My parents were addicted to heroin, and I had a happy childhood. Both of these things are true

After my mother and I moved out, my father couldn’t afford a place of his own with his income divided between child support (when he paid it) and heroin, so he slept on a lot of couches. One of those couches belonged to Audrey, a friend of his from Academy Studios where they worked together making natural history museum displays and carpooled from San Francisco to the studio in Novato, about an hour drive.

I liked Audrey when I was a kid. She had short red hair and a big black poodle named Lucifer and lots of stuff in her apartment was bright pink and lime green. I hadn’t seen her since the day before my father’s funeral, when I was 12 years old, hiding in her bedroom from everyone’s whispers. When I was in my early 20s, doing research for my memoir, I called Audrey and asked her to tell me what she remembered about my father. She told me about the carpool, about how my father was the only member who never took a turn driving. He didn’t have a car or a license, so really he just hitched.

Audrey remembered how bad he smelled then, with his addiction worse than ever and no wife around to beg him to clean himself. He didn’t bathe or change his socks, and his teeth were turning brown. She said other people in the carpool pushed her to tell him he had to start bathing or stop riding with them. She brought it up with him a few times and he just shrugged and mumbled. He didn’t care at all what people thought of him at work. If he hadn’t showered to avoid repulsing the woman he loved, he certainly wasn’t going to do it so his coworkers would have a more pleasant ride to work. He probably thought they were stuck up.

Audrey told me they fought a lot when he stayed with her. She didn’t want him doing drugs in her house, and often noticed cash missing. “I was so furious with him when you were there over the weekends and I could tell he was high,” she told me, her voice cracking a little.

She said that she was never sure if he actually liked her or if he just didn’t want to have to take a bus to work every day. She was not holding back. She was telling me all the little angry private thoughts that she had then, that she’d held onto. She was telling me what she really thought of my father, like I’d been trying to get everyone I’d interviewed to do. But now I felt defensive of him, suspicious that she was exaggerating, romanticizing the idea of having known a junkie once in her own artist heyday.

Audrey described what she called his ‘lair,’ a little hovel tucked away in the corner of the Academy Studios warehouse where he would collect scraps of leftover materials and periodically hide to work on his own projects.

“He treated it like his personal art supply store,” Audrey said. “He stole so much stuff!”

He used to smuggle out supplies for us to play with: little Ziploc bags full of incredibly lifelike fake eyes, plaster molds of lizard scales, scraps of fake fur. It was one of the things that made him magical: pockets always full of treasure.

Audrey was convinced that if anyone else had collected piles of trash in the work site and then disappeared in the middle of the day to play with them, they would’ve been fired. She thought the bosses must’ve known he was doing heroin at work but looked the other way because sometimes when he was high he would just put his headphones on and draw, focusing more completely than anyone else there. And he did such beautiful work.

Audrey choked up as she told me about the time she finally got up the nerve to ask him something she’d wondered about for a while.

“I looked right at him,” she said, “and I asked if he ever made art when he was sober. His eyes went down to the ground, then up to the sky. Eventually he said ‘no.'”

After I hung up the phone with Audrey I laid on my bed for a long time. I stared up at the papier-mâché bird skeleton sculpture, one of my favorite pieces of my father’s artwork. It’s made of pages ripped from my father’s notebooks, so his words spiral around the bird’s ribs, mirror-shard feathers hanging off of it like voodoo icicles. I stared at it, Audrey’s words replaying in my head, thinking about whether it was true that his art was inextricably tied to his addiction; that this part of him that I cherished so much, that I clung to, was a byproduct of what killed him.

I thought, for the first time, about what it would have been like if he had lived and kept using. In all of my imagined scenarios of what it could have been like if he’d lived, I had always imagined him clean and healthy. My mother has kept that part of her life behind her, and I always took it for granted that he would have, too, if he was still here. But if he couldn’t make art without heroin, there’s no way he would have stayed clean.

If he’d lived, would I have ended up another name on the long list of people whose couches he claimed for a little longer than he was welcome, covering them in sawdust, filling the room with his stench? Would he have stolen from me? Would I have let him get away with it? I’ve never doubted that my life would be better if he was still here, but I started to wonder about the different ways his presence could have hurt me almost as much as his absence.

It was horrible to think about, this alternate reality where he lived and I grew to hate him. I looked up at the bird skeleton and I was momentarily disgusted by it.

But then I snapped out of it.

There may have been a period in my father’s life, at the depth of his addiction, when he honestly believed that he couldn’t make art without heroin. He may have told Audrey as much. But it was bullshit. And if he had lived, I would have told him it was bullshit. Artist was so much closer to the core of him than junkie. The ideas, the images, the symbols, the skill all came from him, from his brilliant mind. They weren’t injected into him along with the drugs. Heroin might’ve helped him get into the mind-state to make art, it might have slowed his demons down enough that he could catch them and turn them into sculpture, but he would have found another way into the work.

I wanted to smack him for ever thinking that those beautiful things came from drugs, not from him. And I thought for the first time about how much knowing me as an adult could have helped him, not just how much it could have helped me.

* * *

Another thing Audrey said that struck me as strange was, “I hope you have some positive memories of him.” It took me a moment to realize what she meant, because I have almost exclusively positive memories of him. I have the fondest memory of playing catch in the hallway of the Donnelly Hotel, an SRO on Market Street where he lived after he burned through the friends who were willing to let him crash on their couches. The carpet was the color and texture of fungus, the lighting was dim, the ancient wallpaper peeling off in strips. My father stood at one end of the hallway, next to the reception desk, which was surrounded with bullet-proof glass. I stood at the other end, near the stairs that led up to the rooms that could be rented by the hour, night, or week.

I was nine, and completely unfazed. As we tossed the tennis ball back and forth, my father would make exaggerated sounds of strain as he lunged to catch my “fastballs,” and cheer me on when I caught his. It was our version of the most wholesome trope there is.

“I was ready to fucking murder him,” my mother said, still fuming almost twenty years later about the time he left me alone in his room there. “It was a fucking crack hotel! Who knows what could have happened.”

At the time, I wanted every last moment I could get with him, and I didn’t care what her reasoning was for not wanting me to stay there. I didn’t care that the light bulbs in the hallways buzzed and the room smelled funky and there were sometimes people slumped over, nodding out in the hallways. Her anger makes sense now. I wouldn’t want any kid of mine (or even any friend of mine) to stay in a place like that. But as a child I didn’t see or understand the danger, I was just happy to spend time with my father.

* * *

I have my father’s soft and faded Sun Records shirt that still, after all these years, smells like him. Sometimes when I’m really missing him, I bury my face in that shirt and take a deep breath. To me it doesn’t smell like a junkie, but like my Papa.

After talking to Audrey and my mother about how strung out and filthy he was then, when he didn’t look out of place at the Donnelly and smelled so bad people didn’t want to be in a car with him, I took the shirt out of my drawer and held it up to my nose. I wondered if these new images of the man who wore it would change how I felt about the smell, picturing other junkies I’ve known in my life and the putrid stench that comes from rotting from within and being too high to clean yourself. I balled the shirt up and stuck my nose in it, taking a deep breath. Then I breathed in even deeper, trying to get as much of the smell as possible as I was flooded with memories of running to hug my Papa at a bus stop after I hadn’t seen him in weeks, of sitting in his studio with him while he told me stories about his favorite painters and we giggled about puns, of lying with my head on his chest, the rise and fall of his breath rocking me to sleep as he read me Greek myths.

I may have been able to learn more about who he was as a man, but even the ugliest truths wouldn’t change who he was to me as my father. Regardless of what was going on in those rooms, the hallway of the Donnelly Hotel was great for a game of catch. And that smell that repulsed everyone else triggers only happy memories for me. I keep the shirt wrapped up tight to preserve the smell, but I wish I could use it as a pillowcase and bury my face in it while I sleep, to dream of my father.

Derek Chauvin’s trial is a test of whether facts matter

There were two scenes from Minneapolis over the weekend, one real and one satirical, that illustrate why the ongoing trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is an intravenous line feeding a constant stream of anxiety into the national bloodstream.

First, the real: In the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center on Sunday, police killed a 20-year-old Black man named Daunte Wright who they had pulled over for an alleged traffic violation and then attempted to arrest when it was discovered he had an outstanding warrant. Police haven’t said what traffic violation Wright committed to prompt police to pull him over or what the warrant was for. Wright reportedly attempted to flee and that is when police shot him. Protesters, understandably furious that yet another Black man who appears to have been no threat at all has died at the hands of police, hit the streets of Brooklyn Center Sunday evening. They were met with a police response that’s become numbingly common: Flashbangs, tear gas and rubber bullets.

As for the satirical, the cold open on “Saturday Night Live,” comedians Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, Kate McKinnon and Alex Moffat play four Minneapolis news anchors, two Black and two white, discussing Chauvin’s trial. The dark joke of the skit is that the two white anchors are optimistic that the overwhelming evidence against Chauvin will surely result in a conviction, with McKinnon saying, “there’s no way the jury is going to fall for” the defense’s dumb arguments. But the two Black anchors are skeptical, with Thompson hastening to say, “I’m not saying that.“

What ultimately matters more? Will it be the facts or will brute power prevail over reality itself?

Anxieties around the trial are clearly high and mounting. And it’s not, as the “SNL” skit made clear, because the prosecution is failing to do their job. On the contrary, it’s because the prosecution is doing such a good job, as anyone following the trial can attest.

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Anticipating a defense that will try to blame Floyd for his own death, the prosecution has carefully dismantled any excuse that Chauvin may want to hide behind. They brought in medical examiners to explain that it was oxygen deprivation from being kneeled on, and not drugs, that ended Floyd’s life. They brought in other police, experts in use-of-force, to testify that nothing about Chauvin’s behavior met the standard of necessary use of force to subdue an arrestee. The chief of the Minneapolis Police Department testified against Chauvin, saying he “absolutely” violated the department’s protocols on reasonable restraint. They put traumatized witnesses on the stand and showed the horrific video of Floyd’s death over and over.

As political scientist Scott Lemieux wrote at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, “the question is whether Chauvin is convicted or the jury nullifies.” It is the threat of the latter possibility that is ratcheting up anxiety. As Nwodim’s character in the “SNL” skit says, “Let’s just say we’ve seen this movie before.”

The defenses of Chauvin offered — that it was Floyd who killed himself or that the crowd that was trying to save his life killed him — are ridiculous, but there’s reason to fear that they will work anyway. That’s because the defense isn’t trying to persuade anyone. They’re just betting that there’s at least one reactionary sitting on the jury, looking for any excuse he or she can cling to, no matter how idiotic, to justify voting “not guilty” — and one is all it takes. As anyone who has ever argued with a person drunk on Fox News propaganda can attest, conservatives have a tendency to grab onto any excuse they need to keep believing the bigoted things they want to believe, no matter how silly or irrational it makes them sound.

The question hanging over the trial is a microcosm of the question hanging over our entire country: Do facts even matter? Or are we doomed to be held captive by a right-wing minority who will always find some excuse to keep pushing bigotry and injustice, even in the face of overwhelming evidence against their worldview?

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to look at artifacts from the past, like the movie “12 Angry Men” or any of the various Aaron Sorkin projects, that portrayed a belief that justice was achievable through reasoned discourse and rational assessment of the evidence. And, to be fair to people in the past, there was evidence that, even though getting there is hard and painful, Martin Luther King Jr. was right in his famous quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” As bad as things are, it is indisputable that things have improved on the fronts of civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, etc., as the result of people making reasoned arguments in the face of belligerent right-wing hate.

Still, the ascent of Donald Trump has illustrated, especially to privileged white people who previously had the luxury of a Sorkin-esque faith in rational discourse, that facts often just don’t matter. That is especially true around what are inadequately labeled “identity” or “culture war” issues, that bundle of hot button topics that cut straight to the heart of who has social power and who doesn’t in our society based on who they are.

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It was just a few months ago that a crowd of almost exclusively white people stormed the Capitol and attempted to steal Joe Biden’s electoral win from him. As was heavily discussed during Trump’s subsequent impeachment trial, these people were amped up on Trump’s “Big Lie” claiming that he was the real winner of the election. But, as Hayes Brown recently argued at NBC News, the deeper truth is that what “we witnessed was a race riot” of white people angry at changing demographics and fearful that their privileged status is under threat. The lies about a stolen election were just a cheap rationalization to cling to, one that speaks to their real belief that they have an absolute right to cultural dominance, regardless of what the rest of the country has to say about it.

Lies find fertile ground in the minds of people whose moral beliefs are indefensible. This is something that anyone who reads the history of white supremacy can easily see. And it’s why it’s totally reasonable for people to fear that, no matter how airtight the case against Chauvin is, that there will be at least one juror who grabs onto any excuse, no matter how stupid, to refuse to convict him. After all, people will claim to believe all sorts of idiotic things in order to rationalize their racist beliefs. Three out of five Republican voters will tell a pollster that Trump should have won the election, even though he lost by 7 million votes. Facts have a notoriously bad track record when pitted against the fantasies and lies bigots will use to justify their beliefs.

It’s unfortunate in many ways that Chauvin’s trial has become weighted down with so many of these issues. Ultimately, it still just comes down to 12 random people — and, as noted, it only takes one of those people to be the jerk to blow the entire thing up. That’s the epitome of anecdotal evidence, and not really indicative of where we, as a society, stand on the question of whether facts matter. Still, the human mind notoriously focuses on the individual story over statistics. It’s why the video of Floyd’s death captured public attention, and the dry recitation of statistics of police violence did not. And it’s why Chauvin’s trial has taken on such symbolic heft. The anxiety is palpable, unbearable even. Will truth prevail or will we once again face an ugly reminder of how often facts don’t matter in the face of bigotry?

Nevada GOP censures Republican official who refused to investigate 2020 “voter fraud”

The Nevada Republican Party successfully moved to censure on Saturday one of its own, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, citing her failure to look into groundless allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Cegavske, who is now the only statewide Republican elected official in Nevada, has overseen the state’s elections since 2014.

“A GOP official who was unauthorized to speak publicly confirmed to The Associated Press that the measure passed on a 126-112 vote by the party’s governing members at a meeting in the state capital, Carson City,” The Associated Press reported. The censure, according to The Nevada Independent, will leave Cegavske to fend for herself, as she will be “banned” from receiving “party endorsements or resources for ‘the intense dishonor her failures brought upon the Nevada Republican Party.'”

Cegavske responded to the state party’s move to censure her by arguing in a statement released on Sunday that there was no widespread fraud in the election and the GOP merely wanted her to “put my thumb on the scale of democracy.”

Regrettably, members of my own political party have decided to censure me simply because they are disappointed with the outcome of the 2020 election. My job is to carry out the duties of my office as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, not carry water for the state GOP or put my thumb on the scale of democracy. Unfortunately, members of my own party continue to believe the 2020 general election was wrought with fraud — and that somehow I had a part in it — despite a complete lack of evidence to support that belief. Regardless of the censure vote today by the Nevada Republican Party Central Committee, I will continue in my efforts to oversee secure elections in Nevada and to restore confidence in our elections, confidence which has been destroyed by those falsely claiming the 2020 general election produced widespread fraud.

Nevada GOP executive director Jessica Hanson, after the move to censure Cegavske, wrote that the decision was “passed narrowly” and was followed by a “healthy debate” regarding the election, according to The Associated Press. “The Nevada Republican Party holds our elected officials to a high standard. As such, this weekend, the party sent a clear message that our officials must work for the people, and we demand that our representatives at all levels of government uphold their Oath of Office,” Hanson wrote in the statement on behalf of the state party.

Continual tension has emerged between dueling Republican factions in Nevada after an incident last month when pro-Trump protesters, pro-Trump Nevada Republican Party chair Michael McDonald and former congressional candidate Jim Marchant hand-delivered Cegavske stacks of complaints, demanding that she investigate the alleged election fraud. “I’m tired of elected officials saying, ‘There was no voter fraud; no one’s giving us examples of voter fraud,'” McDonald declared at the beginning of March, while pushing a dolly stacked with boxes of complaints. “Well, you want it, [so] I’m going to deliver it to you.”

Nevada Republicans’ move to censure voices that reject the premise that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud is hardly new. In several other states, including Arizona and Georgia, state Republican parties have likewise moved to censure GOP elected officials who accepted the election results, and virtually every Republican member of Congress who voted to impeach or convict former President Trump has also faced intra-party censure.

Fox’s Chris Wallace corners Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on GOP border hypocrisy

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace challenged Tex Gov. Greg Abbott in an interview on Sunday, pressing him on why he was silent about child migrant abuse at the border under former President Trump and has only just now started talking about the issue during the Biden administration.

“You made news this week reporting that there are cases of sexual abuse at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas, that houses right now more than 1600 children,” Wallace said to Abbott. “But the head of a nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants said this: ‘The only reason why Abbott is now acting like he cares about the children in these facilities is for political reasons.'”

Wallace continued, “Governor, there were thousands of complaints of sexual abuse at migrant shelters during the Trump years. Not to say that what’s going on now is right but we couldn’t find one instance of you complaining and calling that out when President Trump was president.”

Abbott did not directly address Wallace’s question, instead vaguely citing “multiple differences between what happened in the Trump administration” and the Biden administration.

Chris Wallace to Gov. Greg Abbott: "There were thousands of complaints of sexual abuse at migrant shelters during the Trump years. Not to say what's going on now is right, but we couldn't find one instance of you complaining & calling that out when President Trump was president." pic.twitter.com/MgzWY7AGsv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 11, 2021

The interview comes just after a bombshell press conference last week in which Abbott revealed that he’d received tips of child abuse –– some detailing sexual abuse –– at the Freeman Expo Center in San Antonio. “In short, this facility is a health and safety nightmare,” Abbott told reporters at the time. “The Biden administration is now presiding over the abuse of children.”

Last Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn, also a Republican from Texas, called for a federal probe into allegations of migrant children being abused at Freeman Expo Center.

“Unaccompanied children that arrive at our border have already endured dangerous conditions at home and a treacherous journey to get here,” Cornyn said in a statement. “The fact that any child would experience abuse in the care of the U.S. government is despicable. The HHS Inspector General must fully investigate these allegations and the treatment of children at this facility.”

According to Fox News, Cornyn has visited four detention facilities housing unaccompanied minors in recent days and plans to visit more. In late March, Cornyn and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., visited a border facility together, leading a tour of 17 GOP Senators at McAllen border. Cruz likened the facilities to “outdoor holding pens” and alleged that he’d seen smugglers helping people across the border. “Our policy is when they smuggle them in, the Biden administration releases them, and more and more and more,” Cruz said in a video. “This is a humanitarian crisis, it’s a public health crisis, the immigrants who are being released, they’re testing positive for COVID-19 at a seven-times higher rate than the American population, and it’s a national security crisis.”

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that the U.S. is expected to see the highest influx of migrants detained at the Southern border in two decades. Republicans have blamed the recent surge on the Biden administration’s allegedly lax immigration policies, as Salon reported last month. Meanwhile, Democrats have been quick to castigate vocal Republicans who were otherwise silent on the matter during the Trump administration.

“In the last nine months of Trump’s presidency there was a 690% increase in unaccompanied minors encountered by CBP, former Rep. Julian Castro, D-Tex., tweeted. “There’s been a 61% increase under President Biden. How come we didn’t hear a peep from you until now?” Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Tex., echoed Castro: “Their immigration strategy is exactly the same thing as their Covid strategy. Do nothing. Just let people die. P.S. @GOPLeader stop using my community as your prop.”

The Biden administration has refused to call the situation at the border a crisis. Last month, the President defended his immigration policies, attributing the recent spike at the border to seasonal patterns of immigration. “The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed. As many people came — 28 percent increase in children to the border in my administration. Thirty-one percent in 2019 before the pandemic in the Trump administration,” Biden recently said. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March — it happens every year.”

According to an NBC fact-check, Biden’s claim is only a half-truth, as the border has seen an unprecedented surge in unaccompanied minors in the last two years. “From January to February 2019, there was a 31 percent surge in children stopped by CBP,” NBC explained, “From January to February 2021, there has been a 61 percent surge in those stops.”

Back in 2019, the New York Times found that the federal government received 4,500 complaints detailing the sexual abuse of migrant children at detention facilities in the span of four years. These complaints saw a marked rise during the Trump administration’s border separation policy. According to a recent report by the Times, 20,000 migrant children are in government custody, with this number projected to be at 35,000 by June.

Tucker Carlson’s insecurity and the “great replacement” theory

Tucker Carlson’s at it again.

As Salon’s Kaity Assaf reported last week, the unctuous Fox News host delivered more grotesque, racist commentary last week, this time explicitly endorsing the hardcore white supremacist “great replacement” theory on his top-rated TV show. Throwing it out there in a discussion of the assault on voting rights around the country Carlson said, “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate” with “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” It’s a line Carlson has been called out for before.

Back in 2019, in the wake of the mass murder of mostly Latinos at an El Paso Walmart by a violent racist who quoted great replacement theories in his manifesto, Carlson declared that “white supremacy” is “a hoax” that is “used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.” I wrote then about Carlson’s affinity for the belief system that inspired the killing and explained the crude fundamentals of the theory:

[T]he “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.

You can see why so many Jewish groups were appalled by Carlson repeating his comments again last week, this time blithely insisting that “left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement.'” Yes, people do get a little bit upset when major TV celebrities use their platform to sell anti-Semitic drivel to their viewers.

The Anti-Defamation League demanded that Carlson be fired, but there is no word yet as to whether any action will be taken. Just because these toxic beliefs have influenced the recent mass murderers at an El Paso Walmart, a Pittsburgh synagogue and a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, along with the Nazi marchers in Charlottesville Virginia who were literally chanting “Jews will not replace us” apparently doesn’t mean that Fox News has a responsibility to not spread them further.

It’s important to note here that the gunman in El Paso also criticized corporations, which made many observers scratch their heads at the time, but it shouldn’t have. White supremacists who believe in the great replacement theory consider corporations enemies, but not for economic populist reasons, as I wrote at the time of the Walmart shooting:

They see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and Black people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

Carlson’s recent rant also tied the great replacement into one of the hoariest, right-wing tropes of all: the insistence that the only reason Democrats want to have humane immigration laws is that they believe immigrants will vote for them and make it impossible for so-called real Americans to be represented in “their own country.” He said, “if you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”

That’s right. The people who are moving heaven and earth to suppress voting all over the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s Big Lie, are being disenfranchised by voters who don’t look like them. People like Carlson and Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have been selling this line forever, but it is finding new life being tied in with the great replacement.

The funny thing is that as ridiculous as it is to believe that immigrants are “replacing” real Americans in a country where the only people in it who aren’t the descendants of immigrants or trafficked African slaves are Native Americans, there actually is a sort of great replacement going on —but it’s coming from within the country.

Those corporations the white supremacists hate for creating the conditions that incentivize migration have responded to the tax incentives offered by conservative states and have relocated there, bringing a bunch of those loathsome progressive social values with them. It’s one of the reasons some of those former red states have been turning purple. And the recent corporate activism on voting rights has been driven at least in part by the last few decades of diversity in hiring which means that many of them have high-level Black and Hispanic executives who bring their own experiences to the job and they are influencing policy. The Texas Monthly reported that the state GOP is becoming quite agitated by the influx of Californians who have recently invaded their state. Tucker Carlson is agitated about it too:

In December, [Governor Greg Abbott] made a comical appearance on Tucker Carlson’s popular Fox News show. Carlson, a San Francisco–born, San Diego–raised pundit, congratulated Abbott, who grew up in Wichita Falls and Longview, on Texas’s population growth. But why, Carlson wondered, had Abbott let in so many coastal elites?

Above a characteristically calm chyron—”The Next California: Onlookers Horrified by Recent Texas Trends”—Carlson argued that Californians would be the death of Texas. “We’ve seen this across the country, where people flee a collapsing, crummy state and then wreck the state they go to,” he said. “Are you worried that all these Californians will bring their values and degrade the state of Texas?”

Apparently, the great replacement isn’t just a threat that immigrants are going to replace God-fearing real Americans. Californians (as well as residents of other blue states, of course) are also threatening to replace God-fearing real Americans by moving to their states and “degrading” the place with their presence. What do you suppose Carlson has in mind to put a stop to that?

The fact is that we are all going to be “replaced” by the generations that come up behind us. And I’m afraid that Tucker Carlson and his white supremacist allies are going to be replaced by a generation that is overwhelmingly repelled by his ideology and everything it stands for. That, of course, will be really, really great.

Republicans got the Supreme Court they wanted: That will change America forever

For two whole years, Republicans had complete control of both branches of Congress and the White House under Donald Trump, but all they did of legislative significance was pass a massive tax cut for the rich and corporations. Republicans seem so uninterested in legislation, in fact, that the party didn’t even bother to draft a platform during the 2020 campaign. Instead, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent Trump’s presidency cramming as many judges as he could onto the federal bench, working until the last possible moment of Trump’s presidency on this takeover of the judicial branch. The result was a massive victory for Republicans, a thorough remaking of the federal courts — including, of course, the Supreme Court, which now has six right-wing justices, three of them appointed within Trump’s single term.

Ian Millhiser, the senior legal correspondent for Vox, argues that this is no accident. In his new book, “The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America,” Millhiser argues that Republicans have given up trying to pass their wildly unpopular policy agenda through the legislature, which only invites voter anger and backlash. Instead, the court capture is a way to go around the voters to impose the GOP agenda by fiat. I recently spoke with Millhiser about what this Republican-controlled court system means for America. Watch our “Salon Talks” conversation here, or read the following transcript, edited as usual for length and clarity.

As you note in your book, outside of a big tax cut for the rich in 2017, Republicans in Congress “enacted hardly any major legislation under Trump, at least until the pandemic.” But you argue that we shouldn’t mistake this for the GOP having no agenda at all.

If you go back maybe five years, the Republican Party had a hugely aggressive legislative agenda. There was the Paul Ryan budget: They wanted to voucherize Medicare, cut Medicaid in half and slash food stamps, all these things. And they campaigned on none of that in 2020. While Biden’s trying to pass his agenda, Republicans seem to feel like a good use of their time is to complain about Dr. Seuss.

I’ve seen some writers say, “Hey, the Republican Party doesn’t have any ideas right now.” But the truth is, they’ve got a hugely aggressive policy agenda. They just have turned away from democracy as the vehicle to decide how policy is enacted. They control the courts, and they have a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, and they’re pushing an extraordinarily aggressive agenda. I get into some parts of it in the book.

They are dismantling voting rights laws, they are making it so that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor an the Department of Health and Human Services, can’t regulate businesses, can’t prevent emissions, can’t make sure that your health insurer provides you with a certain baseline of coverage. They make it so you can’t get into court, even when your rights are violated. On top of that, they’re carving out certain special protected classes, like conservative Christians who don’t even have to follow the laws. It’s a pretty aggressive agenda.

If Donald Trump had campaigned in 2020, and had said, “We’re going to render the Voting Rights Act completely useless, we’re going to strip the EPA of its ability to control pollution and we’re going to say that if you hold the right religious beliefs, then you’re allowed to violate anti-discrimination laws,” people would have thought that was a pretty impressive agenda that’s as aggressive as any party has run on in recent years.

Which leads me to an interesting question. Do you think they set out to take over the courts deliberately, or was it something they backed into, realizing that this was the best way to pursue their agenda without paying a political price for it?

It’s a good question. I think that, generally, parties that are confident politically don’t tend to rely too much on the courts. So if you go back and you listen to what FDR had to say about the judiciary — and FDR was dealing with a very hostile Supreme Court that was striking down key portions of the New Deal. But what FDR did not do is put in place a bunch of justices who would just implement the New Deal for him. What he wanted was for the court to back the fuck off. He got elected in a landslide. He had a huge congressional majority. He argued, just let the democratic process work, and the court should just uphold his legislation. And if you look at, say, Nixon or Reagan’s rhetoric regarding the court, it was basically the same.

Whatever you think of Ronald Reagan, he won two elections in a landslide. He had every reason to be confident that he could get his policy through using the democratic process with political legitimacy, without having to have some side body of unelected aristocrats doing it for him. You flash forward to the present, and Democrats have won seven of the eight last presidential elections, if you look at the popular vote. If the Senate wasn’t as badly apportioned as it is to give extra seats to small Republican states, Democrats would have controlled the Senate, I think, continuously since the mid to late ’90s. The Republican Party that we have now can’t win free and fair elections.

Now maybe if they didn’t have as many built-in advantages as they do they would moderate, and they would be competitive. But the particular hard-right Republican Party that is in place right now, they’re not confident in their ability to win elections. And if you’re not confident in your ability to win elections, there’s one of two things you can do. Either you can try harder to win elections by moderating, or you can abandon democracy. When you control the Supreme Court, you have the option to abandon democracy.

Right now in Georgia, they’ve passed this very expansive voting restriction law that makes it much more difficult to vote, but also makes it very difficult for a free and fair election to be adjudicated correctly because they’re doing all this weird stuff in the background to make it so that Republicans can throw out votes. I think that’s the end game here. I’ve been seeing a lot of liberals on Twitter confidently declaring that the Supreme Court will throw this law out, that it’s so clearly unconstitutional that we shouldn’t be worried about it. What’s your take on that?

This Supreme Court is really hostile to voting rights. So the backbone of our voting rights law is the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racists voting laws. And the reason why you have to think about race when you think about elections is because, in a typical American election, Democrats will win 80% to 90% of the Black vote, and about 60% to 70% of the Latino vote. That’s been a consistent pattern for many, many elections in a row. So if you’re a Republican state lawmaker, and you want to disenfranchise Democrats, you can use race as a proxy to identify where the Democratic communities are. The most troubling provision of this Georgia law isn’t any of the stuff dealing with early voting or voting by mail or even the dumb provision saying you can’t give people water while they’re waiting in line. The most troubling provision of this bill is that it allows the Republican-controlled state elections board to take over any local election board.

And what local election boards can do in Georgia is they adjudicate voting disputes over whether an individual voter is qualified to vote. They can potentially shut down precincts in a locality, and then they can refuse to certify an election. So the big danger is that it’s very easy to identify where the Democratic communities are in Georgia — not all of them, there are white Democrats in Georgia — but if you shut down the polling precincts in a Black neighborhood in Atlanta, you can be confident that 80% to 90% of the people who are disenfranchised because of that are going to be Democrats.

The danger is that they will use this power. They’ll use race as a proxy to identify the Democratic neighborhoods, they’ll shut down precincts, they will uphold a lot of ballot challenges, they’ll say that people aren’t allowed to vote, and they may even refuse to certify the results in those areas as well. Now, the way that that would have been handled in the past is that the Voting Rights Act has three prongs. First is “pre-clearance.” States with a history of racist voting practices have to pre-clear their new election laws with officials in D.C., just to make sure they aren’t racist. The second is called the “intent test”: If you take an action with the intent to discriminate on the basis of race, that’s not allowed. So if Georgia Republicans of the state election board take over the Atlanta local election committees with the intent to prevent Black people from voting, that would violate the intent test. And then there’s the thing called the “results test,” which is complicated, but the short of it is that certain laws that have a disparate impact on voters of color also have to be struck down.

If for instance, they’re only throwing out majority Black districts, that’s pretty clear.

Right, so the thing that you see in a lot of states — this actually didn’t make it through in the Georgia bill — is that Black churches tend to hold “souls to the polls” drives on Sundays. A lot of Republican states are trying to get rid of early voting on Sundays, because Black people are unusually likely to vote on Sunday because of these voter drives held by the churches. If you write a law that says, “There’s no voting on Sunday,” there’s nothing in it that immediately clicks “race” to you. But the result of that law will be that a lot of Black people won’t be able to vote, or at least it will be harder for them to vote. That would ordinarily run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.

The problem you have is that the Supreme Court basically got rid of pre-clearance in the Shelby County decision in 2015. There was a case called Abbott v. Perez in 2018 that said that the burden of proof for a plaintiff alleging racist intent is so high that it’s basically impossible to meet. If you can show that the lawmakers burned a cross while passing the law, then maybe the Supreme Court will say that that’s not allowed — although Justice Alito will dissent. Anything short of that, it’s just next to impossible after Abbott v. Perez to win all but the most egregious cases.

There’s a case in front of the court right now called Brnovich, which goes after the results test. I don’t know if the Supreme Court is going to dismantle the results test in one fell swoop, I think they’re more likely to do it incrementally, a few pieces at a time. But still, if you don’t have pre-clearance, you don’t have the intent test, you don’t have the results test, then you don’t have a Voting Rights Act. If you don’t have a Voting Rights Act, then you don’t have safeguards against, say, the state election board in Georgia coming in and taking over all the Atlanta polling places and allowing conservative groups to come in and challenge tens of thousands of voters claiming that they aren’t properly registered to vote. All of a sudden you aren’t having free and fair elections anymore.

I also want to talk about abortion rights because there are a bunch of cases coming to the court, I suspect very quickly. South Carolina and Arkansas have passed almost complete abortion bans and Texas is about to. The Supreme Court is 6-3 opposed to abortion rights. Could they overturn Roe v. Wade?

Absolutely. Unless Justice Thomas and Justice Alito are lost at sea during the early phase of the Biden administration, I think Roe is doomed. Now, I think there are two questions. One is, how quickly it will be doomed? There’s a case called Dobbs, I believe, in front of the Supreme Court right now, it involves a 15-week abortion ban. That’s been sitting on the court’s docket and they’ve been waiting to decide whether they’re going to hear the case or not. Every week passes and they just do nothing with it. Maybe they’re a little cautious. Maybe they realize that Democrats are mad right now about how things went down with the last few Supreme Court confirmations and they should maybe wait until there’s a Republican Senate before they overrule Roe v. Wade. They might not do it right away, but it’s coming.

The other thing is that I don’t know that the Supreme Court will ever actually use the words, “Roe v. Wade is overruled.” And the reason why is they don’t have to. We had a bunch of cases — one out of Texas, one out of Louisiana — dealing with what are often called trap laws. These are laws that just put unnecessary and expansive restrictions on an abortion clinic. Your doctors have to have certain credentials that are hard to get and don’t matter, your halls have to be a certain width, you have to have an HVAC system that costs this much money. There’s no actual health purpose, it’s just to run up the cost of running a clinic.

That’s the equivalent of these voting restrictions, but on abortion.

Exactly. I think it’s only a matter of time before some state tries to say that, “You can’t vote unless you have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.” But anyway, once the Supreme Court opens the door to that sort of thing, they don’t have to strike down Roe v. Wade. They could say, “Abortion is protected by the Constitution. But if a state wants to say that all abortion clinics need to be made out of solid gold, that’s fine.” Or, “Doctors can perform abortions, but before they do, they have to complete a special training class that can only be taught by the pope.” Stuff like that, things that in theory leave the abortion right alive, but in practice make it impossible.

It doesn’t even need to be as egregious as the class being taught by the pope, because the problem is that there’s a moving target here. If the Supreme Court had upheld Texas’ law with its admitting privileges and its hallways and stuff like that, Texas would have just passed another law that made it more restrictive and imposed more and more restrictions on a clinic. Maybe they’ll wait until Planned Parenthood invests a bunch of money in a new $10 million facility that complies with all the legal obligations. And then they’ll be like, “Sorry, we just looked at your operating room, and the ventilation systems aren’t good enough. I guess you’ve got to shut this down.” Eventually, if you’re an abortion provider you’re just not going to be able to keep up. You’re not going to keep lighting money on fire and making improvements to your buildings, when five minutes later you’re going to be told to do something else.

This is all very depressing, especially considering how much the courts have been captured by the Republicans. What can people watching this do to make this situation better?

The most important thing that anyone can do is vote. I have an entire chapter in here talking about a practice called forced arbitration, which is where if you do business with anyone, including your employer, your boss can send you an email saying, “If you ever want to sue the company, you can’t. You have to go to a private arbitrator and we’re going to pick the arbitrator.” And all the data shows that arbitrators are more favorable to companies than they are to individuals. And you’re also not allowed to bring a class action. So if we do something to all of our employees, all of you have to bring individual suits. You can’t join together in a class action. And if you don’t agree to give up all your rights this way, you’re fired.

This “You get your steak knives or you’re fired” approach was endorsed by the Supreme Court. But it’s all statutory law, it’s all this misinterpreted law called the Federal Arbitration Act that was passed in the 1920s. And because it’s statutory, Congress can fix it. Now, for Congress to fix it, not only do we need to make sure that we vote for members of Congress who want to fix it, we need to eliminate the filibuster. We need to vote for members of the Senate who will eliminate the filibuster. And then the nuclear bomb that could be dropped on the Supreme Court is you can add seats to it.

The Constitution says, “There shall be a Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say how many seats there are. Congress could say that there are going to be 15 justices: “Look, now there’s six vacancies, so Biden gets to appoint them.” There’s a Democratic majority, Congress could do that. I don’t think they have the votes for it right now. Now, I don’t think court packing is necessarily your option of first resort because if you add seats to the court you diminish the prestige of the judiciary. I don’t think it leads to Roe v. Wade being saved. It leads to Texas saying, “We’re just not going to follow Roe v. Wade anymore.” But what court packing is useful for is: Well, why do we have nuclear weapons? We have them so we don’t have to use them. The reason why the U.S. has a nuclear arsenal is so anyone who would think of attacking us knows we could destroy them, so they don’t attack us.

If we can put the fear of God into the Supreme Court and say, “OK, I understand that you don’t like voting rights, but we like voting rights, and we have this nuclear missile that we are going to launch at you if you come after the Voting Rights Act.” If you can convince them of that, then you don’t need to deploy the weapon.

Leaked video reveals a GOP plan to intimidate Black and brown voters in Houston

Donald Trump’s neofascist slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was always best understood as a threat against nonwhite people, women, the LGBTQI community and others for whom “the good old days” were in many ways not very good at all.

Although Trump may no longer be president, the Republican Party and his followers are still continuing with his crusade.

Because Republicans understand they cannot free win free and fair elections, their party — and the larger white right — is simply trying to stop Black and brown people from voting in Georgia (and soon in many other states as well). This Jim Crow-style campaign is part of a nationwide strategy by the Republican Party and its agents to keep those Americans who support the Democratic Party from being able to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to vote.

Today’s Jim Crow Republicans have mated white supremacy and neofascism, in search of creating something like Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s “managed democracy.” The result is a horrible mixture of right-wing racial authoritarianism and anti-democratic fervor. In their attempt to create a new type of American apartheid, the Republicans and their agents are willing to use all means available, legal, quasi-legal or illegal.

As revealed Thursday by Common Cause Texas, the Republican Party in Harris County — which contains Houston and is the third most-populous county in the nation — is planning to organize what is described as an “Election Integrity Brigade” of thousands of pro-GOP election workers and poll watchers. This group of Republican operatives will be sent into predominantly Black and brown communities to engage in de facto acts of voter intimidation and harassment under the pretext of stopping “voter fraud.”

This “Election Integrity Brigade” will be a permanent group, not just a list of volunteers called out during election season. As explained by the Republican official who conducted the briefing obtained by Common Cause Texas, the goal is to also recruit poll watchers and other volunteers through “military partnerships.” Such a plan is especially troubling given Donald Trump’s coup attempt and his followers’ attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the prominent role played by retired or active members of the military and law enforcement.

In an evident nod to racist fears and bigotry, Harris County Republican leaders explains that these poll watchers must have “courage” and “confidence” to do such work in Houston’s Black and Latino communities.

Today we’re releasing an alarming video of a GOP “Election Integrity Brigade" virtual launch where they detail plans to build an army of poll watchers who will have the “courage” to go into Black and Brown neighborhoods

More: https://t.co/7RTHz9Gjhq #txlege #HB6 #SB7 pic.twitter.com/KEbiRvbNH8

— Common Cause Texas (@CCauseTexas) April 8, 2021

NBC News offers additional details:

Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel confirmed in a statement to NBC News that the program aims to recruit “an army of volunteers” throughout the county as a way “to engage voters for the whole ballot, top to bottom, and ensure every legal vote is counted.” Siegel also called Common Cause “a radical leftist group that is blatantly mischaracterizing a grassroots election worker recruitment video in a shameful effort to bully and intimidate Republicans.”

The Harris County Republican Party’s intimidation campaign is literally transcribed from the Jim Crow reign of terror, when white people in Southern states would physically prevent Black people from voting. Many of the white people who enforced these racist Jim Crow rules or regulations were armed, and even if they did not have weapons on their person at that moment, the threat of violence was omnipresent.

Once permission has been granted for these assaults on Black and brown peoples’ freedom and dignity — as it was by the Age of Trump — they will only escalate in boldness, frequency and, inevitably, violence.

Of course the professional “serious people” in the mainstream news media and professional commentariat have spent recent weeks trying to talk down the concern that the Jim Crow Republicans are literally trying to take away Black peoples’ right to vote.

At many of America’s leading news outlets, such voices have criticized President Biden for his “tone,” because he said that Republicans were engaging in “Jim Crow on steroids” in Georgia and elsewhere. Other members of the “church of the savvy” and adherents of the “view from nowhere” have also tried to litigate and parse whether the Georgia anti-democracy bill really bans giving food or water to voters in line food and water (it does), or tried to argue for reasonable interpretations of the law that leaves Republicans looking less blatantly racist. (Spoiler: Today’s Republicans are in fact blatantly racist.)

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine used odd language, for example, in taking Biden to task for his choice of words and describing the Republican Party’s current attack on black people’s voting rights as “Jim Crow Lite”:

President Biden has contributed to the confusion by describing Georgia’s vote suppression as akin to, or even worse than, Jim Crow. Contrary to the president’s hyperbole, it is more like Jim Crow Lite than “Jim Crow on steroids.”

But Jim Crow Lite is still very bad.

Of course, the Jim Crow Republicans and their mouthpieces took to cable news and other media outlets to play the victim, bemoan “cancel culture” and deny the obvious racism and white supremacy driving their campaign to stop Black and brown people and other likely Democratic supporters from voting, a campaign that now spans 47 states and more than 350 proposed laws.

One of the most perverse claims made in defense of the Jim Crow Republican attacks on voting rights in Georgia is that turnout in Georgia and elsewhere has actually increased after barriers to vote were enacted by Republican governors and legislatures. This is like saying that if you can run faster when being chased by an ax-wielding serial killer, then he’s doing you a favor.

Those public voices who are trying to downplay the dangers to democracy represented by the Jim Crow Republican Party are, in the worst case, enablers of such civic evil. In the “best worst-case scenario,” those voices are offering analyses from their own myopic perch of privilege (most often the position of being white, male and affluent). They have the luxury of imagining themselves detached from “emotions,” and have convinced themselves that white supremacy is controlled by a dial that can be carefully calibrated. In reality, it is more like an old, frayed but powerful electrical switch that frequently sparks, shocks whoever is touching it and possesses the potential to blow out the electricity in the entire building — or start a fire that destroys the neighborhood.

I offer a thought experiment. What if Black and brown people who support the Democratic Party started going into majority-white suburban neighborhoods where many people vote Republican, and acted as poll watchers who were trying to stop voter fraud? Given that there is much more reason to monitor Republicans for efforts to undermine, steal or nullify elections, there might actually be a legitimate need for such vigilance in white neighborhoods.

But how would white people react to that idea? Moreover, what if the Democrats were to take power across the country on the state and local level and then impose the same kinds of limitations, in an obvious attempt to interfere with conservative white people’s right to vote? What do you suppose would happen then? At the barest minimum, many of the same voices now trying to minimize the danger represented by the Jim Crow Republicans’ attack on voting rights would howl in outrage.

Now MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell claims he hired “investigators” to look into Fox News

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of Fox News’ largest advertisers, announced on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Friday that he has hired a team of “private investigators” to dig into Fox News over the burning issue of why the conservative channel won’t let him appear on-air to tout groundless election conspiracy theories.

“I don’t remember seeing you on Fox recently. Why are the Murdochs afraid of Dominion?” Bannon began, referring to Dominion Voting Systems, which has filed a massive defamation suit against Lindell, Fox News and various of the network’s prominent hosts. “Why is Mike Lindell not on Fox, and why do they seem to say, ‘Hey, when Dominion says something, we’re just gonna shut up about it and talk about Biden’s tax bill’?”

Lindell responded by telling Bannon he has hired private investigators to look into everything from Facebook to Fox News, although the scope of the supposed investigation seemed amorphous. “You know, I’m gonna have those answers soon cause I’ve hired private investigators, and I’ve spent a lot of money on them to investigate everything. Why are the bots and trolls, who’s behind them? Why is Facebook involved, Wikipedia involved?” Lindell asked. “And then the big question: Why isn’t Fox having people on? Why isn’t Fox on there talking about Dominion and Smartmatic and the election fraud?”

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell asked why he hasn’t appeared on Fox News, floats the idea he has hired “private investigators” to look into the cable news giant. pic.twitter.com/Cwl2qnohZz

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) April 9, 2021

A Fox News spokesperson didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on whether the channel plans on cooperating with Lindell’s team of private investigators, or has heard about them. Lindell didn’t respond to Salon’s request to comment on why he still advertises on the network, if he’s at war with it.

Poking fun at Lindell hiring investigators to look into Fox News, The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona tweeted that this was: “The sequel to Trump sending ‘private investigators’ to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate.” Others on Twitter likewise mocked Lindell over his effort to investigate the cable giant.

This isn’t the first time the pillow maven has railed against the conservative network he advertises on. In late March, Lindell wondered aloud whether Fox News was “in on” the $1.3 billion lawsuit Dominion filed against him. “Why can’t people go on there [Fox News] and say their free speech, then?” Lindell asked on a right-wing YouTube channel at the end of March. “You’re already sued, Fox. What do you have — are you going to get double sued? What’s the matter with you? What, are they in on it? I don’t get it. Is it a fake lawsuit?” Lindell stated.

The MyPillow CEO, when not blasting Fox News, has recently claimed that in the coming months Donald Trump will be reinstated as president, although the mechanism for such an extra-constitutional transfer of power is unclear. “What I’m talking about, Steve [Bannon], is what I’ve been doing since Jan. 9,” the pillow maven said in late March. “All the evidence I have — everything is going to go before the Supreme Court, and the election of 2020 is going bye-bye. It was an attack by other countries, communism coming in. I don’t know what they’re going to do with that after they pull it down. … Donald Trump will be back in office in August!”

Sure they’re comfortable, but those leggings and sports bras are also redefining modern femininity

As fashion trends go, the move of activewear from gyms and fitness studios into mainstream society has been impossible to ignore. Like it or not, we live in a lycra world.

Tight-fitting leggings, yoga pants, sports bras and crop tops are everywhere from the catwalk to cafes. COVID-19 accelerated the trend, with working from home driving a recent surge in sales.

But the activewear industry has been growing exponentially for the past ten years. While the clothing is made for men and women, it is the women’s market that has driven this phenomenal growth.

The trend has been widely celebrated, criticized, parodied and sometimes dismissed as simply the latest fashion trend in a society obsessed with conspicuous consumption.

On closer examination, however, activewear plays a fascinating role in 21st-century gender definitions, reinforcing and resisting popular ideas about femininity.

The rise of “fit femininity”

Walk through any activewear store and you will be bombarded with empowerment and self-help rhetoric emphasizing the importance of achieving a fit, healthy lifestyle with the right outfit and a positive attitude.

Various scholars have shown how large activewear companies use this type of language — “get moving” and “this is not your practice life” — to reinforce the notion of women’s responsibility for their own body maintenance, regardless of any social or personal barriers.

Others have shown how activewear companies’ marketing approaches encourage women to use physical activity as a means of self-transformation and a pathway towards a more fulfilled life.

It’s a version of femininity based on a woman’s consumption and the ability to maintain her own health and appearance. As feminist sport scholars have shown, society celebrates women who are “in control” of their bodies and active in their pursuit of femininity and health.

In our own research, we argue that wearing activewear in public is a way of saying “I am in charge of my health” and conforming to socially acceptable understandings of femininity.

In this sense, activewear (not to be confused with its less sporty “athleisure” offshoot) has become the uniform of what we might term the “socially responsible 21st-century woman.”

The idealized female form

Part of the appeal of activewear is that it is comfortable and functional. But it has also been designed to physically shape the body into a socially desirable hourglass female form.

High-waisted leggings that sit just above the navel are marketed as having a slimming effect. They are also often promoted as “butt sculpting,” creating the desirable “booty” that has become valued (somewhat problematically) in mainstream culture.

As some have argued, this is yet another example of the appropriation of Black and Hispanic cultures for corporate profit.

With new materials designed to accentuate (not just support) particular aspects of women’s bodies, activewear helps promote the idealized female form as being curvy but fat-free.

And while this idealized form has changed over recent decades — from thin, to thin and toned, to the toned hourglass — the current ideal remains largely unobtainable for most women.

Freedom and conformity

But there is another side to this phenomenon. We wanted to explore women’s own experiences of wearing activewear. Interviewees of different ages, body types, ethnicities and cultures spoke about activewear as being not only comfortable and functional, but also liberating.

From corsets and long dresses in the Victorian era to the high heels of the 1950s “housewife,” the latest beauty and clothing trends have often constrained women’s bodies and movements.

But the women in our research group talked about the freedom they experienced in being able to move comfortably through the day, from work to school pick-up, from the gym to the cafe.

Even so, not all activewear-clad bodies are considered acceptable. Some, particularly larger bodies, are stigmatized and criticized when they don’t meet the feminine ideal.

Some even experience physical abuse or verbal harassment for wearing the “wrong” clothing in public. It’s all part of a long history of social attempts to regulate women’s bodies.

Until recently, activewear marketing was primarily targeted at young, thin, wealthy white women. In 2013, lululemon founder Chip Wilson openly stated his brand’s leggings “don’t work” for larger body types.

In response to these limited definitions perpetuated by the activewear industry, some women have established their own labels. In Aotearoa New Zealand these include the increasingly popular Hine Collection.

Founded by a Māori woman frustrated by the limited sizing of activewear, the brand features larger-sized models and caters to women of diverse body shapes and cultures.

Protest and empowerment

Activewear has even been worn in protest against the policing of women’s bodies in public places such as schools, churches and shops where the wearing of leggings has been deemed not respectable and too distracting for men.

In 2018, there was outrage when young track athletes in New Jersey were told they couldn’t train outside in their sports bras when the male football team was practicing.

Other protests and writings have made leggings and sports bras symbols of pride and a challenge to those who seek to dictate women’s bodily choices.

Most women, however, choose activewear simply because it gives them the ability to move with purpose and comfort throughout their day. While this might not be an overtly political act, it is nonetheless a subtle statement that women are not going to be controlled or objectified. They have pride in their moving bodies.

Activewear is far from a mundane clothing choice. Rather, it contributes to our definition and understanding of femininity and gender in the 21st century.

Julie E. Brice, Doctoral Student in Sport Sociology, University of Waikato and Holly Thorpe, Professor in Sociology of Sport and Physical Culture, University of Waikato

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

How Black poets and writers gave a voice to “Affrilachia”

Appalachia, in the popular imagination, stubbornly remains poor and white.

Open a dictionary and you’ll see Appalachian described as a “native or inhabitant of Appalachia, especially one of predominantly Scotch-Irish, English, or German ancestry.”

Read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and you’ll enter a world that’s white, poor and uncultured, with few, if any, people of color.

But as Black poets and scholars living in Appalachia, we know that this simplified portrayal obscures a world that is far more complex. It has always been a place filled with diverse inhabitants and endowed with a lush literary history. Black writers like Effie Waller Smith have been part of this cultural landscape as far back as the 19th century. Today, Black writers and poets continue to explore what it means to be Black and from Appalachia.

Swimming against cultural currents, they have long struggled to be heard. But a turning point took place 30 years ago, when Black Appalachian culture experienced a renaissance centered around a single word: “Affrilachia.”

Upending a ‘single story’ of Appalachia

In the 1960s, the Appalachian Regional Commission officially defined the Appalachian region as an area encompassing counties in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and the entirety of West Virginia. The designation brought national attention – and calls for economic equity – to an impoverished region that had largely been ignored.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “war on poverty” in 1964, it was with Appalachia in mind. However, as pernicious as the effects of poverty have been for white rural Appalachians, they’ve been worse for Black Appalachians, thanks to the long-term repercussions of slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial terrorism and a dearth of regional welfare programs.

Black Appalachians have long been, as poet and historian Edward J. Cabbell put it, “a neglected minority within a neglected minority.”

Nonetheless, throughout the 20th century, Black Appalachian writers like Nikki Giovanni and Norman Jordan continued to write and wrestle with what it meant to be both Black and Appalachian.

In 1991, after a poetry reading that included Black poets from the Appalachian region, Kentucky poet Frank X. Walker decided to give a name to his experience as a Black Appalachian: “Affrilachian.” It subsequently became the title of a poetry collection he released in 2000.

By coining the terms “Affrilachia” and “Affrilachian,” Walker sought to upend assumptions about who is part of Appalachia. Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken of the danger of the single story. When “one story becomes the only story,” she said in a 2009 TED Talk, “it robs people of dignity.”

Rather than accepting the single story of Appalachia as white and poor, Walker wrote a new one, forging a path for Black Appalachian artists.

It caught on.

In 2001, a number of Affrilachian poets – including Walker, Kelly Norman Ellis, Crystal Wilkinson, Ricardo Nazario y Colon, Gerald Coleman, Paul C. Taylor and Shanna Smith – were the subjects of the documentary “Coal Black Voices.” In 2007, the journal Pluck! was founded out of University of Kentucky with the goal of promoting a diverse range of Affrilachian writers at the national level. In 2016, the anthology “Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poetry” was published.

A unique style emerges

Roughly 9% of Appalachian residents are Black, and this renders many of the region’s Black people “hypervisible,” meaning they stick out in primarily white spaces.

Many Affrilachian poems explore this dynamic, along with the tension of participating in activities, such as hunting, that are stereotyped as being of interest only to white Americans. Food traditions, family and the Appalachian landscape are also central themes of the work.

Affrilachian poet Chanda Feldman’s poem “Rabbit” touches on all of these elements.

Her poem shifts from the speaker hunting for rabbits with their father to the hunt as a larger metaphor for being Black in Appalachia – and thus seen as both predator and prey:

He told me of my great uncle who, Depression era, loaned white townspeople venison and preserves. Later stood off the same ones with a gun when they wanted his property.

An Affrilachian future

We reached out to Walker and asked him to reflect on the term, 30 years after he coined it.

Walker wrote back that it created a “solid foundation” that “encouraged a more diverse view of the region and its history” while increasing “opportunities for others to carve out their own space” – including other poets, musicians and visual artists of color throughout the region.

In her book “Sister Citizen,” journalist and academic Melissa Harris-Perry writes, “Citizens want and need more than a fair distribution of resources: they also desire meaningful recognition of their humanity and uniqueness.”

Affrilachian artistry and identity allows Appalachia to be fully seen as the diverse and culturally rich region that it is, bringing to the forefront those who have historically been pushed to the margins, out of mind and out of sight.

Amy M. Alvarez, Assistant Teaching Professor, English, West Virginia University and Jameka Hartley, Instructor of Gender & Race Studies, University of Alabama

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

We are all germophobes now

I can’t imagine when I’ll buy pants again. Not that I’d been thinking about pants at all this past year, or felt any desire for new ones. But walking through Target recently, en route to the toilet paper and kitchen sponges, I glimpsed a pair of trousers on a rack. I played a quick scenario in my mind. In a moment, I realized that the entire process of going in to a dressing room, trying on clothes that someone else may also have tried on, potentially putting them back on a hanger for yet another person to try on — all of it — seems to me like absolute madness. It seems as ludicrous as sharing a used tissue. Even after being vaccinated, I’ve apparently become more germophobic. Then again, I don’t know how germophobic I should be. All I know is that COVID-19 has changed us all, and it’s changed how a lot of us feel about the things that other people have touched.

The pandemic has been an unpredictable experience for the already anxious and obsessive, and the myth that those inclinations always and only manifest in Lady Macbeth-level hand scrubbing needs to be retired. Writing last year in Glamour, Akanksha Singh wrote candidly about her pre-existing mysophobia — fear of germs — saying that she’d been surprised to find that “my germ anxiety suddenly feels validated — now everyone sees the germs I see everywhere…The pandemic has actually helped ease my phobia.” But in a Scientific American feature on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) from last year, a woman named Carli admitted that she was afraid to leave her apartment. “The compulsions in my head have definitely gotten worse,” she said. “In terms of wearing a mask and cleaning my groceries and going into stores, it’s really hard to gauge what is a normal reaction and what is my OCD.”

And that’s the challenge. When a contagious outbreak is wreaking havoc, how does anyone tell any more what’s normal, what’s “normal for me,” and what’s excessive?

“I believe that this generation has been trained in general, but more specifically because of the pandemic, to be more hypervigilant and sensitive to risk and uncertainty than previous generations,” says Lindsay Case, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Virginia who focuses primarily on with people with anxiety.

Case noted there is a wide range of that sensitivity. “As has always been the case, ‘normal’ precautions for me will be considered high risk for someone else. What someone else considers overly cautious might be seen as irresponsible by another person. I don’t think we have recalibrated the metric,” she says. “I think we have expanded the spectrum of the metric.”

That response jibes with my own experience of the inconsistent, idiosyncratic nature of both fear and ritual. In previous times, there was no divey restaurant or bar that could give me pause; no porta-potty I feared. I played fast and loose with the five second rule, ate off other people’s plates and sat, untroubled, on hotel bedspreads.

Now, I’m different. I don’t wash my hands till they’re raw or wipe down every surface till my home smells like a swimming pool, but I do note my already baked-in anxiety going off in exciting new directions. I’m lately nervous around anything involving particles in the air, whether it’s smoke or dust-spewing construction sites. And while I’m fine touching household merchandise like food and cleaning supplies when shopping, the thought of rummaging through clothing racks makes me shudder.

It’s not like in the early COVID-19 days, when standing too close to a stranger could evoke a reasonable concern about virus transmission. It’s a sense that certain once familiar parts of everyday life now feel infused with an inchoate dread.

“As soon as the CDC recommendations to wash hands came out, I started wondering about the possible impact our new focus on germs would have on people with anxiety and OCD,” says Katie Lear, a a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. “People with OCD feel compelled to repeatedly perform behaviors in a very specific way in order to avoid a bad feeling or outcome. Now,” she says, “that’s exactly what we’re being told to do by our health experts: perform these hygiene rituals in exactly the right way, or you and your family could become seriously ill.”

Lear adds, “When you’re trying to assess whether anxiety and caution are ‘normal,’ it’s helpful to look at how it impacts overall functioning. It’s normal, understandable, and healthy to want to be extra careful given the circumstances. However, if the precautions a person is taking seriously interfere with daily life, that might point to a larger problem.”

There is no question that the pandemic is still disrupting that daily life — and, in the long run, creating what a recent feature in Psychiatry Research describes as a rise in “fear and agony in the general population and healthcare staff professionals.” But while sales of hand sanitizer have gone through the roof and the prospect of socializing again seems overwhelming to many of us, it does not follow that we can’t find our own, re-adjusted sense of normal, or that the fear of contamination has to take up permanent residence in our brains.

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“All precautions must be taken to prevent avoidable infections and further deaths,” says London psychologist Dr. Raffaello Antonino. “However, it is perfectly possible to maintain caution and protecting ourselves and others, while also avoiding to negatively affect our mental health by placing an extreme and unnecessary strain on ourselves, by catastrophizing and engaging in behaviors which will make us more anxious, unhappy and isolated.”

There are many parts of this entire nightmare that may ultimately bring about some positive changes. It has in many ways encouraged us to adopt healthier, more common sense habits. I’m no longer quite the casually filthy germ-magnet I once was, and while I miss my old pastimes of groping subway poles and obsessively touching my face, it’s no doubt for the best I’ve quit them. What’s harder is the way that random things — things in the air, things at my fingertips — still seem so scary. I’m working on it, though.

“It is important to distinguish between normal fear, which refers to a proportional psychological response to an existing threat, and pathological anxiety, which is by definition a disproportionate reaction to a threat or a misappraisal of a threat,” says Nathan Fite, owner and clinical director of the Cincinnati Anxiety Center. “We encourage people to follow the science, and not the trends.” And for those of us who need to take a few deep breaths in the pants department at Target, he offers a simple reminder. “Your perception of what feels dangerous,” he says, “is far too often incorrect.”

Thinking about composting? This is your ultimate guide

It’s always gross when you go to take out the trash, only to find the bag smells like rotting food — and maybe is even dripping from the bottom. Bleck. But what if I told you there was a way to prevent your trash from smelling, all while being more eco-friendly in the process? Sign me up!

Composting offers both these noteworthy benefits, not to mention that it creates rich fertilizer that your gardens or houseplants will love. (Seriously, people call it “black gold”!) However, I didn’t know the first thing about composting — not to mention how I could do it in my apartment — so I called in an expert: Erin Rhoads, an eco-lifestyle blogger and the author of Waste Not, a guide on how to make a big difference by throwing away less.

Here’s what she had to say about all my pressing composting questions.

* * *

Why compost in the first place?

“When we compost organics like food, they’re no longer waste,” explains Rhoads. “Instead, they become food for soil. Our food, the unprocessed stuff, is designed to break down in soil where all types of insects, bugs, and worms will eat it up, helping return nutrients to the soil while improving its quality.”

The end result is nutrient-rich soil that your houseplants or garden will absolutely love.

Another benefit of composting is that it makes your trash less stinky — if you’re putting all of the food waste into the compost, there won’t be any rotting items in your garbage bin. Finally, composting reduces the production of a common greenhouse gas and helps minimize use of chemical fertilizers.

“Starting a compost not only cuts down rubbish sent to landfill, it’ll help cut down on methane gas, and reduce reliance on artificial fertilizers, which is another money saver,” she says. “Composting is a win-win!”

* * *

What can go in my compost bin?

According to Rhoads, compostable items are commonly broken down into “green” and “brown” categories. Green items are plant-based, wet materials, including:

Fruit and vegetable scraps
Grass clippings
Plant trimmings
Weeds that haven’t gone to seed
Animal manure, but only from “vegetarians” such as cows, sheep, chickens, and rabbits

Brown items, on the other hand, are dry plant material, such as:

Dried leaves and twigs
Straw, hay, or corn stalks
Paper, such as newspaper, coffee filters, or paper tableware
Sawdust
Corrugated cardboard

Plus, there are some items that can’t go in your compost bin at all:

Meat and dairy products, which can attract pests
Fats, grease, lard, or oils
Glossy paper or cardboard

For a more comprehensive breakdown, check out the Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.

* * *

Any common mistakes I should know about?

Composting is all about balance, and Rhoads says it can take a little practice to get it right.

“The most common mistake when it comes to composting is not maintaining a balance between the green and brown matter,” she explains. “An oversupply of the green stuff — food scraps, green leaves, grass clippings — will not break down properly. Alternately, too much brown waste, like newspaper and brown paper, brown leaves, branches and twigs, slows down the process.”

You’ll also want to keep your compost from drying out: “If your compost becomes too dry, spray lightly with water.”

* * *

How do I maintain the balance?

It’s actually pretty straightforward.

“Keep the balance between green and brown by adding the same amount of both at the same time,” Rhoads recommends. “Turning your compost regularly with a shovel or compost turner promotes the circulation of oxygen. This is key to reducing funny smells, too!”

The 1:1 ratio is just a suggestion, so don’t worry too much about having exact amounts of green and brown materials. However, if you find yourself with way too much of one type, you can either hold off on adding it until you can balance it out, or simply ask a friend or neighbor if they have any materials for you.

* * *

What can I compost that I might not know about?

Don’t believe everything you hear about composting. Rhoads says there are several items people think can’t be composted, but actually can!

“There is the myth that lemon peels can’t be composted, but really they can, so long as you are not putting too much in, especially when you are using a worm farm,” she explains. “Coffee grounds can be added to the compost, as can pizza boxes, but tear them up to make it easier to break down.”

You can even compost pet waste, but you need to do it separately from your normal pile: “Hair, nail clippings and even pet fur will break down in a compost. If you have pets, consider starting a designated compost for their waste, too.” The USDA has a thorough guide on how to compost pet waste.

* * *

Can I compost indoors?

Not all of us have an outdoor space where we can compost — I live in an apartment, but I’d love to get in on the action.

Lucky for me, countertop composting products are becoming increasingly common, making the practice more accessible.

“I’ve seen a rise in worm farms being used indoors disguised within seats inside kitchens!” says Rhoads. “You might think it will smell, but like any compost or worm farm, once the balance is right there will be no smell.”

There are also crowdsourced composting groups, which allow you to work with your neighbors to reduce waste, like one Rhoads recommends called ShareWaste. “This is a website and app that connects people who wish to recycle their kitchen scraps with their neighbors who are already composting, worm-farming, or keeping chickens.”

* * *

How long does composting take?

So you’ve made a compost pile and put in your greens and browns . . . then what? Essentially, you wait. In a well-maintained compost pile, decomposition can take anywhere from two to four months, but there are numerous factors that affect this timeline, such as the time of year. As Rhoads mentioned, too many browns can slow the decomposition process, and you’ll also need to be diligent about wetting the pile if it dries out and turning it once a week or so.

How do you know when it’s ready to be used? Your compost should look and feel like rich, dark earth — not rotting vegetables! If you see large chunks of food waste or it has a sour odor, it’s not finished yet.

* * *

What can I do with finished compost?

Once your compost has sufficiently decomposed, you can use the beautiful “black gold” in several ways. Many people use finished compost as mulch, spreading it over their garden beds to feed nutrients to the plants and prevent weeds from growing. It can also be used to amend soil in your gardens — mix it into your beds before adding plants or seeds to give them a nutrient boost.

No outdoor gardens? No worries! Your houseplants will love compost, too. Just mix compost into your favorite potting soil and use it to repot your indoor plants. They’re sure to appreciate the rich growing medium.

There’s also a concept called “compost tea,” which is exactly what it sounds like — just don’t drink it! To make tea, you soak compost in water for three days — a 5:1 ratio of water to compost is recommended — then strain out the solids. The resulting liquid can be sprayed onto your plants or garden best as a fertilizer. It’s a great way to stretch a little bit of compost farther.

The history of Durkee Famous Sauce, a forgotten vintage luxury with modern condiment shelf appeal

What is Durkee Famous Sauce?

It’s a mustard-mayonnaise hybrid that’s cut with a punch of vinegar and a “secret formula” of 12 undisclosed spices.

The vintage luxury of Durkee Famous Sauce

At the Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, Durkee Famous Foods set up a booth for visitors to try their wares: Durkee’s Roquefort Delight, Salad Aid and their “Dinner Bell Oleomargarine.” Their stand-out product was, and remains, their Famous Dressing and Meat Sauce, which — according to an pamphlet from the fair — was made from a “secret formula [which uses] vinegar, in which twelve different spices have been steeped for six months.”

This vinegar is then combined with eggs and other ingredients “to complete one of the most fascinating dressings ever produced.” Men, an earlier advertorial pamphlet said, are especially fond of the tangy flavor.

Durkee’s Famous Dressing and Meat Sauce (now known as Durkee Famous Sauce) was originally created by Eugene R. Durkee, the founder of E.R. Durkee & Co. Spice Dealers in Buffalo, NY, in 1857. By 1917, the company had built a four-story industrial structure in Elmhurst, Queens, to serve as their new mustard and spice factory. The news was initially met with opposition from the community, as they wanted to preserve the residential feel of the neighborhood, according to the New York Historic District Council.

As a way to mitigate the negative reception, the company announced that the factory would be surrounded by lawns and flower beds and “would be a boon to the community.” Durkee became the largest factory and employer in Elmhurst with more than 300 employees, mostly women. When Durkee eventually died in 1926, he left everything to his daughters.

Advertisements in the years after the World’s Fair positioned the Famous Sauce as a way for housewives to bring an element of class to their dinner tables, especially if their husbands were jet-setting businessmen.

“Durkee’s Famous Dressing and Meat Sauce is served in the lunches of the Three-Mile-a-Minute planes of the United Air Lines, on the giant air-ships of the American Airways, and many others,” one ad said. “It’s a regular part of the menu of the diners of the finest crack trains; in the dining rooms of the most fashionable hotels, in world-famous restaurants and exclusive clubs from coast to coast and border to border.”

Company literature recommended that home cooks make retro-delicacies like World’s Fair Ham Loaf and “Halibut a la Gondolier.”

In the ensuing decades, Durkee underwent some changes. It had a flurry of owners and is now based in Iowa. Many of its products, like its sandwich relish and its version of Worcestershire sauce, faded through the generations. I’ve yet to have a flight attendant offer me a spoonful of Durkee Special Sauce with my bagged pretzels.

However, I first had it on a pastrami sandwich with swiss on toasted rye at a nondescript Chicago diner a few years back. It had the creaminess of mayonnaise that was immediately cut by the spice of mustard and some vinegary acid. Court Street Grocers in Brooklyn used it as a sandwich spread, too, on their Turkey + Durkee sandwich, according to the Huffington Post.

Depending on where you live, it can be tough to find on supermarket shelves, but it has die-hard fans across the country, especially on the East Coast and at certain points in the midwest. (St. Louis is particularly devoted.) As Eric Finkelstein from Court Street Grocers told Bon Appetit, “People from all over the country have a connection to this product, and for whatever reason, all think it’s from their hometown.”

Typically here at Saucy, I’ll recommend some at-home dupes of condiments, but Durkee is one of those condiments you’re really just going to have to buy and try for yourself. (A generous jar is available for just $8 online).

Once you get it, you’ve got to try one of my current favorite sandwiches, which is actually inspired by a serving suggestion from one of those vintage company pamphlets. They recommend putting out a “Casino Supper” for parties, in which smoked tongue and corned beef is served alongside the sauce and garnishes of radish, parsley and watercress.

***

Smoked tongue is maybe a stretch for some, but I ardently believe that thinly sliced radishes are a terribly underrated sandwich topping, so I created the “Casino Supper Sandwich” that subs in thick-sliced roast beef slathered in Durkee’s.

Recipe: Casino Supper Sandwich
Yields:1 sandwich

Ingredients:

2 hearty slices of sourdough bread
4 to 6 ounces of thick-cut roast beef
4 thinly sliced radishes
A few rings of thin-sliced red onion
A handful of frisée
1 tablespoon of Durkee Famous Sauce

Instructions:

Layer the sourdough bread with a tablespoon of Durkee Famous Sauce, roast beef, radishes, onion and frisée.

Read more Saucy:

This squash and goat cheese galette is as rustic-elegant as it is delicious

A company-worthy sweet-savory tart, this squash and goat cheese galette recipe by Allison Hooper of Vermont Creamery is as rustic-elegant as it is delicious.

***

Recipe: Allison Hooper’s Squash and Goat Cheese Galette

Total Time: 2 hours
Hands-On Time: 40 minutes
Yield: 6 servings

For the Crust

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for counter
2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
1/4 teaspoon table salt
2–4 tablespoons ice water

Instructions:

Pre-heat oven to 350° and set a rack to the lower third position.

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the flour, butter, and salt until the butter breaks down into pea-size bits. Drizzle water into the bowl, and pulse until the dough just comes together — don’t overmix.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and knead two or three times to bring it together. Form a ball and flatten it into a disk, then wrap in plastic and chill at least 1 hour (up to overnight).

For the Filling

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon salted butter
1 large Vidalia or other sweet onion, diced
12 ounces fresh goat cheese (chèvre)
3/4 cup milk
1 large egg
2 teaspoons minced fresh sage or
1 teaspoon crumbled dried sage
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1 medium delicata squash, halved lengthwise, seeded, and sliced into ¼-inch half-moons
1/2 cup dried cherries or cranberries

Instructions:

In a medium frying pan over medium-low heat, melt the butter, then add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until nicely caramelized, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the goat cheese, milk, egg, sage, salt, and pepper. Stir until smooth.

Add the caramelized onion to the cheese mixture and stir to combine. Set aside to cool.

On a floured surface, roll the dough out to a ¼-inch-thick circle. Transfer the dough to a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

Spoon the cheese filling onto the center and spread evenly, leaving a 2-inch border around the edges. Layer the squash over the filling in concentric circles and sprinkle with dried cherries or cranberries.

Gently fold the edges of the dough over the filling, pleating as you go.

Transfer to the oven’s lower rack and bake until the squash is tender and the crust is nicely browned, 45 to 50 minutes.

Top with a sprinkling of toasted pepitas and cut into thick wedges to serve.

More from this author:

Liz Cheney speaks out on Matt Gaetz investigations, calls sex trafficking allegations “sickening”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Sunday said that sex trafficking and other allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) are “sickening.”

Cheney was asked about the Gaetz scandal during an appearance on “Face the Nation.” Gaetz became one of Cheney’s top Republican critics after she voted for the impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

“Are you ready to call for his resignation?” CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Cheney.

“As the mother of daughters, the charges certainly are sickening,” Cheney replied. “And as the Speaker noted, there’s an ethics investigation underway, there are also criminal investigations underway and I’m not going to comment on it further right now.”

“Were you surprised at these allegations?” Brennan wondered.

“I’m not going to comment further,” Cheney insisted.

“Well, he is one of your chief critics,” Brennan noted. “So I needed to offer you that opportunity as you well know.”

“Thank you for the opportunity,” Cheney remarked.

Watch the video below from CBS.

“The Nevers” is nothing more than a recycled Victorian version of every Joss Whedon show you’ve seen

Misfit super-squads are Joss Whedon‘s specialty. To know the man’s work is to know and possibly love at least one of his teams, whether it be the Scoobies on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Angel” and his vigilante family of choice or Serenity‘s indomitable crew on “Firefly.“

Now he gives us “The Nevers” and its head mistress Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) and inventor whiz Penance Adair (Ann Skelly), a pair of best friends with special powers bestowed by a cosmic force that floated over London on a grey day in August of 1896.

Three years afterward she oversees a sanctuary she calls an orphanage. Most of those who live there are adults made pariahs by the aforementioned anomaly and referred to as the Touched. While some received amazing abilities others are simply odd and therefore vulnerable.

Amalia is among the stronger ones in that she has the gift of premonition and is, yes, an expert fighter. She even has cool nicknames – her adversaries simply refer to her as The Widow or The Woman Who Sheds Her Skin. Penance is a bubbly and awkward and granted the gift of technological innovation, through which she manipulates electricity.

For reasons not entirely clear it falls to Amalia to gather these folks under her roof and protect them from society but, more specifically, some kind of greater evil whose aim is unclear. This requires her to punch her way through a whole lot of ne’er-do-wells, and luckily the orphanage has a gifted doctor on call in Horatio Cousens (Zackary Momoh) and a loyal house mother of sorts in Lucy Best (Elizabeth Berrington), one of the first Touched people to join Amalia.

To know Whedon’s work is to know his formula too, which means that if you’re a diehard of any of the other series he’s created you have seen this show before. That could be perfectly fine with you, even a selling point, given how long it’s been since he’s had a show on TV that people wholeheartedly enjoyed. (Notice that “Dollhouse,” a show about mind-controlled women and men whose bodies are leased out for various purposes and brains wiped at the end of each mission, isn’t listed in that gathering of great titles.)

Circling back to a slightly changed version of the same premise over and over again inevitably leads people to recognize updated versions of favorite characters, and that’s not entirely a wise gambit. Perhaps they may compare and contrast and resent that the creator has simply shoved old personalities into new clothing as if they were department store mannequins as opposed to the fully realized beings we imagine them to be.

Therefore, if one were to sum up “The Nevers” as some steampunk version of “Buffy” the boot fits. That description may in fact prove to be an adequate selling point for anyone jonesing for another Chosen One legend with a healthier costume and visual effects budget along with the bonus of gratuitous boob shots inside of brothels and a bit of toe sucking. Hip hip hooray for premium cable!

It’s also a bit unfair to Donnelly, who lends a singular fortitude to Amalia that would place her in the same league as some of the most stalwart Victorian heroines if she weren’t inhabiting a hand-me-down archetype, albeit one decidedly world-wearier and hardened.

“I also drink when I shouldn’t, fight when I needn’t, and f**k men whose names I do not learn,” she tells a companion who wonders why she has the trademark Lady Hero’s Wall of Emotional Opacity around her heart.

Amalia merits more psychological expansion and interiority than Whedon’s classic schematic allows for in the first few hours in which we get to know her. That line is about as much insight as we get into Amalia, and it doesn’t arrive until the third episode, and by then she’s assumed the three-point superhero landing a few times, dropping into one instance of it from a great height after losing her dress mid-plummet. Amalia stripping down to her corset and petticoat becomes something of a running bit, but only because she scraps that hard.

Provided you’re either able to look past or embrace Amalia despite or because of her sameness, along with the nagging notion of Skelly’s Penance as Willow Rosenberg’s sugar substitute and Momoh’s doctor filling the Giles role, there’s still the obstacle course of the thematic mashup driving “The Nevers.” Every moment of it calls forth prior titles, figure and brands that have spun up everything we see here but with more feeling.

The premise itself recalls “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” and Amalia’s meetings with her benefactor Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams) or the politician aligning forced against the Touched, Lord Gilbert Massen (Pip Torrens) intrude upon the narrative flow by flashing us back to every Masterpiece Theater show taking place inside a huge country manse. On the upside, we also get to enjoy Ben Chaplin, James Norton and Denis O’Hare sauntering through the plot and gobbling up the scenery whenever they’re in frame.

With all that going on and an anarchist villain known as Maladie (Amy Manson) running amok, there should be more than enough for a person to hang onto. Regrettably “The Nevers” takes around three and a half hours to coalesce into a show worth sticking with, and only after fridging a key character – another throwback to 20 years ago I could have done without.

To those who might think this poor viewing of “The Nevers” has something to do with Whedon’s poor reputation among fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Zack Snyder, along with loads of women who were in love with his characters and feel betrayed by his false feminist signaling, I assure you that isn’t the case. An artwork’s excellence would be undeniable regardless of whether its creator happened to be a card-carrying member of the League of Disappointing Not-Gentlemen.

Besides, Whedon announced he stepped away from the series in late 2020 although this vision could easily continue under the aegis of the series’ executive producing team which includes “Buffy” veterans Doug Petrie and Jane Espenson.

Each has worked on enough unrelated genre titles to steer the narrative into something more coherent and riveting than the lacy patchwork employed to introduce “The Nevers.” With six episodes produced and rolling out now, it is difficult to imagine transforming the back end of the first season in a way that doesn’t recall past hits and misses; also, and I cannot stress this enough, Whedon diehards may actually welcome more of the same.

But Amalia and her preternatural companions deserve better, as does this cast and the broader TV audience. There’s nothing wrong with wanting “The Nevers” to be a unique vision, and disappointing to realize it gives us very little we haven’t seen before.

“The Nevers” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, April 11 on HBO.

Our last, best chance to save Atlantic salmon

Atlantic salmon have a challenging life history — and those that hail from U.S. waters have seen things get increasingly difficult in the past 300 years.

Dubbed the “king of fish,” Atlantic salmon once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the United States and ranged up and down most of New England’s coastal rivers and ocean waters. But dams, pollution and overfishing have extirpated them from all the region’s rivers except in Maine. Today only around 1,000 wild salmon, known as the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment, return each year from their swim to Greenland. Fewer will find adequate spawning habitat in their natal rivers to reproduce.

That’s left Atlantic salmon in the United States critically endangered. Hatchery and stocking programs have kept them from disappearing entirely, but experts say recovering healthy, wild populations will require much more, including eliminating some of the obstacles (literally) standing in their way.

Conservation organizations, fishing groups and even some state scientists are now calling for the removal of up to four dams along a 30-mile stretch of the Kennebec River, where about a third of Maine’s best salmon habitat remains.

The dams’ owner — multinational Brookfield Renewable Partners — has instead proposed building fishways to aid salmon and other migratory fish getting around dams as they travel both up and down the river. But most experts think that plan has little chance of success.

A confusing array of state and federal processes are underway to try and sort things out. None is likely to be quick, cheap or easy. And there’s a lot at stake.

“Ultimately the fate of the species in the United States really depends upon what happens at a handful of key dams,” says John Burrows, executive director of U.S. programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation. “If those four projects don’t work — or even if just one of them doesn’t work — you could basically preclude recovering Atlantic salmon in the United States.”

Prime habitat

The best place for salmon recovery is in Maine’s two largest watersheds.

“The Penobscot River and the Kennebec River have orders of magnitude more habitat, production potential and climate resilient habitat” than other parts of the state, says Burrows.

The rivers and their tributaries run far inland and reach more undeveloped areas with higher elevations. That helps provide salmon with the cold, clean water they need for spawning and rearing. Smaller numbers of salmon are hanging on in lower-elevation rivers along the coastal plain in Maine’s Down East region, but climate change could make that habitat unsuitable.

“There’s definitely concern about how resilient those watersheds are going to be for salmon in the future,” says Burrows. “To recover the population, we need to be able to get salmon to the major tributaries farther upriver, in places where we’re still going to have cold water even under predictions with climate change.”

One of those key places is the Penobscot, which has already seen a $60 million effort to help recover salmon and other native sea-run fish. A 16-year project resulted in the removal of two dams, the construction of a stream-like bypass channel at a third dam, and new fish lift at a fourth. In all, the project made 2,000 miles of river habitat accessible.

While there’s still more work to be done on the Penobscot, says Burrows, attention has shifted to the Kennebec. The river has what’s regarded as the largest and best salmon habitat in the state, especially in its tributary, the Sandy River, where hatchery eggs are being planted to help boost salmon numbers.

“That’s helped us go from zero salmon in the upper tributaries of Kennebec to getting 50 or 60 adults back, which is still an abysmally small number compared to historical counts,” says Burrows. “But these are the last of the wildest fish that we have.”

The obstacles

The Sandy may be good salmon habitat, but it’s also hard to reach. Brookfield’s four dams stand in the way of fish trying to get upriver.

At the lowest dam on the river, Lockwood Dam in Waterville, there’s a fish lift — a kind of elevator that should allow fish that enter it to pass up and around the dam. But if fish do find the lift — and only around half of salmon do — they don’t get far.

“It’s a terminal lift,” says Sean Ledwin, division director of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources’ Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat. “The lift was never completed. So we pick up those fish in a truck and drive them up to the Sandy River.”

That taxi cab arrangement isn’t a long-term solution, though, and was part of an interim species protection plan.

Only the second dam, Hydro Kennebec, has a modern fish passage system. But how well that actually works hasn’t been tested yet since fish can’t get by Lockwood Dam. As part of a consultation process related to the Endangered Species Act, Brookfield has submitted a plan proposing to fix the fishway at Lockwood and add passage to the third and fourth dams.

But federal regulators found it inadequate.

“Brookfield’s proposal was rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee [which oversees hydroelectric projects] and all the [federal management] agencies,” says Ledwin. The company now has until May 2022 to come up with a new plan.

State scientists aren’t convinced Brookfield’s plan would work either.

“We have really low confidence that having four fishways would ever result in meaningful runs of all the sea-run fish and certainly not recovery of Atlantic salmon,” says Ledwin. “We don’t think that it’s going to be conducive to recovery.”

In addition to considerations related to the Endangered Species Act, Shawmut Dam, the third on the Kennebec, is currently up for relicensing, which triggers a federal review process by FERC.

And at the same time the Maine Department of Marine Resources has drafted a new plan for managing the Kennebec River that recommends removing Shawmut Dam and Lockwood Dam. A public comment period on the proposed plan closed in March.

Brookfield isn’t happy with it and responded with a lawsuit against the state.

It was good news to conservation groups, however, which would like to see all four of the dams removed if possible — or at least a few of them.

“There’s no self-sustaining population of Atlantic salmon anywhere in the world that we know of that have to go by more than one hydro dam,” says Burrows. He believes that having Brookfield spend tens of millions of dollars on new fishways will just result in failure for salmon.

It’s partly a game of numbers. Not all fish will find or use a fishway. And if you start with a low number of returning fish and expect them to pass through four gauntlets, you won’t be left with many at the end.

“If you’re passing 50% of salmon that show up at the first dam, and then you’ve got three more dams passing 50%, that means you’re left with only an eighth of the population you started with by the end,” says Nick Bennett, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “You can’t start a restoration program where you’re losing seven-eighths of the adults before they even get to their spawning habitat.”

And getting upriver is just part of the salmon’s journey. Juvenile salmon face threats going downstream to the ocean as well, including predation and warm water in impoundments. They also risk being injured or killed going through spillways or turbines. Only about half are likely to survive the four hydro projects.

Atlantic salmon, unlike their Pacific cousins, don’t always die after spawning, either. So some adults will also make the downstream trek, too.

“Just looking at our reality, at least two dams need to go, hopefully three, and it would be amazing if all four would go,” says Burrows.

Ecosystem restoration

The fate of Atlantic salmon hangs in the balance, but so do the futures of other fishes.

The Pacific coast of the United States is home to five species of salmon. And while the Atlantic side has just the one, it has a dozen other native sea-run species that have also seen their habitat shrink.

“Those dams are preventing other native species like American shad, alewives, blueback herring and American eel from accessing large amounts of historic habitat,” says Burrows.

Ledwin says removing dams on the Kennebec could result in populations of more than a million shad, millions of blueback herring, millions of eels and hundreds of thousands of sea lampreys.

“The recovery of those species would actually help Atlantic salmon as well because they provide prey buffers and there are a lot of co-evolved benefits,” he says.

Salmon are much more successful at nesting when they can lay their eggs in old sea lamprey nests, explains Bennett. “But sea lamprey are not good at using fish lifts and we’ve essentially blocked 90% of the historic sea lamprey habitat at Lockwood dam. We need to get those fish upstream, too.”

Dam removal advocates don’t have to look too far to find an example of how well river ecosystems respond when dams are removed.

The removal of the Edwards Dam on the lower Kennebec River in 1999 and the Fort Halifax Dam just upstream on the Sebasticook in 2008 helped ignite a nationwide dam-removal movement. It also brought back American shad, eel, two native species of sturgeon and millions of river herring to lower parts of the watershed.

“We’ve got the biggest river herring run in North America now due to the dam removals,” says Ledwin. “And the largest abundance of eel we’ve ever seen on the lower Kennebec.”

The resurgence of native fishes helps the whole ecosystem. When they returned, so too did eagles, osprey and other wildlife.

“When people see all those fish in the river and the eagles overhead, it just kind of blows their minds because they never realized what had been lost for so long in our rivers,” says Burrows.

Rebuilding key forage fish like herring also benefits species that live not just in the river, but the Gulf of Maine and even the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny fish feed whales, porpoises and seabirds. They’re also used for lobster bait and can help rebuild fisheries for cod and haddock, which has economic benefits for the region, too.

“We have to rebalance the scales if we want to have marine industries and commercial fishing industries and if we want the ecological benefits of what sea-run fisheries do for us,” says Bennett.

The path ahead

The process to determine whether any — or all — of the four Kennebec dams that stretch from Waterville and Skowhegan are removed will take years, a diverse coalition, financial resources and agreements to meet the concerns of communities and the dam owner.

“These things come down to compromise, so there may be situations where one of those dams might not be a candidate for economic or social reasons,” says Burrows. “But it will be interesting to see if in the next couple of years we can get to a place where we can have meaningful conversations with federal agencies, the dam owner and continue to engage the communities about the potential of removal at some of these sites.”

And if removal of the four dams did happen, it wouldn’t open up the river all the way to its headwaters. Another nine dams still lie upstream in the watershed that obstruct fish passage.

“Some of those are major dams in terms of power, production and economics,” says Burrows. “So we’re not calling for those to be removed.”

The four lower dams provide just 46 megawatts of power — enough to supply about 37,000 homes and 0.43% of the state’s annual electricity generation. It’s a small amount of power relative to the damage they cause sea-run fish, says Bennett.

“By comparison we expect to add 1,200 megawatts of solar generation in the next five years,” he says. “So these four dams aren’t particularly important in our climate fight.” And removing them would open up substantial amounts of habitat to aid salmon recovery that seem worth the tradeoff in lost power.

That’s not the case, he says, for the nine larger dams upstream.

“We need those dams. We need hydroelectric power in Maine,” says Bennett. “But we made big mistakes in our past use of our rivers. And we went way overboard in favor of hydroelectric power at the expense of fish.”

Outside of the rivers, Atlantic salmon still face a tough road. Climate change is warming ocean temperatures, changing salinity and altering food webs. But having so many unknowns in the marine environment in the coming decades provides more reason to focus efforts on restoring rivers where scientists already know what works, says Burrows.

And if that’s done right, the benefits will extend far beyond salmon.

“It’s not just about salmon — it’s about these other native fish, it’s about the wildlife, water quality, economic opportunity for ground fishermen and lobstermen, and more sustainable forms of recreation and community development,” says Burrows. “If we remove a dam or two here and rebuild these fish populations to pretty big levels that really impacts a whole bunch of different parts of society. That’s what we want to try to do here on the Kennebec.”

Why we’re so tired after socializing now

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 34-year-old Meaghan Tiernan has adhered to social distancing guidelines, which meant refraining from in-person socializing. But as restrictions are lifting in Oakland, California, she and her family had an informal, outdoor dinner with another family for the first time in over a year.

The experience, Tiernan said, was “exhausting.”

Tiernan’s family brought takeout over to the other family’s house; over the course of two hours, their toddlers played together in the backyard, and they enjoyed the company of the other family. It was a fun night.

But when she returned home at 8pm, Tiernan went straight to bed. Tiernan said she felt unusually “depleted.”

“Normally I would attribute my exhaustion to the fact that we were running around chasing my two-and-a-half-year old, but she was so entertained by our friend’s daughter that we really didn’t have to do any parenting that night,” Tiernan said. “We both attributed it to the reactivation of socializing beyond the screen, because we haven’t done it in such a long time.”

Tiernan isn’t alone.

Jenny Block, author of “Be That Unicorn: Find Your Magic, Live Your Truth, and Share Your Shine,” recently had a busy social weekend for the first time. Immediately after she, her wife and friends were all fully vaccinated, they received a flood of invites for social events: a party Saturday night, a brunch Sunday morning, and an all-day pool party on Sunday afternoon.

“It was awesome, these are my favorite people,” Block said. “But I’m not exaggerating when I say I was looking in the mirror going, ‘OK, just two more parties Jenny, we can do two more parties.”

“I didn’t used to have to do that,” she added.

Post-socializing fatigue isn’t new. Before the pandemic, it was a common experience for many self-described introverts. Research estimates that social interactions extending beyond three hours can lead to fatigue later for some people, depending on the time spent socializing and intensity of the social engagement.

Yet anecdotally, this phenomenon seems to be more common now for everyone, not merely self-identified introverts. Both Tiernan and Block told Salon the fatigue they experienced was something they haven’t felt before.

“I know it’s COVID because time has become amorphous, and someone’s suddenly pushing me on this time thing,” Block said. “My brain almost exploded.”

Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams feels similarly. A self-described extrovert, she wrote of the struggle of late pandemic socializing in an essay published in late March, in which she described feeling as though her social skills had “regressed.”

So what is going on?

Chris MacLeod, MSW and author of “The Social Skills Guidebook,” said the feelings of fatigue and depletion are likely due to three factors. First, those who haven’t been socializing during the pandemic aren’t used to seeing people in person. For example, the experience of managing a group conversation bigger than what a person has experienced over the last year could cause someone to think harder in the moment, and thus take more energy.

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There’s also the problem of socialization anxiety. “If you’re mildly nervous, or you’re maybe not in touch with the fact that you’re nervous, you might have that feeling of, ‘oh I’m tired, I’m depleted, my batteries have run out,'” MacLeod said.

While many people think of anxiety as a mental state, there are physical components to it that can lead to fatigue.

“It makes you perspire, it raises your heart rate, raises your blood pressure, and all of those things are wearing on the body,” social psychologist Julie Blackman said. “People are then carrying a lot more muscle tension in their bodies, and all of that takes a toll on our bodies and on how we feel.”

Blackman agreed that nervousness and anxiety could be part of the reason people are reporting fatigue after socializing. Yet she pointed out that another reason is that social interaction has been “equated with danger” for the last year, and therefore people are more vigilant while socializing.

“Now that we can socialize a little more, when we’re in that setting — the setting over the last year or so we’ve learned to worry about — that feeling doesn’t just disappear,” Blackman said. “We’re sort of extra vigilant because we’ve learned to fear those interactions, and even now that they’re allowed we’re still afraid.”

Blackman added: “We’re all a little traumatized about social interactions.”

Humans have a threshold, what Blackman and MacLeod, referred to as a “baseline” on how much social interaction a person can handle until feeling depleted. While this varies from person to person, far and few social interactions — or a lack of socializing in specific ways, like in a big group at a loud and packed restaurant — may cause your tolerance for social stimulation to shrink.

“I think it’s qualitatively different because of the pandemic and because of fear associated with social interaction,” Blackman said. “I think the whole notion of a baseline is different, it’s shifted so that we tire sooner.”

But don’t expect this to last for too long. As fast as socializing became tiring, this tolerance can be built back up with more socializing.

“It’s a little more like riding a bike,” MacLeod said. “There’ll be a temporary rustiness, but you’ll shake it off and remember your old skills.”

Understandably, some people may not want to immediately jump back into packed social schedules.

“I’m going to have to adjust, and I’m going to have to decide whether or not I want to go back to what was before,” Block said. “Or gain what I can from this experience, and maybe have deeper better social interactions; I’m not very good at small talk. I mean I can do it. I’m really good at it, but I don’t like it.”

Sanders says Democrats can’t waste time catering to obstructionist GOP: “I’m not going to slow down”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said Saturday that amid the immediate emergencies of climate change, COVID-19, mass unemployment, and homelessness, congressional Democrats cannot afford to dampen their infrastructure ambitions in the hopes of winning support from obstructionist Republicans.

“The time is now to go forward,” Sanders (I-Vt.) told the Washington Post. “This country faces enormous crises that have got to be addressed right now. When you have half a million people who are homeless, I’m not going to slow down.”

“When the scientists tell us we have five or six years before there will be irreparable damage done because of climate change,” the Vermont senator added, “I’m not going to slow down.”

Sanders’ remarks came as the Democratic leadership is weighing how to proceed with the roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package President Joe Biden unveiled last month, a proposal that will serve as a starting point for congressional negotiations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she hopes to pass infrastructure legislation by July.

But unified Republican opposition to the package and growing complaints from conservative deficit scolds within the Democratic caucus are threatening to impede work on the package that progressives hope to transform into a sprawling bill that deals with a wide range of priorities, from climate to affordable housing to prescription drug prices.

On Monday, the Senate parliamentarian gave Democrats a green light to use the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process for additional spending legislation this year, granting the party the option to move ahead with an infrastructure measure without Republican support.

Sanders told the Post that he is preparing to use the reconciliation tool, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has not publicly committed to that strategy as the Biden administration continues to hold out hope for a bipartisan compromise. With the legislative filibuster in place, Senate Democrats would need the support of at least 10 Republicans to pass an infrastructure bill through regular order.

“The president believes that there’s a path forward to get… this American Jobs Plan passed with bipartisan support,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a Thursday briefing. “That’s why he’s going to invite Democrats and Republicans here. That’s why he’s going to hear from them on their ideas that they’ve already put forward.”

But progressive lawmakers have cautioned the Biden administration against weakening an infrastructure package they believe is already insufficient in a likely futile effort to win over Republican lawmakers, who unanimously voted against a broadly popular $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package last month.

“Let’s not water down a bill for a party that’s not actually interested in bipartisanship or wait for Republicans to have some awakening on climate change,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said earlier this month. “Let’s move with the urgency and boldness that this moment calls for.”

In a report released Thursday, Adam Hersh of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mark Paul of the New College of Florida argued that under-spending in response to the current crises risks long-term damage to the economy and the climate—a warning progressives cited as all the more reason to quickly push ahead with an ambitious recovery package.

Now is the time to go BIG. https://t.co/XxV61PAdzR

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) April 9, 2021

In an appearance on MSNBC Saturday, Sanders said that Republican lawmakers are “probably not” going to accept arguments in support of big spending on climate solutions, core infrastructure, caregiving, and more.

“They live in their world, and their world will be trying to obstruct as much as possible what Biden and many of us in the Congress are trying to do,” Sanders said, arguing that the GOP’s top priority is “trying to divide us up by stressing xenophobia, racism, [and] making it harder for people to vote.”

.@AliVelshi "It's a compelling argument [on infrastructure]. Are any Republicans going to buy that argument that you just made?"@BernieSanders: "Probably not." pic.twitter.com/2q6Hwh7oEk

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) April 10, 2021

“Our job,” Sanders said, “is to rally the American people around an agenda that works for workers and the middle class, who have been neglected for so many years. It is the right thing to do policy-wise, it is the right thing to do politically.”

Ken Burns’ vicious Hemingway smear: PBS series totally ignores writer’s lifelong leftist politics

Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961. Judging by the mean-spirited, petty and lazy PBS documentary series “Hemingway” that Ken Burns made with collaborator Lynn Novick, that’s the same year in which Burns’ brain is permanently frozen. The master of the PBS yawn appears to live in a world where the mentally ill are worthy of hatred, little is known about how severe concussions damage the brain and alter personality, and Google, does not exist.

While documenting the legendary American author’s descent into paralytic depression in the third episode of the series, Burns and Novick fail to even mention that many medical experts and literary scholars believe that Hemingway suffered from untreated hemochromatosis — a condition causing the body to produce excessive amounts of iron. Symptoms include debilitating pain, exhaustion and memory loss, all of which Hemingway displayed, and made worse with his heavy drinking.

While chronicling the years leading up to Hemingway’s suicide, the documentary series drops several references to the nine concussions that Hemingway endured throughout his life, but never interviews a neurologist who might have explained what is now common knowledge, especially in the wake of disturbing studies of the brains of deceased NFL players — chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, often caused by repeated concussions, can lead to loss of cognitive function, and often transforms its victims into abusive malcontents.

Instead of considering how anyone might feel and behave while struggling with hemochromatosis, depression, brain damage and alcoholism, all while receiving little to no medical intervention, Burns and Novick are content to cast Hemingway as a narcissistic bully. Crucial to their presentation of Hemingway as a loathsome and delusional figure is the inclusion of his intense concerns that the FBI was surveilling him. Hemingway’s suspicion that two men in a Ketchum, Idaho, restaurant were federal agents, and that men working in the local bank after hours were scrutinizing his finances, are treated as nothing more than the psychotic ravings of a lunatic.

On the issue of the FBI, and Hemingway’s politics more broadly, Burns and Novick manage a surprising achievement — they outperform the dishonesty they exercised when presenting Hemingway’s health problems.

In the 1980s, Jeffrey Meyers, a Hemingway biographer and professor at the University of Colorado, filed a Freedom of Information request for the FBI’s file on Hemingway. He was received more than 100 pages of documents, 15 of which were redacted. The file included longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s order to monitor Hemingway, details of plans to tap his phones and even information on how Hemingway’s doctor at the Mayo Clinic was reporting on the author’s condition to the FBI field office in Minnesota. There are also memos from agents offering proposals for how the bureau could destroy the beloved writer’s public reputation.

In an appalling act of journalistic malpractice, the Burns and Novick series never even mentions the FBI file. Meyers is alive and well in California, but does not appear in the documentary.

Burns did interview the late A.E. Hotchner, a journalist and longtime friend of Hemingway who wrote three books on the author, but never acknowledges that Hotchner expressed remorse over not taking Hemingway’s claims of FBI surveillance seriously. The exposure of the FBI file led Hotchner to write that he “regretfully misjudged” his friend’s fears, and that the FBI’s persecution of Hemingway contributed to “his anguish and suicide.”

In fact, Hemingway first drew the attention of the FBI decades earlier, because of his support for the Republican (i.e., socialist) government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway collaborated with left-wing filmmaker Joris Ivens to make “The Spanish Earth,” a 1937 documentary rallying support for the democratically elected Republicans. Hoover denounced Hemingway as a “premature anti-fascist” — a bizarre but accurate label of the author’s lifelong political commitment to the destruction of fascist forces.

Three years later, Hemingway signed a public letter protesting the FBI arrest of Americans in Detroit who were violating the Neutrality Act by encouraging enlistment for the Republican cause

Contemptuous of dissent and unable to distinguish between anti-fascism and pro-communism, Hoover and Raymond G. Leddy, an FBI agent stationed in Cuba, described Hemingway in internal memos as “dangerous” and likely to “stir up trouble.” For his part, Hemingway referred to the FBI in 1942 as the “American gestapo.”

Hemingway put his life on the line several times in service to democracy: First as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I, where he was shot and sustained his first concussion, and next as a wartime correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway also reported on World War II, and while in France took up arms alongside U.S. soldiers against the Nazis. Even though it is illegal for a noncombatant to join wartime fighting, the military awarded Hemingway the Bronze Star in recognition of his courage. Burns and Novick never mention this.

They also never discuss the “Crook Factory” — an anti-fascist spy network that Hemingway organized in pre-World War II Cuba to discover whether any influential Cubans were secretly sympathetic to fascism. That might sound like the premise for an implausible thriller, but in fact the U.S. embassy in Havana paid Hemingway a monthly stipend to lead the effort. When he began reporting on their results, the FBI grew livid. Meyers, after reviewing the extensive FBI documentation, writes that Hoover and other FBI leaders saw the Crook Factory as a “rival company” that should be “put out of business.”

Moving forward to the late 1950s and early ’60s, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of 20th-century history understands that the U.S. government wanted nothing more than to put Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution “out of business,” after the rebels drove out the corrupt pro-American regime of military dictator Fulgencio Batista. Hemingway, on the other hand, was a passionate supporter of the revolution.

The Burns documentary mentions only in passing that Hemingway saw hope and promise in the Cuban revolution, but his political engagement extended much further than that. According to Nicholas Reynolds, the author of “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961,” Hemingway provided financial aid to Cuban revolutionaries, and gave Castro meticulous advice on how to handle the American press. Castro and Hemingway met just once, in May of 1960, but numerous photographs of that encounter are available with a brief Google search. None appear in Burns’ documentary, nor is Reynolds among its sources.

Burns and Novick also failed to interview Norberto Fuentes, a journalist and friend who wrote the 1984 book “Hemingway in Cuba,” and who claims that Hemingway eventually hoped to write a book about the Cuban revolution. He certainly told reporters on several occasions that he supported Castro’s revolution, and refused to denounce the Cuban leader when the U.S. government demanded he do so.

Just as Burns and Novick diminish Hemingway’s heroism in the face of fascism, and provide cover for the FBI’s violation of his civil rights, they also distort his larger political history. While “Hemingway” includes the author’s declaration that “all the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation,” making him sound like a right-winger, it never mentions that he supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs for president in 1920, and often told friends that Debs was the only candidate in his lifetime worthy of such a vote. He did, however, tell friends that of all the politicians in the 1932 presidential race — including Franklin D. Roosevelt — he was most favorable to Norman Thomas, another socialist.

Burns and Novick recycle the familiar claim that Hemingway’s first writing job was as correspondent for the Kansas City Star. This is also untrue. Before writing for the newspaper, he accepted a job with the official publication of the Co-Operative Society, an organization that aimed to build solidarity between farmers and urban workers in support of the labor movement. David Crowe writes brilliantly about Hemingway’s politics, focusing mainly on his early years, in “Hemingway and Ho Chi Minh in Paris: The Art of Resistance.” Crowe is also missing from the Burns farce.

The program devotes all of 30 seconds to Hemingway’s only novel set in the U.S., the overtly political “To Have and Have Not.” No one would claim it’s among Hemingway’s best books (the film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is far better known). But the story of a dispossessed worker desperate enough to run contraband from Cuba to the Florida Keys does provide insight into Hemingway’s politics, particularly the protagonist’s excoriations of capitalism and his dying condemnation of individualism: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”

I’m not suggesting that Hemingway deserves hagiography. He was undeniably a complicated and difficult man. But in failing to demonstrate any compassion for his physical ailments and mental illness, lying about the FBI’s desecration of his civil liberties and distorting his lifelong leftist politics, Burns and Novick are effectively carrying water for J. Edgar Hoover.

A truthful look at Hemingway’s life would examine the genius accessible in his writing, document the tragedy of his decline and death and wrestle with his numerous flaws. It would also illustrate his public devotion to human freedom, and his eternal literary alliance with the underdog. The evils of the U.S. national security state, ever zealous to monitor, defame and destroy anyone it viewed as dangerous or uncooperative, would emerge as dark contrast.

“The most essential gift for a good writer,” Ernest Hemingway once explained, “is a built-in, shock proof shit detector.” He also asserted that a “writer without a sense of justice and injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children.” Given the total absence of a “shit detector” in their miniseries, perhaps Burns and Novick should seek out a new occupation.

Trump went on brutal rant against “dumb SOB” Mitch McConnell in Mar-a-Lago speech: reports

Former President Donald Trump reportedly went off on Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) during a speech to major Republican donors in Florida Saturday night.

While the event was closed to the press, multiple reporters are hearing from sources inside the room.

Here’s what Washington Post correspondent Josh Dawsey reported:

“If we had a real leader instead of Mitch, who is a total stone cold loser, if we had a real leader, he would have never, ever accepted the results of that election,” Trump said. Mocked Sasse, Romney and others but saved the nastiness material for McConnell.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) April 11, 2021

Here’s what New York Times correspondent Shane Goldmacher reported:

Trump also said he wished that Mike Pence “had the courage" regarding not supporting certifying the election and that he was "so disappointed” (though he said he also likes Pence).

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 11, 2021

Trump also complained that McConnell never said thanks for hiring his wife, according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Trump rant on McConnell at RNC was brutal, per attendee. He took credit for Mr. McConnell's margin of win. "Did he ever say thank you to me? No. I hired his wife. Did he ever say thank you to me? No." He said he feels "sorry" for her, said, "She's suffered so greatly."

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 11, 2021

Trump also gave a speech against immigration that sounded like the speech he gave when he officially kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign.

“They’re coming in from the Middle East. They’re not sending their best people. You have murderers, you have rapists, you have drug dealers,” Trump said of immigrants coming into country, as he mocks BIden for disagreeing with his immigration policies.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) April 11, 2021

Trump also told a “sir” story, which are widely viewed as a tell he’s being dishonest, that the coronavirus vaccine should be called a “Trumpcine.”

Students didn’t just learn nothing during school closures — they actually regressed, study says

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pandemic caused “the largest disruption to education in history” — and children are suffering from learning loss as a result.

The study, which was co-authored by researchers affiliated with the University of Oxford, analyzed national examinations that occurred in the Netherlands both during and after their school lockdowns. They selected that country because the lockdown there was brief, schools there receiving equitable funding and the nation has “world-leading rates of broadband access.” In other words, it provided a “best-case” scenario for people who hope that children aren’t learning less as a result of the pandemic lockdowns.

Yet despite the country’s “favorable conditions” for education, researchers found that students “made little or no progress while learning from home.”

“Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes,” the authors write.

The study has far-reaching implications for the global state of education during the pandemic, particularly at the primary and secondary level. In the United States, most states closed schools at first before enacting remote learning plans involving so-called “Zoom classrooms,” named for the eponymous video conference app. Some schools have reopened since, though school reopening plans vary tremendously among districts and public or private schools.

Primary teachers and students alike generally balked at remote learning, for both its poor ability to engage students and for the way that remote learning had negative social repercussions. One teacher in Portland public schools observed that reports of child abuse went down tremendously during the epoch of remote learning, largely because physically abused students were no longer directly observed by their teachers and thus child abuse more often went undetected.

In the University of Oxford study, authors tried to account for alternative explanations for the perceived learning loss, such as the possibilities that the effects of social distancing influenced how students performed on tests or that students may have experienced awkwardness returning to school after staying home for several weeks. They also pointed out that remote teaching, in theory, could provide students with important knowledge but simply de-emphasize the skills needed to take tests. To address these possibilities, they examined how students did on tests that focused on learning readiness.

“These tests present the student with a series of words to be read aloud within a given time,” the authors write. “Understanding of the words is not needed, and no curricular content is covered.” They learned that students still did worse on those tests, “suggesting that differences in knowledge learned account for the majority of the drop in performance. In years prior to the pandemic, we observe no such difference in students’ performance between the two types of test.”

The authors conclude by asking whether the educational setbacks are temporary or permanent, ultimately writing that while we will only know for sure years down the road, “dynamic models of learning stress how small losses can accumulate into large disadvantages with time.”

This is not the first study to address how the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education. Last month Horace Mann released a report noting that more than half of teachers in K-12 public schools said the pandemic had caused a “significant” learning loss for students. Almost all of the educations (more than 97%) said that they had observed some learning loss among students over the past year when compared to previous years, while a majority (57%) said they believed their students were behind their peers by more than three months when it came to social-emotional progress.

In a similar vein, a survey published last year in The Conversation found that students of color from low-income households were far more likely to struggle with at-home learning because of disparities in terms of their access to the necessary technology and their parents having enough time away from their jobs to help them. There is also evidence that the stress associated with the pandemic disruptions to education are causing an increasing number of teachers to leave their profession altogether.

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Why the case against abortion is weak, ethically speaking

Abortion rights are under attack. But ethics education can help — and defenders of abortion rights should recognize this, before it’s too late.

In recent years, over 250 abortion-restrictive laws have been proposed across 45 states. Arkansas and South Carolina are the most recent states to pass laws to ban abortion after 6 weeks into pregnancy, when a “heartbeat” can be detected in the fetus and before many women even know they are pregnant.

The Supreme Court now has a majority of justices who identify as “pro-life,” and will surely be more receptive to these attacks on abortion rights than previous courts have been. If the issue comes before them, it is unclear how they might rule: they have already restricted a medication used to induce abortions and might welcome further restrictions.

While legal attacks demand immediate legal responses, these responses aren’t a long-term, comprehensive strategy to protect legal rights and access to abortion.

Representatives of pro-choice organizations sometimes claim they are “doing all they can” to protect abortion rights, but this is not true: Mary Ziegler recently reported in The Atlantic that, since the 1990s, pro-choice advocates have deliberately avoided engaging moral or ethical questions about abortion; they have focused solely on the legal freedom to choose abortion.

Meanwhile, over that same time period and up to the present, pro-life advocates have seen engaging the ethics of abortion as essential to their cause and have invested heavily into training sessions, educational institutes, and materials to help move their message. Surely they view this “ethics education” as a wise and effective investment, since it has helped bring abortion rights to the legally precarious place they are now.

Given the stakes here, it’s time for pro-choice advocates and organizations to rethink the wisdom of avoiding talk of ethics.

* * *

Think about what motivates people who want to make abortion illegal. Their primary motivations are, from their perspective, ethical or moral. If asked why abortion should be illegal, they will often reply with an argument like this:

Fetuses are innocent human beings with the right to life, and—since it’s always wrong to kill innocent human beings—abortion is murder and should be illegal, with few exceptions.

Advocates of this type of argument include the Catholic Church, evangelical Christians, and organizations like the National Right to Life and Americans United for Life. Pro-life “ethics education” involves training people to advocate for this type of argument.

To defend abortion rights requires refuting such arguments. But the most common pro-choice responses to the pro-life argument don’t do this. Observing that making abortion illegal won’t reduce abortions, and claiming that abortion opponents have bad motives or are hypocritical, or that opposition to abortion is inherently religious, that abortion is “normal,” and offering slogans, such as that abortion is “not up for debate,” simply do not engage the core issue: these types of responses do not explain why abortion is not murder or show what’s wrong with the argument against abortion.

Even more sophisticated bodily autonomy defenses of abortion—that women’s rights to choose what happens to and with their bodies and lives justify abortion—are often at least presented in ways that do not challenge the assumption that abortion is murder, along the lines of, “Say whatever you want about the ethics of abortion: we’ve got the legal right to it.”

But abortion generally is not murder and the ethical arguments given to try to establish this are demonstrably weak. The more people who know and understand why this so and are able to effectively communicate this knowledge, the better, since that would do some good towards helping undercut the primary motivation for making abortion illegal.

* * *

To better recognize the flaws in the core ethical argument against abortion, it is useful to consider two far less controversial medical procedures that also end the lives of human beings. These cases provide insights into some of the core content of pro-choice ethics education.

First, in every U.S. state and most countries, if a person elects to be an organ donor, their organs can be removed for transplant when that person suffers complete brain death—even if their body is still alive. Organ harvesting involves cutting living human beings open and their organs being removed one-by-one until, at last, the heart is detached and the human being dies, having been directly killed by the procedure.

But almost no one believes that such organ donation procedures are immoral. Pro-life organizations have not mobilized against them or even signaled disapproval. And hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to be organ donors with full knowledge that their bodies might be killed in this way if their brains permanently cease functioning.

What this shows is that most people recognize that it’s not always wrong to kill human beings. This is true even when those human beings are considered “innocent,” as human beings used for organ donation are often categorized. This is a first step in undercutting the pro-life argument.

A second relevant set of cases involves anencephalic infants, or babies born with severely undeveloped brains. These babies usually do not live long, and the widely accepted medical practice is to let these infants die, providing palliative care only, even though they could be kept alive by a machine. This ends their lives, but it is not wrong.

The ethical insight gained from these two common medical practices is that not all human beings have a right to life that trumps all other considerations: it is not always wrong to end the lives of even innocent human beings, if they lack what would make ending their lives wrong.

And these cases share a core feature with the vast majority of U.S. abortions, 88 percent of which take place during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy: the human beings in question do not have brains capable of supporting consciousness, awareness, or feelings. Since these common medical practices concerning organ donation and anencephaly are morally permissible, so are most abortions.

* * *

Abortion opponents will respond that this conclusion about abortion does not follow, given differences among the cases.

Pro-life intellectuals argue that organ donors are not really “human beings.” But surely they are human beings—they are living human organisms, with heartbeats. The pro-life premise that it’s always wrong to kill human beings implies that organ donation practices are wrong, so this is a good reason to reject the assumption and its application to abortion.

About anencephalic infants, pro-life advocates recognize these babies as human beings and argue that it would be wrong to harvest their organs to use for other children. But either both brain-dead humans and brain-less infants are human beings or neither are, and organ donation is either acceptable from both or neither: the difference in age is immaterial.

Some would respond that organ donation and anencephalic newborns cases involve human beings who, tragically, have lost even the potential for valuable futures. Yet fetuses, they argue, have lives, or potential lives, before them, and so have rights to those lives. And they are “innocent” too.

But calling fetuses “innocent” assumes that they are persons: “innocence” implies the potential for guilt, and that’s only true of persons. Nobody would refer to human eggs or tissue as “innocent,” because nobody thinks these things are persons. And for someone to have a potential future seems to require that “someone” be a person: for any future to be someone’s future, there must be a person whose future that belongs to. So are fetuses persons?

“Personhood” is a controversial concept, but the organ donation and anencephaly cases can help us understand it. First, we should all agree that it’s usually wrong to end the lives of persons: persons have the right to life. But since organ donation practices and how anencephalic newborns are treated is not wrong, we can conclude that these human beings are not persons: if they were persons, ending their lives would be wrong. And these humans are not persons because, again, they lack brains capable of supporting any type of consciousness: they were persons in cases of organ donation and cannot be persons in cases of anencephaly. And this suggests that beginning fetuses are not persons either, since they too lack consciousness-enabling brains. So the pro-life claim that all embryos and fetuses are persons is not true.

So, in sum, the “abortion is murder” charge doesn’t stick: it’s not always wrong to kill human beings; at least early-term fetuses are not persons with the right to life; and “innocence” is a concept that just doesn’t apply to fetuses. Ethical arguments—and ethics education—can support the pro-choice side after all, and the more people making these types of critiques, in different ways and for different audiences, the better.

* * *

Why, though, should we think that abortion is generally morally acceptable? Why think attempts to ban abortion are unjust attempts to criminalize morally acceptable behavior? The simple failure to show that abortion is wrong might be enough for that, but we can offer positive arguments as well.

The ethical framework most medical ethicists use to determine whether a human being has moral rights, such as the right to life, involves the question of whether the individual has “interests.” Interests are what make someone’s life go well or poorly for them: respecting and promoting someone’s interests typically promotes their well-being; ignoring or denigrating their interests typically harms them. Interests are the basis for concerns about “equality,” which are about equal consideration of interests.

Rights protect interests, and interests are not possible without a sufficiently developed brain. What determines how an individual should be treated is not the simple fact of whether they are biologically human organisms; rather, it’s factors that depend on their having a brain that allows for any form of consciousness: minds matter, not heartbeats or human DNA. The basis of human rights is not human biology, as statements of human rights might misleadingly suggest, but having interests, and most fetuses—at the stages of pregnancy when most are aborted—do not have interests, given their undeveloped brains and nervous systems.

Pregnant women, of course, have interests and the resulting rights to life, liberty, and control of their bodies. Fetuses would have the right to women’s bodies, labor, and time only if they are explicitly granted that right, and, of course, women who seek abortions have not given the fetus that right. While women’s rights to autonomy may be sufficient to justify abortion, that argument is surely easier to make if fetuses are not persons, do not have basic moral rights, and so abortion is not murder.

To be sure, fetuses in the third trimester (after 27 weeks) likely have interests, as research on fetal pain suggests. And even most pro-choice ethicists agree that third-trimester abortions raise pressing moral concerns, although these concerns are complicated when such abortions are sought due to newly discovered fatal anomalies or threats to the health of the prospective mother. But pro-life advocacy is not focused on the unique ethical issues concerning later abortions, which account for less than 1 percent of all abortions; their goal is prohibiting nearly all abortions, the overwhelming majority of which affect fetuses without interests.

* * *

So, is abortion murder? Does it violate human rights? Not unless other widely-accepted medical procedures that end human life are also wrong. But they aren’t, and neither is abortion. Ethics education—of many types, at many levels, for many different audiences—helps people better understand why this is so.

Enabling more people to more productively engage the many ethical arguments about abortion won’t, by itself, solve any social or political problems: no single strategy would. But ethics education is an essential part of any successful comprehensive strategy to ensure abortion rights and access, and so pro-choice advocates should engage in it. More generally, our political culture needs genuinely fair and balanced, honest and respectful engagement of arguments and truth-seeking: more people practicing this with the complex topic of abortion would help set a better intellectual and moral tone that would enable us all to better engage the many other polarizing issues that confront our society.

If the legal right to abortion is lost, however, pro-choice advocates will be forced to engage with the study of ethics in trying to rebuild their case for abortion rights. So they might as well start that now, while they still have the law on their side. That’s not just smart strategy: ethics demands it.

Rand Paul calls for these two GOP senators to be ousted for lying to Republican voters

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Saturday called for the ouster of two GOP senators during a speech at the Save America Summit in Florida.

“This is our problem,” Paul told the group, which sponsored the rally the preceded the January 6th insurrection.

“Seven Republicans voted to keep Obamacare. You remember John McCain doing it,” he said with a wave of his thumb.

In reality, the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed when three GOP senators voted with Democrats.

“But here’s the thing: this is our problem. We know the Democrats want to have socialized medicine and nationalized health care. But Republicans say they’re for it, we got to keep them honest. And you got to send home the ones that lie to you,” he urged.

McCain passed away in 2018, but the other two GOP senators who joined with him are still in the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was re-elected in 2020 and will not face voters again until 2026.

But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is up for re-election in 2022 and is facing a primary challenge.

Senator Rand Paul comments on Former Senator John McCain's thumbs down vote on Obamacare in speech at Save America Summit in Miami, FL on April 10, 2021 pic.twitter.com/3mpn04S5E1

— Kyle Mazza (@KyleMazzaWUNF) April 10, 2021