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Church membership is in a freefall, and the Christian right has only themselves to blame

The trend of Americans exiting the pews, never to return, has been steady for some years now and shows no signs of slowing down. According to a new Gallup poll released this week, only 47% of Americans polled in 2020 belong to a house of worship, which is the first time that number has fallen below half of the country since they started polling Americans on this question. 

But what’s really interesting is that the collapse in church membership has happened mostly over the past two decades. Since Gallup started recording these numbers decades ago, church membership rates were relatively steady, with only the smallest decline over the decades. In 1937, 73% of Americans belong to a church. In 1975, it was 71%. In 1999, it was 70%. But since then, the church membership rate has fallen by a whopping 23 percentage points.

It is not, however, because of some great atheist revival across the land, with Americans suddenly burying themselves in the philosophical discourse about the unlikeliness of the existence of a higher power. The percentage of Americans who identify as atheist (4%) or agnostic (5%) has risen slightly, but not even close to enough to account for the number of people who claim no religious affiliation. A 2017 Gallup poll finds that 87% of Americans say they believe in God. So clearly, what we’re seeing is a dramatic increase in the kinds of folks who would say something akin to, “I’m spiritual, but not big on organized religion.”

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Blame the religious right. Until recently, the U.S. was largely unaffected by the increasing secularization of many European countries, but that started to change dramatically at the turn of the 21st century. And it’s no mystery why. The drop in religious affiliation starts right around the time George W. Bush was elected president, publicly and dramatically associating himself with the white evangelical movement. The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people’s sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility.

Not only were these religious figures and the institutions they led hyper-political, the outward mission seemed to be almost exclusively in service of oppressing others. The religious right isn’t nearly as interested in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as much as using religion as an all-purpose excuse to abuse women and LGBTQ people. In an age of growing wealth inequalities, with more and more Americans living hand-to-mouth, many visible religious authorities were using their power to support politicians and laws to take health care access from women and fight against marriage between same-sex couples. And then Donald Trump happened. 

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let’s face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn’t care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup’s numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%. 

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To be clear, the drop-off in religious affiliation is, researchers have shown, likely less about people actively quitting churches, and more about churches being unable to recruit younger followers to replace the ones who die. As Pew Research Center tweeted in 2019, “Today, there is a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation.” 

All of which makes sense. It’s rare that people abandon an ideology or faith that they’e had for a long time. Once an adult actively chooses to belong to a church, it’s hard to admit that you were wrong and now want to abandon the whole project. But young adults, even those who went to church with their parents, do have to make an active choice to join a church as adults. And many are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved. 

In 2017, Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” spoke with Salon about how the decline in religion is concentrated largely among young people. There’s “a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans,” he explained, noting that young people were particularly critical of anti-science and homophobic rhetoric from religious leaders. 

“[C]onservative white Christians have lost this argument with a broader liberal culture,” he explained, including “their own kids and grandchildren.”

It’s a story with a moral so blunt that it could very well be a biblical fable: Christian leaders, driven by their hunger for power and cultural dominance, become so grasping and hypocritical that it backfires and they lose their cultural relevance. Not that there’s any cause to pity them, since they did this to themselves. The growing skepticism of organized religion in the U.S. is a trend to celebrate. While more needs to be done to replace the sense of community that churches can often give people, it’s undeniable that this decline is tied up with objectively good trends: increasing liberalism, hostility to bigotry, and support for science in the U.S. Americans are becoming better people, however slowly, and the decline in organized religious affiliation appears to be a big part of that. 

Gaetz probed on alleged payments for sex and taking ecstasy, said to share pics on House floor

Emerging reports are shining greater light onto the alleged sexual misconduct of Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump loyalist, following an explosive initial report from the New York Times on Tuesday. That first story revealed that the Department of Justice was investigating Gaetz over an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has denied those allegations and instead claimed that he and his family were victims of an elaborate extortion plot. 

A report from CNN, published on Thursday night, quoted unnamed sources claiming that Gaetz had shared photos and videos of naked women, with whom he had purportedly had sex, with colleagues on the House floor.

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.

Another source told CNN that it was “a point of pride” for Gaetz to show the photos to fellow members of Congress. The report also noted that the congressman is further being investigated over “whether his involvement with other young women broke federal sex trafficking and prostitution laws.”

The bad news for Gaetz — until recently viewed as a rising Republican star, closely tied to former President Trump — didn’t stop there on Thursday. Later in the evening, The New York Times released a report suggesting that Gaetz may have paid women for sex using the mobile payment platforms, CashApp and ApplePay: 

A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times. Investigators believe Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Fla., who was indicted last year on a federal sex trafficking charge and other crimes, initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel, and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters. Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.

Receipts reviewed by The Times reportedly showed that both Greenberg and Gaetz had sent payments to at least one woman during the period of these alleged encounters in 2019 and 2020, and that Greenberg had sent a payment to a second woman. “The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men, according to two people familiar with the conversations,” The Times further reported. According to one source, Gaetz took ecstasy before one such sexual encounter. 

In a peculiar statement that repeated Gaetz’s full name four times, the congressman’s office denied all the allegations reported so far. “Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex,” a statement given to the Times read. “Matt Gaetz refutes all the disgusting allegations completely. Matt Gaetz has never ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life.”

GOP voting restriction push grows: 361 bills in 47 states; at least 70 in Texas and Arizona

The tide of Republican-sponsored bills aimed at restricting voting access continues to swell, with at least 361 proposed laws in 47 states. That’s a 43% increase in just the last month, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

The Brennan Center previously found 253 such bills in its February roundup, but the number continues to grow as Republican lawmakers seek to crack down on ballot access in response to months of blatantly false claims about election fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies.

Some of the measures have already been approved, with five restrictive bills signed into law, including a sweeping set of restrictions in Georgia that were likened to Jim Crow-era voter suppression by President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats, who argue the new law will disproportionately impact voters of color. Other restrictive bills have been signed into law in Iowa, Arkansas and Utah.

Another 29 bills have already passed at least one state chamber while 26 others have advanced to committees, according to the Brennan Center report. Most of the bills aim to restrict mail-in voting and about a quarter aim to toughen voter ID requirements. Some bills also seek to make it more difficult to register to vote, expand voter purges of “inactive” voters and restrict voting times. The new Georgia law and other proposed bills also strip power from local and state election officials, giving Republican-led legislatures that sought to overturn Trump’s loss last year more power over elections.

Texas, where changing demographics increasingly threaten to upend decades of Republican rule, has rolled out 49 restrictive bills, the most in the country. Georgia, where the legislative session ended on Thursday, was a distant second with 25 bills, and Arizona — where voters last year supported Democrats both in the presidential election and a U.S. Senate race, for the first time since the mid-’90s — comes in third with 23 restrictive bills.

The GOP-led Texas Senate on Thursday approved a sweeping bill that cracks down on absentee and early voting, with many provisions seemingly aimed at undercutting new rules implemented by progressive Harris County executive Lina Hidalgo and fellow Democrats to expand ballot access. The bill restricts early voting hours after Harris County offered 24-hour extended early voting hours in 2020, bans drive-through voting sites that were used by the county, and bans local election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to all eligible voters, which the country tried to do last year before being blocked by a court.

The bill also bans election officials from encouraging or educating voters about early and absentee voting options and requires anyone who needs to vote by mail due to a disability to provide a government document or doctor’s note proving they are disabled. It also bars the use of drop boxes and prohibits anyone from casting ballots on behalf of someone else, including spouses. The bill would also impose financial penalties on election officials who fail to purge inactive voters and eliminates certain restrictions on partisan poll watchers.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has touted “election security” as a “top priority,” claiming that the legislation will “strengthen the public’s faith in our electoral process and ensure that every Texan knows that when they cast their ballot, their vote is secure.” 

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “racist, terrifying attempt to plunge Texas back into Jim Crow.”

“This is not who we are. This is not what our state stands for,” he said in a statement. “This will do immeasurable harm to Texas communities. Yet Republicans, in their shortsighted, self-serving political games, voted last night to gut the foundations of our democracy: Texans’ constitutional right to vote.”

Seven restrictive bills have already advanced in Arizona, including four that would ban election officials from sending absentee ballots to voters who did not request them, make it easier to purge voters from apermanent early voting list, impose stricter voter ID requirements for absentee ballots, and reduce the amount of time that voters have to fix ballot issues like missing signatures. Two other bills would ban automatic voter registration and Election Day registration — which is not even available in the state but appears aimed at challenging provisions in pending federal voting rights legislation.

Florida lawmakers have advanced a bill that would outlaw ballot drop boxes, ban anyone except immediate family members from submitting ballots on behalf of someone else, and reduce the amount of time a person can remain on the state’s absentee voter list.

New Hampshire lawmakers have advanced 10 restrictive bills, including legislation that would eliminate Election Day voter registration, ban the use of a college ID to vote, ban students from using their college address for voting purposes, make it more difficult to register to vote, and require more identification information for absentee voters.

Michigan lawmakers last week rolled out eight restrictive bills in a single day, aiming to require photo ID for both in-person and mail voting, barring online mail ballot applications, prohibit election officials from sending out mail ballot applications to voters who have not requested them, restrict the use of ballot drop boxes, and cut protections against voter intimidation by expanding the use of poll watchers.

Some states may follow in the steps of Georgia, which rolled numerous provisions affecting virtually every part of the state’s election system into a single omnibus bill. Georgia’s law incorporated parts of 16 other bills, including a voter ID requirement for absentee ballots, a ban on unsolicited absentee ballot applications, and a provision that makes it a crime to provide food or water to voters in long lines at polling sites. The bill also strips the secretary of state of some power — after current Secretary Brad Raffensperger pushed back on Trump’s election lies — and allows the legislature to select its own head of the state election board. It also empowers state officials to take over local election offices, a move that appears aimed at heavily Democratic and diverse Atlanta-area counties that tipped the state’s presidential and Senate races to Democrats last year.

Iowa also passed an omnibus bill that combined two other restrictive bills. The new law makes it easier to purge voters who missed a single federal election and imposes criminal penalties for county auditors who fail to purge voters. The law also reduces the amount of time voters have to apply for absentee ballots, restricts the use of drop boxes and imposes limits on who can submit ballots on someone else’s behalf. The law also cuts the state’s early voting period to nine days and even requires polls to close an hour earlier on Election Day.

Arkansas approved two laws imposing tougher voter ID requirements and Utah approved a new law to require clerks to use death certificate data to purge dead voters, which “could make faulty purges more likely,” according to the Brennan Center.

Republicans have denied allegations of voter suppression, arguing that they are merely responding to voter concerns about election integrity. But those concerns grew out of a months-long campaign by Trump and Republican state legislators themselves to stoke doubts in the security of mail voting, even though mail voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. Dozens of courts, including judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans, rejected election lawsuits from the GOP either because they failed to file challenges until they lost elections or because they lacked any evidence. Former Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged that the Justice Department investigated and found no evidence of any widespread fraud. Georgia Republicans and even law enforcement agencies launched multiple audits, recounts and investigations into the election and found no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities.

In some cases, Republicans have acknowledged that voting restrictions will help them gain a partisan advantage. Michael Carvin, an attorney for the Arizona GOP, told the Supreme Court last month that removing restrictions would put the party at a competitive disadvantage. Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh defended the party’s new proposed restrictions by arguing that “everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

“Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well,” he told CNN.

But Georgia could serve as a cautionary tale for other states aiming to restrict ballot access. At least three lawsuits by voting and civil rights groups have been filed in the past week, seeking to strike down sections of the law and arguing that they amount to racist voter suppression. The state is also facing a corporate backlash from Atlanta-based companies like Delta and Coca-Cola as well as a coalition of dozens of Black executives across the country. President Joe Biden on Wednesday even urged Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to the bill, which he described as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

On the flip side, at least 843 bills that would expand voter access have been introduced across 47 states, according to the Brennan analysis. Nine have already been signed into law, including a Massachusetts bill to extend early voting, a Montana bill to improve access for disabled voters, a New Jersey bill to create early voting, a New York bill to expand automatic voter registration, and multiple bills in Virginia that expands access for disabled voters, early voting, and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

At least 112 other bills that would expand ballot access have advanced in 31 states. More than a third of the 843 bills aim to address absentee voting and more than a fifth are aimed at easing voter registration. Other bills aim to expand early voting and restore voting rights to people with past criminal convictions.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Wednesday touted the state’s version of the Voting Rights Act, which would ban racial voter discrimination and includes protections against suppression and intimidation.

“At a time when voting rights are under attack across our country, Virginia is expanding access to the ballot box, not restricting it,” he said in a statement. “With the Voting Rights Act of Virginia, our Commonwealth is creating a model for how states can provide comprehensive voter protections that strengthen democracy and the integrity of our elections.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene pushes to “Fire Fauci,” ban “vaccine passports”; visits Trump

Controversial QAnon–curious Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., proposed two new bills on Thursday, one seeking to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci by eliminating his salary and another endeavoring to ban “vaccine passports” in the United States by mandating that businesses not turn away unvaccinated customers.

The first bill proposed by Greene, entitled the “Fire Fauci Act,” would eliminate Dr. Fauci’s salary “until a new NIAID Administrator is confirmed by the Senate,” Forbes reported. 

“We can defund anything we want in the government … and right now with Dr. Fauci with his everchanging flip-flopping advice, needs to be defunded,” Greene stated on Thursday morning during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “WarRoom Pandemic” podcast, reviewed by Salon. This legislation is purely symbolic, as Politico congressional reporter Andrew Desiderio pointed out, since the NIAID director’s appointment is not “subject to Senate confirmation.” 

Reacting to Greene’s proposed bill that would “reduce Dr. Fauci’s salary to $0” on Twitter, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., wrote, “Below is an example of why members of Congress need good staff. Helps prevent us from introducing stupid, nonsensical bills like the one below from @RepMTG.” 

On the subject of vaccine passports, Greene proposed a bill titled, “We Will Not Comply Act,” that would effectively ban such documents by “prohibiting businesses engaged in interstate commerce from using them to allow patrons to access their services,” according to The Hill. “It stands up for everyone’s rights and stops the force of vaccine passports, but it very importantly gives people the right to sue if they are discriminated against, and that is a very, very big deal,” Greene argued on Bannon’s “WarRoom Pandemic” podcast. The congresswoman then said that passengers who refuse to wear masks on airplanes are being “discriminated” against. 

After announcing the two new bills, Greene posted another one of her CrossFit workouts to Twitter. “This is my Covid protection. #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain. It’s time to #FireFauci,” she tweeted midday on Thursday. The video posted to Twitter showed the congresswoman doing kipping pull-ups, the same type of pull-ups Newsmax host Greg Kelly performed on scaffolding a few weeks back in an attempt to impress Greene. 

On Tuesday, Greene traveled to Florida and met with former President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “It’s great to be with Marjorie,” Trump declared in a video subsequently posted on Twitter. “She’s really a very special person, she’s out there fighting hard, and the people of Georgia love her,” he added. 

“Thank you very much, Mr. President, and the people love you!” Greene responded. 

In the Sonoran Desert, GIS helps to map migrant deaths

Last year geographer Sam Chambers published an unusual map of the Sonoran Desert. He wasn’t interested in marking roads, mountains, and cities. Instead, the University of Arizona researcher wanted to show the distance a young male can walk in various regions of the desert before the high temperature and physical exertion put him at risk of dying from heat exposure or hyperthermia.

On the resulting map, red and purple correspond with cooler, mountainous terrain. Yellow and white, which dominate the image, indicate a remote, hot valley. It’s here where migrants seeking to cross between Mexico and the United States are at greatest risk of dying from the desert’s relentless sun.

Chambers’ map relies on geographical information system (GIS) modeling, a digital technology that allows geographers to perform spatial, data-driven analysis of landscapes. Chambers’ chosen topic represents a burgeoning effort to use GIS to understand the risk undocumented migrants face while crossing international borders, according to Jonathan Cinnamon, a geographer at Ryerson University in Toronto. According to Chambers’ analysis, migrants began crossing through hotter, more rugged parts of the desert after the U.S. government increased the number of Border Patrol agents and installed new surveillance technologies, including underground motion sensors and radar-equipped watchtowers.

The Sonoran covers roughly 100,000 square miles in Arizona, California, and Mexico, and includes major cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, as well as vast swathes of empty public and private lands. The effort to funnel migrants into this desert began in 1994 under the Clinton administration. That’s when the wave of increased migration that had started in the 1980s prompted the U.S. government to embrace the policy of “prevention through deterrence.” The idea was that would-be migrants from Mexico and Central America would be deterred from illegally crossing the U.S. border if their routes were too treacherous. With this goal in mind, Border Patrol erected new infrastructure and stepped up enforcement in border cities like Tijuana and El Paso, leaving the harsh unpopulated borderlands as the only option.

In an email to Undark, John Mennell, a public affairs specialist with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — the agency that oversees Border Patrol — in Arizona, said that people crossing the border illegally are at risk from the predations of smugglers and criminal organizations, who, he says, encourage migrants to ride on train tops or to shelter in packed houses with limited food and water. Mennell says the agency has installed rescue beacons in the desert, which migrants can use to call for help. According to CBP, Border Patrol rescued roughly 5,000 migrants on the Southwest border from October 2019 through September 2020.

Yet according to data compiled by the nonprofit group Humane Borders, the prevention through deterrence approach has failed to stop migrants from attempting the border crossing. “There continues to be a shift in migration into more remote and difficult areas,” said Geoff Boyce, a geographer at Earlham College in Indiana, and one of Chambers’ collaborators. Migrants have a much higher chance of dying in the desert today than they did 15 years ago, he said, and the numbers continue to rise, from 220 deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in 2016 to 318 deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in 2020. Last year, 227 migrants died in the Pima County Medical Examiner’s jurisdiction, in southern Arizona, although activists say that the number is likely much higher because of the way bodies disappear in the desert.

Chambers and Boyce source mortality data from the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. They have gotten information on migrant activity from No More Deaths, one of many humanitarian groups in the Tucson area that maintains desert water and supply stations for migrants. No More Deaths, which supports the decriminalization of undocumented migration, has set up supplies in the mountains and other hard-to-reach areas. Humane Borders also maintains stations in areas accessible by car. These organizations maintain meticulous records — the raw data that launched Chambers’ and Boyce’s first desert mapping collaboration.

* * *

On a cool November morning, Rebecca Fowler, administrative manager with Humane Borders, climbed into a truck armed with a list of 53 water stations. She was joined by two volunteers who chatted on the street next to a truck bed bearing yards of hoses and 55-gallon blue barrels that the organization purchases at a discount from soda companies.

Fowler was leading the Friday morning water run to seven stations off State Route 286, which runs south from Tucson to an isolated border town called Sasabe. Each week, Fowler and her volunteers check to be sure that the water is potable and plentiful. They change out dirty barrels and make notes of any vandalism. (In the past, some of the group’s barrels have been found with bullet holes or with the spigots ripped off.)

Among other data points, Fowler and her team gather data on water usage, footprints, and clothes found near their sites. Using the county’s medical examiner data, they have also created an interactive map of migrant deaths. A search of their website reveals a spread of red dots on the Southwestern United States, so many between Phoenix and Tucson that the map turns black. The organization has charted more than 3,000 deaths in the past two decades.

In her years in the desert, Fowler has noticed the same kind of changes pointed to in Boyce’s and Chambers’ research. “Migrants have been increasingly funneled into more desolate, unforgiving areas,” she said.

The humanitarian group Humane Borders maintains dozens of water stations in the Sonoran desert and tracks water usage, footprints, and clothing found near their sites. Visual: Emily Cataneo for Undark.

GIS modeling, which is broadly defined as any technique that allows cartographers to spatially analyze data and landscapes, has evolved alongside computers. The U.S. military was an early developer and adopter of this technology, using it to understand terrain and plan operations. In those early days, few activists or academics possessed the skills or the access needed to use GIS, said Cinnamon. But in the last decade, more universities have embraced GIS as part of their curricula and the technology has become more readily available.

Now, the kind of GIS modeling employed by Chambers, who uses ArcGIS and QGIS software, is commonplace in archaeology and landscape design. It allows modelers to understand how factors like terrain, weather, and manmade features influence the way people move through a given physical environment.

An architect might employ GIS technology to decide where to put sidewalks on a college campus, for example. Chambers used these techniques to study elk migration during his doctoral studies at the University of Arizona. But after Boyce connected him to No More Deaths, he started using his skills to study human migration.

No More Deaths tracks data at their water stations, too — including acts of vandalism, which they asked Boyce and Chambers to assist in analyzing via GIS. That report, released in 2018, spatially examines the time of year and location of the vandalism and uses its results to postulate that Border Patrol agents are primarily responsible, while acknowledging that rogue actors, such as hunters and members of militia groups, may contribute as well. (CBP did not respond to Undark’s questions on water station vandalism.)

When Boyce and Chambers finished analyzing the information, they asked themselves: What else could this data reveal? Previous attempts to understand the desert’s hostility had relied on the prevalence of human remains or statistics on capture by Border Patrol agents, but both of those are imperfect measures.

“It’s very hard to get any type of reliable, robust information about undocumented migration, particularly in remote desert areas,” said Boyce. “The people who are involved, their behavior is not being methodically recorded by any state actor.”

* * *

Most of the water stations on Fowler’s route were set back from the highway, off bumpy roads where mesquite scraped the truck. By 11 a.m., heavy-bellied clouds had rolled in and the temperature was in the 80s and rising. The fingers of saguaro cacti pointed at the sky and at the Quinlan Mountains jutting over the horizon; on the other side lay the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fowler says Border Patrol’s policies increasingly shunt migrants into treacherous lands within the reservation.

Humane Borders’ water barrels are marked by long poles capped by tattered blue flags, fluttering above the brush. Each barrel features a combination lock, preventing vandals from opening the barrel and pouring anything inside. Each is also marked by a Virgin of Guadalupe sticker, a symbol for migrants passing through the desert.

At each stop, Fowler and that day’s volunteers, Lauren Kilpatrick and Isaiah Ortiz, pulled off the lock and checked the water for particulates and pH levels. They picked up nearby trash and kept an eye out for footprints. At the third station, the water harbored visible black dots — an early sign of algae — so the group dumped all 55 gallons and set up a new barrel. At a later station, Fowler found a spigot that had been wrenched off and flung among the mesquite. Later still, the group came upon a barrel full of decaying, abandoned backpacks.

This was the third water run for Kilpatrick and Ortiz, a couple from Nevada now living in Arizona. Kilpatrick had read books and listened to podcasts about the borderlands, and Ortiz had wanted to get involved because the crisis felt personal to him — some of his family are immigrants, some of his friends and their relatives undocumented.

“I just think about their journey — some of them are from Central America and Mexico,” he said. “Their lives were in real danger coming through areas like this.”

Water barrels are marked by highly visible flags. Visual: Emily Cataneo for Undark.

Volunteers monitor the water for particulates and pH levels. Visual: Emily Cataneo for Undark.

Some barrels are vandalized, or used as trash receptacles. Visual: Emily Cataneo for Undark.

GIS modeling simplifies this complex landscape into a grid. To analyze the grid, Chambers uses a standard modeling software; so far, he has published five papers with Boyce about the desert. For the first they worked on together, the team took No More Deaths’ data on visits to water sites from 2012 to 2015 and looked at changes in water usage at each site. Once they’d determined which routes had fallen out of favor and which had risen in popularity, they looked at whether those newer routes were more treacherous, using a ruggedness index that Chambers developed with his colleagues by looking at the slope and jaggedness of terrain, along with vegetation cover and temperature. They concluded that official United States policy is increasingly shunting migrants into more rugged areas.

From CBP’s perspective, “Walking through remote inhospitable terrain is only one of many dangers illegal immigrants face during their dangerous journey into the United States,” said Mennell. And installing new technology and increased patrol on popular migration routes is actually a good thing, he says, because it contributes to the goal of securing the border against smugglers shepherding in so-called “illegal immigrants.”

In another paper, Chambers studied whether migrants took new routes to avoid increased surveillance, and whether those new routes put them at higher risk of heat exposure and hyperthermia. To map out which areas were toughest to cross — as measured by caloric expenditure — Chambers factored in such variables as slope, terrain, and average human weight and walking speed, borrowing both military and archaeological formulas to measure the energy expenditures of different routes. He used viewshed analysis, which tells a mapmaker which areas are visible from a certain point — say, from a surveillance tower — and, using his slope calculations and the formulae, compared the energy costs of walking within sight of the towers versus staying out of sight.

Chambers tested his findings against the maps of recovered human remains in the area before and after increased surveillance. To map risk of heat exposure, Chambers used formulae from sports medicine professionals, military physicians, and physiologists, and charted them onto the desert. And he found, just as with the ruggedness index, that people are taking longer, more intense routes to avoid the towers. Now they need more calories to survive the desert, and they’re at higher risk of dying from heat.

Caloric expenditure studies had been done before in other contexts, said Chambers. But until this map, no one had ever created a detailed spatial representation of locations where the landscape and high temperatures are deadliest for the human body.

* * *

GIS mapping is also being used to track migration into Europe. Lorenzo Pezzani, a lecturer in forensic architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, works with artists, scientists, NGOs, and politicians to map what they see as human rights violations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Compared with the group conducting research in Arizona, Pezzani and his team are at a distinct disadvantage. If a body drops into the sea, it’s unlikely to be recovered. There’s just not as much data to study, says Pezzani. So he and his team study discrete disasters, and then they extrapolate from there.

Pezzani disseminates his group’s work through a project called Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative research effort consisting of maps, visualizations, and reports, which has appeared in art museums. In 2018, information gathered through their visualizations was submitted to the European Court of Human Rights as evidence showing the Italian government’s role in migrant drowning deaths.

The goal is to make migrant deaths in the Mediterranean more visible and to challenge the governmental narrative that, like the deaths in the Sonoran, these deaths are unavoidable and faultless. Deaths from shipwrecks, for example, are generally blamed on the criminal networks of human traffickers, said Pezzani. He wants to show that the conditions that draw migrants into dangerous waters are the result of “specific political decisions that have been taken by southern European states and by the European Union.”

Pezzani, Chambers, and Boyce all intend for their work to foster discussion about government policy on immigration and borderlands. Boyce, for one, wants the U.S. government to rethink its policy of “prevention through deterrence” and to demilitarize the border. He believes the current policy is doomed to fail and is inhumane because it does not tackle the underlying issues that cause people to try to migrate in the first place. Ryan Burns, a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, said he wants to see more research like this. “We need more scientists who are saying, ‘We can produce knowledge that is sound, that is actionable, that has a very well-established rigor to it, but is also politically motivated,'” Burns said.

Cinnamon said that GIS, by its nature, tends to involve approaching a project with a viewpoint already in mind. “If the U.S. government decided to do the same study, they might approach it from a very different perspective,” he said. As long as the authors are overt about their viewpoints, Cinnamon sees no issue.

Burns, however, did sound one cautionary note. By drawing attention to illegal crossings, he said, researchers “could be endangering people who are taking these paths.” In other words, making a crisis more visible can be politically powerful, but it can also have unintended consequences.

* * *

Before their last water station visit, the group from Humane Borders drove into Sasabe. A helicopter chopped overhead, probably surveilling for migrants, Fowler said. Border Patrol vehicles roamed the streets, as they do throughout this part of the country.

Once, Fowler said, a 12-foot wall spread for miles across the mountains here. In recent months, it’s been replaced by the U.S. government’s latest effort to stop migrants from venturing into the desert: a 30-footer, made of steel slats, undulating through the town and across the mountains in either direction. It’s yet another factor to consider when mapping the Sonoran and envisioning how its natural and manmade obstacles will shape its migration routes.

“There’s so much speculation” about what will happen to migrants because of this wall, said Fowler. She suspects they will cross through the Tohono O’odham Nation, where there’s no wall. But they won’t have access to water dropped by Humane Borders. “What I worry about, obviously, is more people dying,” said Fowler. She’s certain the migrants “will continue to come.”

Chambers and Boyce plan to keep making maps. They recently published a paper showing the stress that internal border checkpoints place on migrants crossing the desert, the latest step in their quest to create empirical evidence for the increasing treacherousness of the border.

“It’s an important thing for people to know,” said Boyce.

* * *

Emily Cataneo is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has been published in Slate, NPR, the Boston Globe, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications. Find her on Twitter @EmilyCataneo.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

This year’s hot cross buns should be sourdough

The Perfect Loaf is a column from software engineer turned bread expert (and Food52’s Resident Bread Baker) Maurizio Leo. Maurizio is here to show us all things naturally leavened, enriched, yeast-risen, you name it — basically, every vehicle to slather on a lot of butter. Today, he tells us how to turn classic hot cross buns into tender, slightly tangy, chocolatey hot cross buns.

* * *

At the right time of year and in the right location, you can smell hot cross buns — leavened sweet buns spiked with spices and dried fruit — before even making it inside a bakery. Usually topped with a sweet glaze and a white cross of flour and water, hot cross buns pop up around Easter and are most commonly associated with their place of origin, the U.K. Admittedly, I have never seen them grace a pastry case out here in the southwestern U.S., but I recall seeing their bright white crosses in bakeries during my travels through Europe in years past.

It’s safe to say I’m happy to have rediscovered these beautiful buns lately, because when baked well, they are hard to resist. They have all the right components for a festive treat: sweetness from the sugar in the dough, dried fruit, and simple syrup glaze; spice from the cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice; and a tender texture and richness from the butter and egg. For me, a good hot cross bun has the spice of an oatmeal cookie, the texture of a soft dinner roll, and the sweetness of a cinnamon bun.

Typically, hot cross buns are leavened with commercial yeast, which gives them their tall rise and light interior. My approach to these — of course — is 100% naturally leavened, using a sourdough starter.

But first, let’s take a look at what else sourdough does when making hot cross buns.

What does sourdough bring to bot cross buns?

While I might be biased, I think sourdough always carries a welcome depth of flavor that isn’t generally found in recipes that rely on commercial yeast and require a shorter rise time. The lengthy fermentation time needed for sourdough starter (or a starter-based levain) to acidify and make dough rise produces organic acids: the longer the fermentation time, the greater the acidity — and complexity of flavor.

The acid by-products of lengthy natural fermentation indeed make for a more delicious bun, contributing to the dough’s tender interior and helping awaken the palate to other flavors in the treat — I like to think of it like adding vinegar to a salad or a splash of lemon juice to steamed vegetables. For a bonus, the acids also lend nutritional benefits, namely by helping to break down the dough’s gluten, which makes it more digestible, improves glycemic response, and helps unlock nutrients in the grain for better absorption by our bodies.

Challenges with sourdough in hot cross buns

Converting a yeasted product to be 100% naturally leavened can bring challenges. In this case, the dough has a relatively high sugar percentage, which can inhibit fermentation activity. Sugar, being hygroscopic, robs yeast cells of the water necessary for fermentation. Having a little sugar in a dough can help spur fermentation as a kind of “fuel” (you may know this if you’ve added a pinch of sugar to a bowl of warm water or milk and commercial yeast), but as the sugar percentage in a dough increases, the fermentation activity decreases. If you’ve ever baked sourdough cinnamon rolls or another heavily enriched dough, you’ll know just how sluggish it can be — sometimes requiring several hours more rise time than a leaner dough (one with no butter, sugar, or eggs).

Why doesn’t commercial yeast have this problem? Compared to natural leavening, typical instant yeast doesn’t suffer from this because it’s created to be resilient even in the face of high sugar concentrations. This type of leavener is what you’ll typically found in pastry applications and other enriched doughs. But this doesn’t mean we can’t use sourdough for sweet baked goods; we just need a few adjustments.

* * *

How to make sourdough hot cross buns

The first step to making hot cross buns is to swap out the commercial yeast with a sourdough starter; but to further dial things in, we can make a dedicated levain specifically for these buns. Making a dedicated levain helps skew the ratio of bacteria to yeast in the desired direction. In this case, we’re looking for increased yeast activity (for a strong rise) and decreased bacterial activity (to reduce sourness — great in sourdough bread, not as desirable in hot cross buns).

Let’s take a look at the three things I focused on when developing my sourdough hot cross bun recipe: Ensure fermentation activity is vigorous by increasing preferment percentage, increasing fermentation time, and reducing excessive acidity. Let’s break it down.

Increasing preferment percentage

When baking with commercial yeast, you might only need around 1% yeast to total flour in the mix. But with natural leavening, which is not quite as potent, we need a large preferment—which in the case of sourdough is our sourdough starter or levain — to ensure vigorous fermentation from the start and to avoid excessively long fermentation times. Typically, with a sourdough bread recipe (without any sugar in the dough), my preferment percentages are around 15 to 20%, but because this hot cross bun dough has a high percentage of sugar to total flour (8%), I increased the levain percentage to 37.14%.

By increasing the preferment percentage, we start with a higher bacteria and yeast population. This increase means from the beginning, there will be more “workers” helping to ferment the dough, speeding up the timeline to ensure the dough is fully fermented by the time it goes in the oven.

Increasing fermentation time

Despite the increased preferment for this recipe, it’s also necessary to increase the fermentation time. Since we’re using natural leavening instead of extremely potent commercial yeast (which isn’t affected by sugar in the dough), it takes longer. But this is a good thing! A longer-running fermentation time ensures the bacteria has enough time to do its work, creating the organic acids that add flavor and aid digestion.

Reducing excessive acidity

While some acidity is a flavor boost, excessive amounts — especially in a sweet application like these buns — can be overpowering and detract from the eating experience. To keep acidity low, I first settled on using all white flour (instead of whole-wheat flour) — in this case, higher-protein bread flour. Not only will this flour ensure a tall rise and fluffy texture, but white flour also has less bran and germ present from the wheat berry, which helps limit the sour flavor in these buns. The bran and germ act to buffer the dough’s total acidity during fermentation, allowing bacteria to function for much longer before their activity begins to wane (bacterial activity decreases as pH decreases): The longer bacteria functions, the more acidity in the final baked product.

To further reduce acidity in the dough, I add a small amount of sugar to the levain, limiting bacterial cell count while it’s ripening. Most bacteria are negatively affected by sugar, so adding a small amount to the levain skews the levain to be more yeast-dominant, reducing the final dough’s total acidity.

Now we’re on our way toward a hot cross bun with classic texture and a slight sourness that keeps luring you back, bite after bite. This brings me to one more adaptation:

Swap the dried fruit for chocolate — if you dare

Traditionally, hot cross buns are loaded with dried fruit, typically raisins, cranberries, apples, or even a mix. In my take, instead of the dried fruit, I use chocolate to bring additional sweetness — and a little bitterness — which pairs wonderfully with the added spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice) and orange and lemon zests. While chocolate might not be a traditional addition to these hot cross buns, after trying it, I wouldn’t have them any other way.

More Easter recipes:

These companies’ deforestation promises went up in flames

The year 2020 was supposed to be when the world solved the problem of falling forests. Instead, deforestation hit a 12-year high. Hundreds of big companies pledged to stop deforestation by 2020, but only four truly followed through, according to a new report out Monday from CDP, a nonprofit that tracks corporate commitments.

“We had 10 years to implement these commitments,” said Sareh Forouzesh, CDP’s associate director for forests. “We have not seen the progress we need.”

Back in 2010, the collection of CEOs who make up the Consumer Goods Forum signed a pledge to eliminate deforestation throughout their supply chains by 2020. As the years passed, the initiative gained momentum and hundreds more companies signed up. And in 2014, more businesses doubled down with the New York Declaration on Forests. Some of the corporate giants who promised they were going to make big changes — like Cargill, McDonald’s, and Walmart — could have made a real difference. These are companies with the market power to force change worldwide. But they didn’t even hit their own targets.

Forests provide habitat for endangered species like orangutans, and they also keep the human habitat — Earth — livable. When forests burn they transform from carbon filters, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, to plumes of greenhouse gases. The best evidence from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the world must be growing more trees than it cuts down by 2030 to have a chance of keeping the Earth below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of warming.

“We know what to do,” Forouzesh said. “There is no more excuse for inaction.” 

Four companies succeeded in backing up their words with deeds, according to the report: toilet-paper company Essity, the cosmetics giant L’Oréal, the chocolate titan Mars, and food packager Tetra Pak. These companies did a lot of work, but none of it was rocket science. They set up “no-deforestation” certification schemes, and told their suppliers that they needed to make sure they were not tearing down forests to produce cocoa and paper.

The majority of companies failed because they didn’t commit the time and money necessary to accomplish the monumental task. Corporations could have simply dropped any supplier that refused to comply, but they’ve mostly avoided that strategy. That’s because as long as some corporations aren’t committed to cutting deforestation, suppliers could just shift to less responsible buyers. “This isn’t about a few bad apples, we need to move entire sectors,” Forouzesh said. “If these companies engage with their suppliers, they can bring them along. If they exclude them, then their influence over that supplier ends.”

Most of the companies that have made pledges have at least started opening up their sourcing data, so activists and investors can measure what progress they’ve made, CDP found. 

The absolute best way to boil eggs, according to so many tests

In Absolute Best Tests, our writer Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She’s mashed dozens of potatoes, seared more Porterhouse steaks than she cares to recall, and tasted enough types of bacon to concern a cardiologist. Today, she tackles hard-boiled eggs.

* * *

Humans have been boiling eggs for a very long time.

By some accounts, it all began with egg roasting about a million years ago. This likely evolved into egg boiling around 5000 B.C., thanks to the invention of pottery. And more recently than that, boiled eggs are thought to have cropped up in Ancient Rome, where wealthy patricians served them as an appetizer course called gustatio. (Apicius, a collection of Roman recipes compiled sometime between the first and fifth century A.D., corroborates this with recipes for seasoning and topping boiled eggs.)

So it’s no surprise that when one Googles “best way to boil an egg” in 2019, one must contend with a cool 65 million results.

On the first page alone, certain guides would have you lower your eggs into simmering water, to cook for eight minutes. Others would like you to steam them in a basket several inches above the water line. Some sites make chimerical promises (“perfectly, every time”) while many get straight into the mechanics: the equipment, the slotted support paraphernalia, the ice bath of it all.

The official recommendation of the American Egg Board — known beyond its eponymous cause for a rabble-rousing role in the “Just Mayo” labeling scandal — is to bring the eggs and water to a boil, then remove the pot from heat and cover to let steep for 9 to 15 minutes, depending on egg size.

Food52’s own endorsements have ranged from the “bring to a boil then cut heat and cover” method to “10-minute boil + ice bath” to “c’mon, just use an Instant Pot.”

Which brings us to 5:45 a.m. a few Fridays ago, when I found myself standing in front of eight cartons of eggs and every slotted spoon in my home. In the freezer lay two XXXL bags of ice. On my countertop was an Instant Pot, one of those nefarious-looking sous vide wands, a whole bunch of stockpots, and, for reasons not germane to this blog post, a breakfast cookie.

I knew what I had to do: Spend an ungodly amount of time boiling egg after egg, according to the Internet’s most-touted methods, all in pursuit of the truth. What is the best way to boil an egg?

And while the results were far from fully conclusive, one thing’s for certain: My apartment hasn’t smelled the same, since.

* * *

The Setup

In a world where so very much is out of my control, I relished in exercising a few simple constancy factors for these experiments:

  • Size and brand: I purchased dozens and dozens of the same generic-brand, large eggs from the supermarket below my apartment.
  • Age: I used eggs that were all roughly the same “age” — as in, they were all purchased the same day (with a few weeks to go on their expiration date) and left to sit in the refrigerator for a week.
  • Temperature: For each boiling test, the egg-subject was at room temperature. (Dropping cold eggs into hot water can make them crack.)
  • No funny business: I skipped baking soda and vinegar in the water, based on Sarah Jampel’s prior tests.
  • Ice bath for peeling: Each egg was transferred immediately from its cook method to a large ice bath, where it sat a full five minutes before I peeled it underwater.

* * *

Method #1: Standard boil

Method:

Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Use a slotted wooden spoon to gently lower in an egg. Boil, uncovered, then immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Let cook in boiling water for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13 minutes.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

Eggs should get a hot start (whether boiling, steaming, or pressure cooking) because “slow-cooked egg whites bond more strongly with the membrane on the inside of an eggshell” — aka, they’re easier to peel — according to Serious Eats.

Ease of method:

Straightforward to execute. Very no-fuss, requiring no special equipment. At one point, I did need to fiddle with the flame to maintain a boil.

Ease of peel:

Encountered almost no peeling issues. “These tests’ll be a breeze,” I thought, giddily — hours later, fingertips raw and somehow simultaneously burning and icy, I looked back on this moment and laughed darkly.

Egg results:

In all eggs, the whites and yolks had a pleasant texture — no rubbery whites, here. The six-minute egg was an especially creamy specimen, if you’re into a soft-boil. In one (the eight-minuter), the yolk weirdly sank down to the bottom of the white, though this didn’t affect anything other than appearance. Overall, this was the most straightforward method with the best bang-for-your-effort-buck results.

* * *

Method #2: Standard simmer

Method:

Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Turn down heat until water is at a rolling simmer. Use a slotted wooden spoon to gently lower in an egg. Simmer, uncovered, then immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Let cook in simmering water for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13 minutes.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

You want to keep egg temperatures lower than what a full-on boil for the whole cook would produce (rubbery whites, chalky yolks) — Serious Eats swears by a hybrid version of the simmer and the standard boil, where eggs are lowered into boiling water and left for 30 seconds, before the temperature is turned down and eggs are cooked, covered, at a low simmer for 11 minutes.

Ease of method:

Easier said than done. Maintaining a “rolling simmer” — at least, in the uncovered way I was testing — is a hands-on endeavor. That said, no special equipment is needed.

Ease of peel:

Peeling was breezy, as with the standard boil set. The only exception was the six-minute egg, which was of course less cooked than its standard-boil counterpart, and required a very delicate hand to avoid jabbing a thumb into its tender white.

Egg results:

No immediately discernible difference in texture or flavor of eggs than with the standard boil set — except that, like the aforementioned six-minute guy, each egg was of course slightly less cooked than its standard-boil counterpart. The 13-minute egg had a strangely shaped air pocket dent at its base.

* * *

Method #3: Steam

Method:

Add a couple inches of water to a large pot. Place steamer insert inside, well above the water line. Cover. Bring water to a boil over high heat. Remove cover, add egg, cover, and steam. Immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Steam for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13 minutes.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

Steam supposedly cooks the eggs more gently, yielding a creamier texture. There’s less risk of cracking since cold eggs never hit hot water, and they’re apparently easier to peel because they avoid a big temperature jump.

Ease of method:

Straightforward to execute. Requires a steamer insert (or tight-fitting colander) and a fitted lid, though unlike the boil-and-steep method, does not require transferring a heavy, hot pot.

Ease of peel:

Overall, the most difficult test batches to peel. Had to wrestle with lots of shell bits stuck stubbornly to tender whites, ultimately resulting in torn whites during the final extrications.

Egg results:

Despite peel-stage drama, these were the Platonic ideal of a boiled egg: the whites silky as pudding, the yolks luxuriant and velvety as a Laura Ashley Christmas dress.

* * *

Method #4: Bring to a boil, turn off and steep

Method:

Add eggs and cold water to a pot — have at least an inch of water above the eggs. Bring water to a rolling boil, uncovered. Once a boil is achieved, cut the heat, cover the pot, and move off of the hot burner. Let egg steep in water for prescribed time, then immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Let steep for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13 minutes.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

“Starting with cold water lets you heat the egg more slowly, which keeps the whites from getting rubbery,” says the Exploratorium.

Ease of method:

Straightforward to execute. Only slightly fussier than the standard boil and standard simmer, as it requires a fitted lid, and movement of a hot and potentially heavy pot mid-process.

Ease of peel:

Peeling these test batches was an emotional roller coaster. Some were perfectly fine (my note on the eight-minute egg reads, insanely, “a true pleasure to peel — like slipping off your jacket in the park on the first sunny day of the season”), and others, like the 11-minute egg, were a nightmare.

Egg results:

The eggs themselves had a wonderfully consistent texture throughout the whites of each. The longer-steeped yolks got chalky-tasting after the 10-minute steep mark. The eight- and nine-minute eggs were oddly misshapen, which is a purely aesthetic criticism.

Photo by Ella Quittner 

* * * 

Method #5: Instant Pot

Method:

Pour one cup of room temperature water into an Instant Pot. Set the egg on a steamer insert. Seal and cook on low or high pressure for specific increment of time, at specific pressure level. Immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

  • Low pressure for four minutes, instant release
  • Low pressure for seven minutes, instant release
  • High pressure for eight minutes, instant release
  • Low pressure for 10 minutes, instant release
  • Low pressure for five minutes, five minutes natural release
  • High pressure for five minutes, five minutes natural release
  • Low pressure for 12 minutes, instant release
  • High pressure for two minutes, 12 minutes natural release

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

Because using an Instant Pot has the benefits of steaming, minus the guesswork.

Ease of method:

Second-least straightforward to execute, after sous vide. Owning an Instant Pot is a large barrier to entry. Plus, it takes a while for the Instant Pot to come to pressure, so not a great method if you’re pressed for time.

Ease of peel:

All of these eggs were slightly tricky to peel, but only a few (the high pressure for two minutes + 12 minute natural release, and the low pressure for five minutes + five minute natural release) were a real pain. The eggs for which I’d used the instant release function were more seamless to peel.

Egg results:

The texture of the eggs was surprisingly more like the standard-boil batch than like the steamed batch. I had no material shape or yolk-sinking issues. For a soft-boil, I’d advocate for low pressure for four minutes + instant release, and for a classic hard-boil, high pressure for five minutes + five minutes natural release (or, if you’re worried about peeling, perhaps test low pressure for eight minutes + instant release).

* * *

Method #6: Sous vide

Method:

Use a Joule Sous Vide to bring a vessel of water to 194°F. Cook egg. Immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Cook for 9, 12, 16, 20, and 24 minutes.

Note: There are many ways to sous vide eggs, including the 63°F poached/soft-boil, and the 75°F version. Due to a dwindling supply of eggs, I went with just the 194°F method, which was recommended by Joule’s app.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

Precise temperature control should theoretically enable the perfect textures for egg white and yolk.

Ease of method:

Straightforward to execute if you have an app that correlates to your sous vide tool. As with the Instant Pot, owning the tool itself is a large barrier to entry.

Ease of peel:

No notable issues.

Egg results:

In the eggs cooked for a shorter time, the yolks were noticeably richer in texture than most other batches, with the exception of the steamed eggs. That said, not sure it was worth the trouble of procuring and assembling equipment, and waiting for water to come to temperature.

* * *

Method #7: Bake

Method:

Dampen a kitchen towel and lay it on the center oven rack. Preheat oven to 325°F. Once preheated, nestle egg onto towel so it rests between the rack’s rods in a taut towel hammock. Bake. Immediately transfer to an ice bath to cool before peeling.

Variables:

Bake for 30 and 35 minutes.

Why science (OK, the internet) says it’s best:

The oven-baked method has been touted on this very site as, “How to Hard Cook Lots of Eggs at Once.” (It comes courtesy of Alton Brown.)

Ease of method:

Deceptively easy to set up, but long to execute, and painful in the end. (See below.)

Ease of peel:

I debated changing this header to “Debacle of Peel,” but I’m a stickler for consistency. I went through so, so many eggs to get to a batch that was actually cooked through enough on all sides to peel. Many earlier tests resulted in big wet spots randomly found in the whites, throughout the peeling process (even if the yolks had already gone chalky). My guess is that my wonky oven environment created too much variability in the temperature to cook the eggs through uniformly.

Egg results:

The eggs’ textures were inconsistent and unpleasant. This method is not worth the trouble.

* * *

TL;DR

  • The lowest-maintenance method: the standard boil, which produced delicious, consistent, aesthetically-pleasing eggs.
  • The method yielding the best texture: the steam (perfect peel-ability be damned!).
  • A method that’s totally solid and consistent, and great if the only thing in the world you don’t own is a timer or watch with second hands: the Instant Pot.
  • The worst method: the oven-bake. (But you knew that, right?)

And one more word of advice: Do not attempt this experiment at home unless you find the idea of eating only gribiche for weeks after to be wildly exciting.

* * *

Here’s what to do with all those hard-boiled eggs

Easter Bread

Nestle hard-boiled eggs into a pillowy loaf of bread for this Easter centerpiece. (Though technically you won’t want to eat the eggs — they’ll be rock-hard after baking.)

Nori Deviled Eggs

Change up your deviled egg routine by mixing soy sauce and sesame oil into mayonnaise and egg yolks in this recipe from Eric Kim, who notes the inspiration for the recipe comes from something his mom regularly made when he was growing up: “There’s really nothing like that nostalgic tangle of nutty sesame, salty soy, yolky egg, and savory seaweed,” says Kim. “At the risk of sounding la-di-da, this is, truly, my Proustian madeleine.”

Nancy Silverton’s Egg Salad with Bagna Cauda Toast

Nancy Silverton’s Genius egg salad features DIY garlic mayonnaise and salty bagna cauda-slathered toast. Now that’s a great way to turn hard-boiled eggs into a meal.

Virginia Willis’ Deviled Eggs

For a classic deviled egg, look no further than Virginia Willis’ Genius recipe: mayonnaise, mustard, cayenne, and chopped herbs for a bright finish.

Low-Key Niçoise Salad

You know the nicoise, you love the nicoise. This one calls for avocado, tuna, kalamata olives, dill, and lots of hard-boiled eggs, but let’s keep it real: use whatever you like in a nicoise (potatoes, lentils, tomato, radishes) — follow your heart, salad edition.

Japanese 7-Eleven Egg Salad Sandwich

Creamy-dreamy egg salad, pillowy white bread. When in possession of many hard-boiled eggs here’s honestly nothing better than a Japanese-style egg sandwich.

Momofuku’s Soy Sauce Eggs

Though technically this recipe calls for 6-minute jammy eggs, who says you can’t make them with hard-boiled eggs? No one! “What I like best is that these eggs can be used in a thousand different ways,” says Christina Tosi, who featured this recipe in her cookbook Milk Bar Life. “They are perfect on their own as a snack, or on an English muffin (eggs Benny setup), in pasta, or cut up and mixed into a salad.”

Pickled Deviled Eggs with Smoked Salmon

Not only are beet-pickled eggs the most beautiful snack to look at, when deviled with mustard, mayonnaise, and capers, then topped with a little piece of smoked salmon, they’re a springy brunch centerpiece on a plate.

This post contains products that are independently selected by Food52 editors, and Food52 may earn an affiliate commission.

Hollywood still can’t get autism right

Earlier this year, Australian singer/songwriter Sia released a movie about an autistic character. Titled “Music,” you may have heard of it because was almost universally panned. (You can read my own review here.) Critics, self included, felt that nearly everything about that cinematic catastrophe was wrong: It was boring. It was hackneyed. It was pretentious. Most egregious of all, though, its titular autistic character — played by a neurotypical actress, no less — was an over-the-top caricature, one who existed mainly as a prop to help a non-autistic character realize her potential.

While obviously these things are matters of opinion, there are few people within or outside of the autism community who will defend “Music.” Yet as we acknowledge World Autism Awareness Day, it is valid to ask ourselves: What does a good representation of autism in media look like? Does such a representation even exist?

“Coding” autism

When you talk to people who are neurodiverse, one problem they consistently identify is that even well-developed characters who seem to be on the spectrum are frequently “coded” — that is, they are given personality traits associated with autism but are never directly identified as being autistic.

“I have yet to seen a portrayal in the media that feels genuine,” Becca Hector, an autism and neurodiversity consultant and mentor in Colorado, told Salon via Facebook. After noting the prevalence of autistic stereotyping in media, and particularly the entertainment industry, she added that “the closest they ever got, in my opinion, is Temperance Bones from the TV show ‘Bones.'” Hector praised how the character “acted” autistic and the people around her responded with a mixture of laughter and exasperation, which struck her as realistic. At the same time, Bones was “absolutely coded.”

Jen Elcheson, a 39-year-old autistic paraeducator and published author living in western Canada, agreed with Hector about Bones in the Facebook conversation. “Honestly, I find autistic coded characters easier to relate to in entertainment than the ones they purposely make autistic,” she observed. “Because when they do it deliberately, it’s usually characters laden in all the stereotypes.”

Elcheson cited the 2016 movie “Carrie Pilby” as another example of a positive representation of autism in media.

“They described the main character as gifted and introverted, but any autistic could tell you she was one of us,” Elcheson explained. Yet the problem is that, again, the character was coded. “When characters are coded not only does the greater public miss out on seeing a different depiction of an autistic that isn’t a stereotype, but the autistic community once again experiences erasure,” she added. “Not intended, but we feel it.”

Morenike Giwa-Onaiwu, a visiting scholar at Rice University who is also on the autism spectrum, was more ambivalent.

“In some ways, having the character ‘coded’ but not outright called autistic is more inclusive with regard to neurodiversity, given that autism is but one neurotype,” Giwa-Onaiwu told Salon by email. “However, it also feels/seems almost like the failure to outright state that the person is autistic is almost appropriative. Like…you are obviously patterning your character after us, but you won’t ‘claim’ us…why? Is it based upon some silly notion that ‘labeling’ is harmful? It’s not harmful to be what you are and to call it what it is. Disability is not a dirty word and neither is autism.”

Giwa-Onaiwu, who is African American, added that this is analogous to “the same problematic mindset behind ‘I don’t see color.’ We WANT our neurology to be acknowledged and we WANT our color to be seen…just don’t look down upon them when you do see them — but please, see us. We’re here.”

In search of autistic characters that aren’t one-note

One pop culture representation of autism that has been praised, both because its main autistic character is played by someone on the spectrum and is openly identified as such, is the TV show “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay,” which returns for its second season on Freeform on April 8. (Read my review for season one here.)

“I think for some of the best that we’ve had recently was definitely Kayla Cromer [who stars as the autistic character Matilda] in ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay,” Haley Moss, an autism advocate and the first openly autistic female attorney in Florida history, told Salon. “What makes ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay’ so great is we have an autistic actress playing an autistic character. It’s very clear that her input is valued, that the character is very inoffensive. She’s quirky. She’s interesting. She’s also kind of coming of age and she’s not just dealing with the struggles of being autistic and the challenges and gifts that come along with that. I think that’s something really powerful to see, and that it is a representation.”

Moss also pointed to the Pixar short film “Loop,” which features a non-speaking autistic girl of color on a boat.

“I think it was like seven or eight minutes that they introduce her to a fellow camper,” Moss described. “She’s at camp and she’s like canoeing with this boy, Marcus, who has to learn how to interact with her. And they learned to kind of bond in this canoeing experience, even though they both communicate with each other very differently. So those are, I think are the best.”

As for negative representations of autism in media, Giwa-Onaiwu noted that in movies like “Music,” the autistic characters are either so underdeveloped that they become “a ‘prop,'” or they are classified as cisgender white males, such as Max from “Parenthood” and Sheldon from “the Big Bang Theory.” Although she felt that representations have “somewhat” improved since the controversial 1988 film “Rain Man,” “the characters are still rare, unrelatable, over-acted, and almost always white. Where are the autistic people who look like me, who look like Rene, who look like Hari S. or like Lydia X.Z.Brown?”

Moss elaborated on how the movie “Rain Man,” which was the box office champion in the year it was released and won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role (for Dustin Hoffman), is problematic.

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“People’s idea of autism still stems from ‘Rain Man,'” Moss explained. “I’ve had people say, ‘But you’re not like Rain Man. And it’s really frustrating that ‘Rain Man’ has left such a stamp on not only pop culture, but how the public perceives autism. It makes it really difficult to kind of move past that for a lot of folks since they still see ‘Rain Man’ as the gold standard. It’s ‘Oh, okay. You’re like Rain Man. No, I’m not!”

Sally J. Pla — an autistic children’s author who writes books with neurodivergent main characters for elementary/middleschool kids and co-founded anovelmind.com, which assists librarians and teachers in finding good literary works for children who are neurodivergent or otherwise psychologically atypical — also singled out the character of Matilda from “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay” as one of her favorite pop culture characterizations of autism.

“This girl is completely, boldly, cheerfully herself — the well-adjusted self-advocate I only wish I could have been — or had as a role model when I was 17 (and undiagnosed, and wholly confused),” Pla wrote to Salon. “It’s especially wonderful to watch ‘Matilda,’ because stereotypes and misconceptions especially abound regarding females on the spectrum.”

As for what those stereotypes are, Pla said, “We are not always robotic, or shy or socially clueless . . . We especially do not lack empathy! Also, we are chronically underdiagnosed.” 

The autistic sidekick

Pla also identified three examples of tropes that make her “cringe,” including “the long-suffering sibling” whose chances at achieving their personal goals are jeopardized because they must care for their autistic family member and the “misunderstood main character” whose autism exists mainly to be “a big problem and the main point of this story!” She identified the character of Sam from “Atypical” in season one as an example of this, although she admitted that the show had its strengths too.

Finally she criticized the character who exists as “the stereotypical comic-relief sidekick,” such as Abed from “Community” or Sheldon. “We’ve all seen the quirky geeky pal who fumbles every social interaction — who exists to cue the ableist humor,” Pla observed.

Natalie Oden, a 26-year-old actress and model in California who is on the spectrum, perhaps summed it up best.

“In my opinion, I think that representations of autism in media still has a long way to go,” Oden told Salon by email. “For example, characters who are autistic are played by actors who are not autistic. Plus, the writing of autistic characters that are based on stereotypes. While yes some autistic people are like that and not all the stereotypes are bad, not all of us act the same.”

Whether it’s the stereotypical super genius or the bug-eyed cartoon character from “Music,” critics on the spectrum agree that autistic people in media aren’t allowed to be just that — people.

“What I do like to see is more positive representations of autistic people as being abled to do something just like anyone,” Oden explained. “Roles like being a friend, doctor, parent, reporter, lawyer, cook, actor, just someone you see in your everyday lives.”

Will far-right evangelicals respond in an authoritarian way as Americans become more secular?

For decades, far-right white evangelical Christian fundamentalists have feared the U.S. would, like Western Europe, become increasingly secular — and now, according to Gallup, that has come to pass.

Gallup has been polling Americans on their religious affiliations for 82 years, beginning in 1939. The polling company has been asking, “Do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue or mosque?” And the answer went from 73% saying “yes” in the early 1940s to only 47% saying “yes” in the early 2020s. It’s a staggering and monumental decline.

Journalist Eric Levitz analyzes this polling in an article published by New York Magazine this week, arguing that it his significant implications for American politics.

Levitz argues, “In assigning culpability for this trend, one could assemble a long list of plausible co-conspirators. The ascendance of the evangelical right likely damaged Christianity’s brand with social liberals by associating the faith with theocratic politics, while pedophilic priests and their enablers surely drove no small number of American Catholics from the pews.”

Levitz goes on to note that in the U.S., Gallup polling shows that millennials are generally less religious than their parents and grandparents.

“Two-thirds of Americans born before 1946 belong to a religious institution, according to Gallup,” Levitz points out. “That drops to 58% among Baby Boomers, 50% among Generation X and 36% among millennials. The pollster’s limited data from Zoomers indicates that they are roughly as irreligious as their cooler, wiser immediate predecessors.”

In Western Europe, the far-right white evangelical movement led by Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, Dr. James Dobson, Tony Perkins and the late Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, Sr. didn’t catch on the way it did in the U.S. — where white evangelicals have been a major voting block within the Republican Party. Even European Christians who go to church are likely to favor a separation of church and state and be non-fundamentalist in their views. And the U.S., according to Levitz, is moving more in that direction — much to the Christian right’s dismay.

Levitz argues that as Americans become increasingly secular in their views, far-right evangelicals will respond in an authoritarian way — including voter suppression.

Levitz writes, “Whatever its impact on the GOP, the implications of creeping secularism are more dire for social conservatives. The Republican Party can ultimately retain political power by bringing its policy commitments into slightly closer alignment with public opinion. That is not an option for the Christian right’s true believers. As a result, the movement is becoming forthrightly anti-democratic. On the one hand, the moral minority hopes to impose its will on the nation by judicial fiat. On the other, it aims to disenfranchise the heathen majority.”

Texas GOP moves to “gerrymander” state courts after Democrats sweep key judicial elections

Texas Republicans are pushing legislation that advocates say will “gerrymander” the state’s appeals courts after Democrats swept judicial races in districts serving Dallas, Houston and Austin.

The Texas Senate Jurisprudence Committee on Thursday advanced SB 11, a bill introduced by Republican committee chair Joan Huffman to redraw the boundaries of the state’s court of appeals districts. The bill and its state House counterpart in their current form propose only minor tweaks to several districts — but voting advocates warn they are “shell” bills that will soon be loaded with much bigger changes based on proposals from a powerful group to “gerrymander” court districts just months after Democratic judges swept appellate races in five of the state’s 14 districts.

The bill is expected to be based on proposals by Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a deep-pocketed legal advocacy group that urged lawmakers to merge the state’s 14 districts into five to seven mega-districts, which advocates say are designed to dilute the power of urban areas and make it difficult for Democrats to win in the future.

“This is 100% partisan driven,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said in an interview with Salon. “The political party they don’t like is winning too many districts, so they just want to change them so that can no longer happen.” Gutierrez testified at Thursday’s hearing.

Texas is one of two states where Republicans are seeking to redistrict courts after the 2020 election, and GOP legislators in several other states have advanced legislation seeking to reform their judicial systems for partisan gain. Pennsylvania Republicans are also pushing an amendment that could “gerrymander” the state’s courts, Alicia Bannon, who heads the Fair Courts Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, said in an interview with Salon. Though the effort was originally born out of a ruling striking down a partisan Republican gerrymander, in recent months “the court’s also been targeted for its role in some of the decisions in connection with the 2020 election ensuring that people had a meaningful opportunity to vote,” she said.

State courts played an outsized role in the 2020 election as former President Donald Trump and his allies pushed dozens of baseless lawsuits alleging election fraud without any evidence. They could play an even greater role in the coming months as Republican state lawmakers push more than 360 bills to restrict voting in 47 states, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center, including more than two dozen in Texas. Republicans are also gearing up for a new round of legislative redistricting that could cement GOP minority rule for the next decade after the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts had no jurisdiction over partisan gerrymanders.

The Texas bill offers few details but is ultimately expected to include some version of reforms proposed by Texans for Lawsuit Reform, according to Gutierrez and news reports. The group released a lengthy report proposing a plan that would shrink the state’s 14 court districts to seven, along with three other plans to reduce that number to just five.

“We’re fairly sure it will be one of those proposals, or something closely modeled there, and generally what people expect is taking the current composition of the court and reducing it, probably almost in half, to create these mega-districts where you would have maybe one Democrat. But the majority of those court of appeals districts would then become completely controlled by Republicans,” Gutierrez said.

A spokesman for Huffman did not respond to questions from Salon.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee said it is monitoring the “judicial gerrymandering” bill. 

“NDRC strongly believes that the entire redistricting process should be free of map manipulation and that includes municipal and judicial processes as well,” Molly Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the group, said in a statement to Salon. “When it comes to judges — who are meant to be impartial arbiters — making sure they are not manipulated by a hyper partisan redistricting process is critical.”

Texans for Lawsuit Reform argue that the courts should be consolidated to address unequal workloads and to make the system more efficient. But David Slayton, administrative director of the Texas Office of Court Administration, told the legal news outlet Texas Lawyer that the idea to redraw appeals court boundaries did not come from the Texas judiciary, suggesting the push came from the group. George Christian, senior counsel for the lawsuit reform group Texas Civil Justice League, told the outlet he agrees that changing the district boundaries could make the court system more efficient, but said the current effort raises obvious questions about partisanship.

“There is a very legitimate question people will ask,” he said. “Why the sudden interest in the appellate courts, now that a lot of Democrats are winning those elections?”

Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which bills itself as a nonpartisan group of “lawyers who want the civil justice system in Texas to be efficient and fair,” argues that the state would save money with fewer courts and eliminate docket equalization, which results in the transfer of cases between court districts and is “generally unpopular with litigants, lawyers, and justices.”

“Our 14 appellate courts have unequal workloads, and in some parts of our state, a district court answers to several different appellate courts. Texas should consolidate its intermediate appellate courts to achieve more efficiency and administrative rationality,” the group’s website says.

Gutierrez told Salon that there is a legitimate need to address drastic differences in caseloads, but that the current effort is a political exercise.

“We’ll see what the actual bill looks like, but if you wanted to seriously address that problem, I think you would be more transparent about what’s in the bill and bring in more of the stakeholders who really know these courts and understand the caseloads and impacts,” he said. “But the people in the room who are involved in this are Texans for Lawsuit Reform. That seems to be it.”

Though Democrats have little say in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature, the bill could face strong pushback from rural areas of the state that will be heavily impacted. Yvonne Rodriguez, chief justice of the state’s 8th Court of Appeals in El Paso, told local news outlet El Paso Matters that she believes the details of the legislation are intentionally being kept under wraps so Republican sponsors can spring it at the “last possible moment” to avoid giving opponents “any time to really mount a defense against it.”

Rodriguez warned in an interview with Texas Lawyer that the Texans for Lawsuit Reform proposals would combine her court with larger urban districts and force attorneys and litigants to travel hundreds of miles to the nearest appellate court while resulting in higher legal bills and job losses.  

“That is the worst result we could reach,” state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat who represents El Paso, told El Paso Matters.

El Paso’s Democratic court could be merged with a heavily Republican area or combined with other Democratic areas to create Republican majorities in other districts.

State Sen. Cesar Blanco, who represents the city, told the outlet that such a measure would disenfranchise heavily Democratic voters.

“Redistricting is always very politically motivated. It’s about who gets what, it’s about keeping and managing power, and I think this consolidation is a move to do that,” he said.

“If you live in a rural part of the state, the odds of you ever again being able to elect the traditional candidate that you’re familiar with, who knows your community, go down practically to zero,” Gutierrez told Salon, adding that heavily minority parts of South Texas would be heavily impacted as well as whiter, more conservative parts of the state.

The latter aspect poses the biggest threat to the bill.

“They went out of their way to really innovate gerrymandering in Texas, which is hard to do but they figured out a way. But this is one that I feel harms so many different communities,” Gutierrez said, predicting that the impact on traditionally Republican areas of the state could doom the bill in committee.

“There are definitely a lot of groups who represent minority Texans or parts of the state along the border” who oppose the bill, he added, but “I think we’re going to find a lot of groups in red or rural parts of Texas that hate the bill just as much.”

The state’s Senate Jurisprudence Committee hearing also included SB 1529, which Gutierrez described as a backup bill “clearly intended” as a plan to offer a “different way to reconfigure the courts in Texas” if SB 11 fails.

It “basically creates what people are referring to as a business court,” he explained. “Right now, anything civil goes through the court of appeals system, but the business court would be a statewide court, like our Texas Supreme Court. Civil matters that would normally go to the court of appeals will go to that court. It’s Texas, so automatically these default to Republican judges for the foreseeable future. It definitely seems to be part of a plan to address what they see as the problem: Democrats winning a bunch of these traditional court of appeals races.”

The effort underscores Republicans’ focus on reshaping the judiciary in states, often in “retaliation against particular decisions coming out of the court,” Bannon (of the Brennan Center) told Salon. Legislators in at least 17 states proposed at least 42 bills last year to “diminish the role or independence of state courts,” according to a Brennan Center analysis.

Perhaps the most noteworthy is Pennsylvania’s effort to pass a constitutional amendment that would “open the door to gerrymandering the judicial system,” Bannon said. That effort has extended into this year and took on additional importance after Republicans waged a failed months-long effort to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat in that state.

Republicans, who tried and failed to impeach judges who had struck down their partisan gerrymander, earlier this year advanced a measure aimed at changing the way appellate judges are elected. Judges are currently elected statewide and a majority are from urban areas near Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The GOP proposal would replace the existing system with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-led legislature every 10 years — apparently in hopes of reshaping the state Supreme Court’s 5-2 Democratic majority, after it repeatedly ruled against them. The effort could mirror the state’s legislative gerrymandering, which has allowed Republicans to control the state House since 2011 and the state Senate since 1993, even though Democrats routinely win statewide races.

Republicans argue the amendment, which cannot be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, is intended to “include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts.” But Democrats say the new effort is an extension of the state GOP’s success at gerrymandering its way into power.

“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told The New York Times. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”

The bill already passed the House last year but needs to be passed by both chambers this year to make it onto the ballot. Republicans hoped to advance the measure in time for the amendment to appear on the ballot in May’s primary elections, but that effort has been delayed. Senate President Pro Tem Jake Corman, a Republican, vowed that the measure was not dead and the legislature would soon hold hearings on the issue and perhaps look at alternative options to changing judicial elections.

Meanwhile, more than 100 advocacy groups and labor unions have signed a letter to state lawmakers warning that the plan is “the largest attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians in the history of our Commonwealth” and “a massive threat to the independence of our judiciary.”

Republicans in Tennessee launched a different kind of effort in response to the court rulings surrounding the 2020 election, moving to remove a Nashville judge who ruled to expand absentee voting amid the coronavirus pandemic. The effort ultimately failed after widespread condemnation. “That was just another example of a bill that was very explicitly linked to decisions coming out of the 2020 election,” Bannon told Salon.

The Republican push to reshape state courts comes after a successful four-year campaign to reshape the federal judiciary. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., led the confirmation of more than 220 federal judges and three new Supreme Court justices after blocking many of former President Barack Obama’s nominees, including his 2016 Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland (who is now attorney general).

Unlike the federal judiciary, the efforts to remake state courts have received relatively little attention.

“State supreme courts are extremely powerful bodies that often fly under the radar,” Bannon said. “Ninety-five percent of all cases are filed in state court. State supreme courts are usually the final word in interpreting state laws and state constitutions, and they have a great deal of power in everything from voting rights to environmental issues, corporate law issues and criminal justice. They’re very powerful bodies and people often don’t pay a lot of attention.”

Though the Pennsylvania effort is clearly partisan, “in other instances, it’s harder to point to one particular opinion or decision coming out of a court,” she added. “Rather what you see is a broader effort to gain more political control over the judiciary.”

In Montana, newly-elected Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill earlier this year that gives him the power to appoint anyone he wants to fill judicial vacancies, rather than being required to choose from a list of nominees vetted by an independent commission.

“That’s another kind of instance where we’re seeing political actors basically trying to inject more politics into the selection process,” Bannon said.

Other recent efforts have seen mixed success. Despite assailing Democrats over calls to expand the federal judiciary, Republicans successfully packed the Georgia and Arizona Supreme Courts, giving GOP governors even more power in states that are increasingly trending toward Democrats. Both states “added seats to the court in a pretty overt effort for overtly partisan benefit,” Bannon said.

Kansas lawmakers responded to a court ruling requiring additional funding for public education by passing a law that threatened to defund the entire state judiciary before it was overturned.

North Carolina has also advanced numerous bills that would “politicize the court,” with varying degrees of success, pushing to change judicial selection methods and undermine Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s judicial appointment power, Bannon said. “The common denominator was basically trying to give the legislature more power over judicial selection and essentially seeking a partisan advantage in those courts.”

For the most part, however, efforts to politicize the courts have failed once voters caught on. Just one of the more than 40 bills to undermine the power or independence of state courts proposed last year ended up passing, according to the Brennan Center.

“One thing we’ve seen in a number of states where courts have been targeted this way is that when the public does pay attention to this issue, they don’t like what they’re seeing,” Bannon said. “People understand the importance of having an independent judiciary. They don’t want judges to be just another set of politicians and they don’t like power grabs with respect to the courts. … I think people on the whole understand the importance of an independent judiciary. But given the centrality that state courts play, I think it’s a real worry that this is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the kinds of attacks we’re going to see going forward.”

Republicans have a dream: The end of democracy and the return of Jim Crow

In Georgia and 46 other states across the country, the Republican Party is trying to keep Black and brown people and other members of the Democratic Party’s base from voting. The goal is to keep the Republican Party in power indefinitely through a pseudo-democratic system political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

In essence, today’s Republicans want to turn back history’s clock to the Jim Crow era.

The smokescreen for this assault on American democracy is that such anti-democracy efforts are intended to “protect” the “security” of votes against the threat of “voter fraud,” “manipulation” and “corruption” by unseen (and of course nonexistent) forces.

But the smokescreen is transparent.

On Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp admitted the truth about the Republican plot against democracy, telling WABE radio, “A lot of this bill is dealing with the mechanics of the election. It has nothing to do with potential fraud or not.”

Kemp’s statement echoes other public admissions by prominent Republicans and members of the white right: They that know they cannot win competitive elections in a real democracy because their policies and proposals are broadly unpopular with the American people. This is especially true given the country’s changing racial demographics, and the fact that the Republican Party’s core appeal is almost exclusively based on white identity politics, racism, and white supremacy. Donald Trump’s neofascist presidency only accelerated that dynamic.

Former labor secretary and political columnist Robert Reich recently wrote that while “Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible” for the Republican turn toward overt racism, “he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry, and the GOP has taken him up on it. This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.”

There has been much excellent writing on the legal, legislative and procedural details of the Republican Party’s war on Black and brown voters and American democracy.

We know now that the Jim Crow Republicans are attempting to pass at least 350 bills and initiatives that will make mail-in and absentee voting much more difficult, narrow the window of time to vote, remove polling places in predominantly Black, brown and poor communities, add onerous ID requirements and sabotage many voter mobilization efforts, especially those used by Black churches and other community organizations.

These anti-democracy laws also literally allow Republicans to rig the outcome of elections in their favor by expanding their control of local voting boards.

In total, these are de jure examples — written in the law — of how Republicans and the white right are trying to overturn America’s multiracial democracy with the goal of creating a new American apartheid state across the South and elsewhere.

But much less has been written about how these Jim Crow Republican attacks are also a de facto assault on the day-to-day lives, dignity, freedom, safety and humanity of Black and brown Americans. The long arc of the Black freedom struggle is one where the de jure realities of institutional racism and white supremacy cannot be properly separated from quotidian social inequality and injustice. These new attempts by Republicans and the white right to undermine America’s multiracial democracy are an open declaration that American democracy is to be first and foremost a White democracy. The Jim Crow Republicans’ plot against the rights of Black and brown people is also an attempt to make civic life and representative politics a “whites only” space. Because the Republicans and their allies are literally rewriting the rules of democracy in their favor they stand a good chance of succeeding, at least for now. 

White supremacy, on a fundamental and basic level, is a declaration that white people can act however they wish toward nonwhite people, up to and including maximal cruelty and violence, without consequences. Why? Because whiteness constructs white people as dominant over other groups by definition. This is the logic of Trumpism and other forms of racial authoritarianism that the post-civil rights era Republican Party has so enthusiastically embraced.

The Jim Crow Republicans have enshrined this principle into law: The Georgia anti-democracy bill makes it illegal to give people waiting in line to vote food or water. President Biden has described such laws as “un-American” and an “atrocity,” and other prominent voices have condemned it as well. But these critics are dancing around a more basic and fundamental truth about what is being communicated by the Jim Crow Republicans and their allies.

The real truth and connotative meaning of the Jim Crow Republicans’ ban on giving food and water to voters who are waiting in line is that Black and brown people are not quite human — the Other, not worthy of the same respect and decency as “real Americans,” understood to be white by default. If the Republicans and other members of the white right who write these anti-democracy bills were being fully honest, they would simply state, “Do not feed the animals.”

To properly understand the breadth of the Republican Party and its forces’ attack on multiracial democracy one must locate such efforts as part of a larger right-wing campaign to dehumanize Black people and other nonwhites. By implication, votes by such dehumanized people are deemed to be illegitimate and therefore not allowed.

So we reach a teachable moment: What is white privilege? It is understanding that one’s basic humanity — as a member of a group of people deemed to be “white” in America — will not be challenged. As we see with the Republican Party’s war on multiracial democracy that freedom is by definition denied to Black and brown people in the United States.

In his sweeping and essential book “Trouble in Mind” the historian Leon Litwack described the informal rules and resulting dehumanization of black people during the earlier Jim Crow regime this way:

The indignities visited on black youths were meant to impress on a new generation the solidity of racial lines and the unchallengeable authority and superiority of the dominant race. … Young blacks underwent the rites of racial passage in a variety of ways. But the specter and threat of physical violence — “the white death” — loomed over nearly every encounter. If they themselves were not the victims, the violence fell on members of the family, friends, and neighbors, almost always with the same intent — to remind black men and women of their “place,” to impose severe restraints on their ambitions, and to punish any perceived signs of “impudence,” “impertinence,” or independence.”

With their nationwide crusade to reinstate de jure Jim Crow laws across the United States, the Republicans and their allies are also summoning these old, ugly day-to-day white supremacist cultural norms and rules.

Jim Crow was a form of terrorism, so widespread that millions of Black people (who could accurately be described as internal refugees) fled the South during two great migrations. Jim Crow involved informal rules: Black people could not make eye contact with white people, as that was “disrespectful.” Black people were expected to step off the sidewalk and into the street to let white people pass. Black people could not protest or otherwise resist if they were not paid for work they had completed on their jobs. Black and brown adults were to be treated like children and addressed as “boy” or “girl”, “auntie” or “uncle”. Black adults were also expected to be deferential to white children. Regardless of their income, Black people should not have nicer clothes, cars, homes or personal property than white people. At four-way intersections, a black driver was expected to let white drivers go first.

These social rules were enforced by violence — and all too often by death.

The informal codes and rules of Jim Crow life were in many ways defeated by the Black freedom struggle in the 20th century. But as documented repeatedly by social scientists and other experts, the logic and expectation of Black people’s deference to white people and white authority still remains. These are the expectations that fueled the Tea Party, the rise of Trump and other recent manifestations of fake right-wing populism in the United States. This is the expectation that drives the Republican Party’s ongoing attacks on multiracial democracy in Georgia and across the country. These expectations of white power were also at the heart of Donald Trump’s attempted coup, the Capitol attack and the broader right-wing terrorist movement.

Will America move forward as a prosperous and free multiracial democracy or will it instead jettison that project and be pushed backward into a white supremacist pseudo-democracy. These are the stakes. We face a battle for the soul of America.

For many in the Jewish community, so-called “Christian Seders” are “100% cultural appropriation”

On Sunday, an image began circulating on social media of a challah loaf that had been braided into the shape of a cross. It was the centerpiece of a “modified Seder meal” that had been hosted by Carly Friesen, a Christian lifestyle coach, who served it alongside roast lamb, a lemon poppyseed cake and what appeared to be a Caesar salad topped with toasted croutons. 

“Today we celebrated Passover in our own way for the first time as a family,” Friesen wrote in an since-deleted Instagram post about the meal.  “We had a modified Seder meal to start with a reading of the first Passover and recognizing Jesus as the final Passover lamb sacrificed for us.” 

Once the image hit Twitter, it quickly went viral. In part, it was because so much of Friesen’s meal contained yeast. During Passover, Jews refrain from eating chametz, which is traditionally anything that contains barley, wheat, rye, oats, and spelt and is not cooked within 18 minutes after coming in contact with water. No leavening — like the kind used for the challah, cake and croutons — is allowed.

It’s also customary to clean all the chametz out of one’s house, by either cleansing the house, boarding up pantries or selling the grains to their non-Jewish neighbors to buy it back at the end of the holiday. “The ONE F**KING DAY your bread isn’t supposed to have yeast in it, and the Evangelicals can’t even get that right for their LARP,” one Twitter user responded with an eyeroll emoji. 

However, the images of Friesen’s meal serve as a blatant visual metaphor for the growing trend of American Christians, especially Evangelicals, co-opting the traditional Jewish Passover Seder and hosting so-called “Christian Seders.” All over the country, Christian churches and Bible colleges have been holding annual “Easter Seders,” which are often completely divorced from Jewish history and ritual of the tradition, and rarely have any actual Jews in attendance. 

Although Jewish food writer Dina Cheney could understand the general appeal of Seder as a way of commemorating an escape from oppression, she points out that its celebration is tied to a unique experience. “The Seder is really about the Jewish experience — specifically the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt,” she wrote to Salon via email. 

“The ritual foods and prayers that encompass it are also specific to that history; for instance, the haroset (fruit and nut paste) represents the mortar used by the (Jewish) slaves as they labored,” she added. “So, overall, I would say it’s strange for anyone who is not Jewish to conduct a Seder. Instead, I think it would make more sense for them to devise a ritualistic meal that speaks to their own cultural experience.” 

Pesach Seder Plate

Robbie Medwed is a Jewish day school instructor who lives in Atlanta. He said that he finds the adapted celebrations to be “100% cultural appropriation” because Christians’ celebrations of the Seder are ahistorical. 

“The Seder itself is an event that didn’t come into being until after Jesus died, so Jesus never participated in a Passover Seder,” Medwed said. “There’s no historical record of it because it never happened. Three of the four Gospels point to Jesus having a Passover meal, but there’s even disagreement among the Gospels about whether or not that was pre-Passover or actually on Passover.” 

According to Medwed, the Passover Seder itself originally appears for the first time in The Mishnah, which was codified somewhere between 180 and 200 CE, and then was expanded upon in the Talmud, which was codified between 400 and 550 CE.

“Most of the rituals that we know of from today’s Seder were invented long after Jesus was ever even alive,” Medwed said. “So, the main thing is that it’s taking something that is now entirely Jewish without any Christian roots whatsoever — or any joint roots — and it’s completely changing its meaning. I’ve seen a lot of people who turn the idea of the Passover sacrifice of the lamb and say, ‘That’s actually Jesus.’ And when you take a Jewish symbol and completely transform it like that, it becomes incredibly offensive.” 

Many Christian seders also shift the meaning of other traditional elements of the meal. The unleavened matzo, for example, is reimagined as the body of Christ, which is traditionally represented through leavened bread during the Eucharist. 

Medwed feels like social media has definitely contributed to the spread of the Christian Seders. There’s of a growing number of Evangelical lifestyle influencers on social media who share curated images of their celebrations as content. Additionally, searching the term “Christian Seder” returns hundreds of results on social media, making it easier for church and Bible study group leaders to spread and mimic. 

“It’s a lot easier to share ideas from one place to another, it’s a lot easier to copy programs,” he said. “People don’t need to reinvent the wheel, they can literally download a program and put it on in their own church or their own place without having to give it much thought.” 

According to Kendall Vanderslice, a food historian who specifically studies the history of church meals, the practice of Christian Seders often largely emerge in Evangelical spaces where some of the liturgical rituals associated with traditional Christianity — feast days, for instance — aren’t necessarily part of their faith practice. 

“I think there is a longing for some kind of connection or tradition or tethering, which I think is a sort of very human longing, especially right now,” Vanderslice said. “I think this is both sort of a sign and a symptom of this lack of grounding to Christian tradition, because there’s a kind of ahistoricity there. There’s the lack of understanding on the part of Christians who think that the Seder as it’s practiced now is the Passover meal that Jesus would have had at his Last Supper.” 

Vanderslice said that, for some, there’s also ignorance of how deeply Christianity has been used to harm Jewish people; while she doesn’t believe that many of the Christians who are hosting these celebrations do so malevolently, “they’re just totally overlooking 2,000 years of harm that’s been done and shifts that have happened in both religions.” 

Cara, who asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons, is an former Evangelical — or “exvangelical” — who attended a small, conservative Christian college in the midwest where the students and teachers would hold an annual Seder in the dining hall. 

“You’re trusting a bunch of college students who have a rudimentary grasp of what any of this is about, who aren’t Jewish, to host this,” she said. “There’s no wine because it’s a dry campus. They’re printing stuff they found on the internet and really trying to make it work, but it just kind of took the heart and soul out of something that is really important to a lot of people and commodified it, or stripped it of some of its meaning.” 

She said that looking back on it now, she feels a deep amount of “cringiness,” especially because she went on to work as the assistant director of her town’s Jewish Family Services. 

“You didn’t have to be Jewish to work there, but I worked in our local temple,” she said. “Once I was part of the Jewish Family Services family, I was always getting invited to things and that was really cool because there’s something different about being invited into a celebration that someone has been having for many years. It’s very special and meaningful, and I think that allows you to learn something.” 

Attending as a guest to a Jewish Seder is a vastly different experience from the people who are trying to replicate the tradition and assign their own meaning to it. 

“I think that the desire to be interested in other cultures is not wrong,” she said. “I just think that the way that people are going about it is very wrong.”

Trump advisers “see danger” as the former president faces criminal probes in two states: report

On Thursday, Business Insider reported that advisers to former President Donald Trump are privately worried about their boss’ legal exposure in multiple state investigations.

“The growing list of criminal investigations and civil lawsuits keep piling up while Trump remains ensconced in his South Florida oceanside compound Mar-a-Lago,” said the report. “Alongside a rotating cast of attorneys, Trump has warily watched as local Georgia and New York investigators escalate their probes connected to both his slapdash efforts to hold onto the presidency despite losing the 2020 election and his namesake company’s finances.”

“Notably, the ex-president is also hearing from advisors that he faces little actual legal risk from the January 6 rioting at the Capitol, according to a dozen advisors, legal experts and Republicans close to the former president,” said the report. The president is facing a civil suit for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act in connection with his role in fomenting the riots, but his criminal liability appears negligible.

New York is investigating the president’s business and finances. Georgia, meanwhile, is looking into whether the president’s pressure on state officials to “find” extra votes after the election violates any laws.

“If I were Trump, I’d be most concerned about the business activities in New York,” said retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, an ally of the former president. “Because when you have a prosecutor hell-bent to get you and you’ve had a long career in business, there’s always a possibility they could come up with some technical violation, more likely with his companies than him personally.”

You can read more here.

Right-wing media figures are “scrambling” to “pick up the Limbaugh mantle” in the post-Trump era

Two months after former President Donald Trump left the White House and six weeks after Rush Limbaugh’s death, right-wing media find themselves at a crossroads — and the competition is fierce. Journalist Caleb Ecarma, in an article published by Vanity Fair on March 31, examines the state of right-wing media in the Biden era.

Ecarma observes, “Many of the pro-Trump powerhouses who set the conservative agenda no longer wield the same power. Breitbart News’ readership has collapsed, Fox News is still recovering from its post-Trump slump, and Rush Limbaugh died last month . . . Figures like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin are still cranking along. But others are scrambling to fill the vacuum left at the top, hoping to piece together their own conservative media empires.”

The Vanity Fair reporter points to Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino as some of the prominent right-wing media figures of the Biden era.

“Earlier this month, Dan Bongino — a former Secret Service agent and thrice-failed GOP congressional candidate who became a star Fox News contributor and top podcast host during the Trump era — joined the scramble of radio hosts looking to pick up the Limbaugh mantle,” Ecarma notes. “Beginning on May 24, Bongino will host a Westwood One radio program from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET, the same time slot Limbaugh occupied before his death from lung cancer in February.”

Ecarma adds that one thing Shapiro and Bongino have in common is “a massive increase in traffic to their respective news and commentary sites at a time when many of their direct competitors are struggling.” And the Vanity Fair journalist points out that Shapiro’s Daily Wire operation is home to a “podcast network” that includes five different shows.

“With its bevy of new-media offerings,” Ecarma explains, “the Daily Wire is set to become the go-to opposition outlet of the Biden era, especially for Gen-X and Millennial conservatives who are no longer tuning into talk radio and cable news.”

Limbaugh, who was 70 when he died of lung cancer on February 17, had an enormous influence on right-wing media — and his bombastic, rude-and-crude, often mean-spirited approach was a major departure from the more intellectual conservatism of columnist George Will and National Review founder William F. Buckley. Limbaugh’s domain was AM talk radio, and he didn’t make a lot of appearances on cable news.

Shapiro, in contrast to Limbaugh, is much more internet-focused.

A former Daily Wire employee, quoted anonymously, believes that Shapiro made a wise move by looking ahead to a “post-Trump environment.”

“Part of what makes Ben unique and why he is thriving with Trump out of the picture is, going back to 2016, he was always prepping for this post-Trump environment,” that source told Vanity Fair. “He knew that was just a temporary phase, and that’s why he set himself apart from the more Trumpian sites back then — even when he agreed with what Trump was doing at times — and why he’s best prepared for this next phase now.”

COVID-19 was the third most common cause of death in US last year

COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, a year defined in many ways by the deadly pandemic.

This is the conclusion reached by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a report released on Wednesday. (The statistics are provisional, meaning that they are only based on preliminary information provided to the agency from state governments and could later need to be updated.) The CDC estimated that roughly 375,000 people died in the United States within the year 2020 as a result of COVID-19. The only illnesses to cause more fatalities were heart disease, which led to roughly 690,000 deaths, and cancer, which resulted in roughly 598,000 deaths. In the process of rising to the top 10 causes of death, COVID-19 bumped suicide off of the list, which was the 11th most common cause of death in 2020.

The CDC also found that the COVID-19 death rate was highest among Hispanics, while overall death rates were highest among non-Hispanic African Americans and non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native populations. These demographic trends are important, the report argues, because they can provide the agency with useful guidelines about how to address the pandemic going forward.

“Provisional death estimates provide an early indication of shifts in mortality trends,” the CDC explained. “Timely and actionable data can guide public health policies and interventions for populations experiencing higher numbers of deaths that are directly or indirectly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In announcing the report, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told journalists that “the data should serve again as a catalyst for each of us to continue to do our part to drive down cases and reduce the spread of COVID-19 and get people vaccinated as quickly as possible.”

She added that, “Sadly, based on the current state of the pandemic, these impacts have remained in 2021 where we continue to see that communities of color account for an outsize portions of these deaths.”

Walensky, and President Joe Biden’s administration more generally, have repeatedly expressed concern that Republican-led states are easing COVID-19 restrictions too soon and will prolong the pandemic by doing so. Their fears appear to have been backed up by a report earlier this week that COVID-19 infection rates rose by 16% last week compared to the previous week.

“I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19,” Walensky told reporters at the time.

Dr. Deborah Birx, who led Trump’s coronavirus task force, publicly implied that the coronavirus death toll might have been lower if not for President Trump’s public health policies. Birx told CNN on Sunday that she believes the former president’s unwillingness to follow consensus public health recommendations could have cost up to 400,000 lives.

Andrew Cuomo improperly used campaign resources to promote his book about leadership: watchdog

A government watchdog on Thursday filed a complaint alleging that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., improperly used campaign resources for personal benefit when promoting his book about leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Cuomo for New York, Governor Cuomo’s authorized committee, repeatedly promoted sales of the book on social media and in emails sent to supporters,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote in the complaint filed with the state Board of Elections. “Expenditures for those book promotions appear to have been made exclusively for the personal benefit of Governor Cuomo. Accordingly, an investigation of Cuomo for New York’s conversion of campaign funds for personal use is in order.”

In its complaint, CREW cited a laundry list of instances in which the governor promoted his book, “American Crisis,” via email, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The watchdog argued that mailing lists and social media accounts are a campaign asset. “By repeatedly using those accounts to promote sale of the book,” CREW said, “Cuomo for New York used campaign funds for Governor Cuomo’s personal benefit.”

Cuomo received a “high offer of more than $4 million” for his book deal last year, according to The New York Times. Anonymous sources have alleged in other reports that the deal exceeded $5 million, per The Buffalo News. 

CREW’s complaint also notes that “by using the time of campaign employees and/or consultants to promote the book, Cuomo for New York used campaign funds for Governor Cuomo’s personal benefit.” According to The New York Times, several Cuomo aides helped the governor prepare various drafts of his book, whom he relied on “for everything from full-scale edits to minor clerical work.”

CREW noted that Cuomo reportedly “sought and received an ethics clearance for the book.” In fact, an ethics agency named JCOPE, which has declined to provide details on Cuomo’s book deal, gave the governor a green light so long as the book was “unrelated to the governor’s duties.” According to The Buffalo News, a special counsel reportedly told the agency that Cuomo would write the book on his own time and would not use his own office to support the project. 

On July 17, Martin Levine, deputy general counsel at JCOPE wrote that ethics requirements had been met by Cuomo, the book’s proposed publisher, Random House, and its imprint, Crown Publishing. “Please note that the governor may not promote the book while performing his official duties,” he reiterated, “and any appearances or activities to promote the book must clearly be separate and apart from the governor’s official duties.”

The Cuomo administration has defended itself by alleging that many employees volunteered their time, which senior adviser Richard Azzopardi told The Times is “permissible and consistent with ethical requirements” of the state. “Every effort was made to ensure that no state resources were used in connection with this project. To the extent an aide printed out a document,” he said, “it appears incidental.”

About 48,00 hardcover copies of Cuomo’s book have been sold, according to NPD BookScan. In early March, Crown Publishing announced that it would discontinue its promotion of “American Crisis,” as well as its plans for a paperback edition amid an ongoing probe into the suppression of data tied to deaths that took place at nursing homes amid the pandemic.

From “Soul Train” to Don Shirley, new book celebrates the history of Black performance in America

The idea of being Black and poor in America often makes people think about the gun violence, drug trade and pain that wraps the existence of that reality. And because those factors are prevalent means that too often we overlook the joys that make up the heart of the community. These joys exist by way of family gatherings, community affairs like block parties, and other forms of fellowshipping, with one thing tying all of these types of events together –– dancing. You better know how to dance. 

My dad, one of the best dancers I know, once faked me out­­ ––­­  by telling me that we were going to the Exotic Auto Show, which comes to Baltimore every year around my birthday. So, we jumped in his car, picked my cousin up and headed down to the arena. Dad forgot his wallet, so we had to go back to the house and when I walked inside, “Surprise!” was yelled by my whole family and the bulk of my block. Before I could catch my breath, my cousins surrounded me telling me that I had to dance, my crush La Tesha was there, and it was a requirement­­. The only other option was me leaving my own party, kind of putting me in a dance or die situation. I was a little kid and didn’t really have any moves (and would never really learn) but I quickly picked up the Black-Dude-Two-Step, which is a left to right, front-back movement that allows one to appear to be on beat for any song at any function. My friends still know I can’t dance, but it doesn’t stop me or them from joining in and celebrating the love of something that is special to us. Author Hanif Abdurraqib captures the beauty of the history of dance and its relation to Black America in his new book, “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.”

Abdurraqib, the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of “Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest” and “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” is back with a brilliant collection of personal essays that circle around Black people performing in the America, both publicly and privately. Abdurraqib joined me on “Salon Talks” recently and explained how “A Little Devil In America” covers everything from the true history of Don Shirley that was left out of the Oscar-winning film “Green Book” to how Don Cornelius built his “Soul Train” empire.

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Abdurraqib here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below, to hear more about the history of Black arts, what COVID did to his sneaker collection and the enthusiastic dance moves that got him through high school in Columbus.

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

I love how you love Ohio, man, Columbus. I love how you love where you’re from. I feel like being from cities like Columbus or a place like Baltimore, I feel like we’re always the underdog when we’re fighting with different powers in New York, or Atlanta, or L.A., right? We come in and we do our thing and then we proudly go back home.

That’s it, right? My parents are from New York, and so much of the pop culture that I consumed in the ’90s, especially Black stories, were about like coastal stories, like “Juice,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood,” all that. I realized at a pretty young age that there were Black people everywhere kind of living stories that were not dissimilar to those stories that I was consuming. I got really fascinated with regional Black culture. Baltimore is a really good example of this, where it’s like – nowhere else is like Baltimore and no one else are like the Black folks in Baltimore. And it’s like that in Detroit too. I feel like Detroit is its own central thing. Loving where I’m from in a way, it’s kind of just embracing my complete understanding of the way my people move in the city I love and understanding that it’s not like anywhere else.

How have you been holding up with this COVID stuff and how are you handling the rollout of your new book when everything is virtual?

I’m going to honest, in 2019 and early 2020 I was on the road all the time, I did like 120 readings or something in that time. So if I’m being real, being home has been good. I wish it was under different circumstances and I wish it did not come with all of the tragedy that it’s come with, both in my own life, but also globally, but I do think that I almost needed to slow down. I needed to hit a point where I could settle myself in Columbus and reassess my own priorities.

Now, putting the book out into the world, I miss the kind of physical nature of being in front of people and reading the work and hearing the way a room is reacting to the work in real time. But there’s something about the accessibility of the virtual space that I’ve really enjoyed too, where I can connect with folks from all over, people who’ve come through from all over, and I do hope that’s a trend that kind of remains post-whatever, post-a-pandemic world looks like if there is to be one. For me personally, I fell into healthier routines and I’ve been a little bit more generous with myself because it’s just me and I’m just at home by myself. Spending that time alone is good.

Healthier routines like what? Like you changed your diet, or . . . 

Well, a little bit. I spend some time meditating now. I have a more scheduled, thoughtful writing routine. My workout routine is a bit better. I’m sleeping better than I’ve ever slept. I’m getting like a solid eight hours of sleep, and it’s just because I’m not always on the move. I’m not in like three different time zones a week. And all of these things lead me to be a better person, a better more careful, more thoughtful person, which leads me to be a better writer. It’s all kind of interconnected for me.

That’s fire. Sometimes I fear becoming a better person, because I think it’ll mess my art up.

Nah. One, you’re already a good person. You don’t got to worry too much, but if anytime you become a better person, the art will follow. It really will.

Word. I’ve been following your work for a minute and I’ve always appreciated how much you love doing readings. It’s a part that a lot of writers struggle with, even successful ones. They want to be able to protect the way they sound on the page. How are you going to try to keep that part of it together?

Everything’s virtual. I have no in-person event planned until like November, and even that’s tentative because it’s so unpredictable. But I still try to kind of bring my all to the virtual reading space. So much of what I love about the in-person reading is just the sounds of the room and the sounds of the people in the room. It took a minute for me to adjust to the fact that I’m just like in my own house immersed in nothing but the sound of my own voice, and then silence. It’s kind of like if you take the crowd out of the arena and you just hear like the feet squeaking on the basketball court. That’s kind of jarring, but I still try to bring my all to the reading space. I write the work to be read out loud, I’m always thinking about the musicality of language and the pleasure of sound. So much of the work is written to be performed.

Speaking of performance here we have your amazing new book, “A Little Devil in America.”

Thank you.

Can you first explain the title and just break down the cover for our readers?

The title is a quote from Josephine Baker‘s speech at the March on Washington, which is a speech that I love and a speech that often gets written out of the history of the March on Washington. People kind of cherry-pick Black history. Josephine Baker, at the March on Washington, gets written out, but I love that speech and that particular line comes from a point where she was looking out on the younger audience — because she was a much older performer and a much older person coming back to the states for the first time in a long time — and she looked out on that audience of younger people and she said this line about like, “Go and ask your parents about me. They’ll tell you I was a devil. I was a devil in other countries and I was a little devil in America too.” I love the way that Black folks remind people of their greatness and are unafraid to, but have to do it repeatedly, as Little Richard did for example as well. It felt fitting for the book.

I’m so hands-on with my covers. I take it real seriously, and we went through a lot of different iterations of the cover. We got really close sometimes, and I’d be like, “That’s the one,” and then I would sleep on it and wake up the next day and be like, “No, no, no, that’s not the one. We got to do a different one.” And we landed on this one. I landed on this because I really liked these photos of Lindy Hop aerials, and I knew I wanted a photo that showed Black people in the midst of something spectacular.

There’s Willa Mae Ricker and Leon James’s photo from 1943 doing a Lindy Hop aerial. I just love her face. I love that she’s kind of like she can’t even believe what she’s doing. When I was writing the book so many times I was like, “I can’t believe this book came so easily to me.” I was like, “I can’t believe this is happening.” I wanted to capture that awe in the photo.

You start the book off with talking about dance marathons. It was a wild and crazy time to be alive. What was that world was like?

I didn’t know these things existed, these Great Depression dance marathons, until about three years ago when I was working on the book, and a homie hit me to them. It was horrific. People who did not have much, did not have shelter or food were performing in this way where they were just dancing for, not just hours, not just days, but months, months and months and months and months. Some of them just to get shelter and three meals a day. In some cases the second place didn’t win anything. If you danced for 1,457 hours, which some people did, you won, but if you danced for 1,456 hours and 55 seconds you got nothing.

That’s crazy.

And that’s just pretty horrific. I knew that it was an entry point into this idea of dance and endurance that I could use as a gateway to get into “Soul Train,” and the somewhat marathon run that “Soul Train” had. Also, the “Soul Train” mind, which is less about endurance and more about precision and kind showing out in this small window of time. Of course the dance marathons were largely white folks. I was just fascinated by those parallels, those somewhat horrific parallels.

You’re a sneaker guy. If you had to dance for 1,400 hours, what kind of shoes you wearing?

I’m thinking about those sacai Waffles, just because they’re so comfortable. But I also just got those like Undercover joints with the Chaos and Balance on them, and those might be the ones too, because the cushion in the back is real. What are you wearing right now? What are you wearing out the house?

I’m wearing the newest sacais. I grabbed every colorway of them, but I’m not dancing 1,400 hours in those. Jordans still, bro, and just a lot of slip-ons.

A lot of slip-ons.

I feel like I’m Cali right now.

Yeah. I can’t wait to get back out. I’ve gotten so many sneakers during the pandemic.

They’re killing me. Oh my God. These sneakers, they’ve been killing me. I already know. I already know, and they’re all in boxes.

All in boxes.

1,400 hours though, I think I might be going with some 992s or 991s, bro.

I forgot about New Balance. I only got one pair of 991s. I might have to put them on for that.

Another thing about this book I liked a lot is the way that you dropped in with bits and pieces of your personal story. One was about when you guys danced in high school and that was a way for the Black population of the school to connect. Could you dance?

I can’t dance that well, but I’m an enthusiastic dancer. I know how to get from point A to point Z on the dance floor without f**king up anyone else’s good time, which I think that’s vital, because you have people who can really, really dance and you’ve got people who really can’t dance. I like being in that middle ground where it’s like I know how to stay out of the way and have my time in my little corner and let the people who can really dance take up a lot of space.

I don’t need the spotlight, just a two-step. How did the rest of the school, like the non-Black population, respond to that?

It’s wild, because when I look back at that time, ever since I wrote that piece in the book and people have read it, everyone wants to talk about it. When I look back at that time, I just thought this was happening at every high school all over the country. But it’s so wild. High school, you’re eating lunch at like 11:00 AM. We’re having these like sock hops in a dark gym at like 11:15 in the morning, everyone’s sweating, all these teenagers grinding up on each other and whatnot. Then we just got to go back to class. By noon, we’re back in chemistry class just still sweaty or whatever.

It’s an incredible phenomenon. It felt really innovative in a way because it was like the school’s way of saying, “This is how we know we’ll keep these people here, because if we let them leave during lunch they ain’t coming back. We got to make something enticing enough to make them want to stay.”

Much like in either city, to be Black in Columbus is regional. I’m from the east side and to be Black on the east side is different than what it is to be Black on the north side. In my high school there were Black kids from all over the city, and to have this point where we could all kind of come together and rock for a bit and then go back to our classrooms and be the people we are in our classrooms, it was kind of beautiful, because it let me in early on the fact that Black people can be multiple things at any time during any day.

It’s crazy that in 2021 we still have to push that nerve that we’re not a monolith. Some of us listen to this type of music, some of us are into that type of music, and then some of us love it all, and it’s totally okay, like any other group of people.

You mentioned “Soul Train” earlier, and you write about Don Cornelius in the book. I think that was important for the culture just in general, because people don’t know Don Cornelius was a mastermind, a business mind. He owned the whole franchise, right?

Yeah.

What should people know about Don Cornelius?

Coming up, he was a big deal in my house, mostly because those reruns would play. If you came up without cable, in Ohio, and Columbus specifically, you would still get WGN, the Chicago network, and they would just play old “Soul Train” reruns on Sundays all morning long. I just grew up as a kid immersed in Don Cornelius’s cool. He was a cool mother**ker. The outfits, his voice, the way he talked, and the way that musicians revered him. Musicians really cared about showing up on “Soul Train,” just showing out.

In my household he was someone who was really revered, and it was good for me as I got older to find out more about him, his business mindset and his full vision for the fullness of Black people. The era he came up in and what he saw in terms of the Civil Rights Movement and the way that he knew that music could be propulsive as a method to get people to freedom. He was visionary in that way.

Two of my favorite chapters in the book were one about you playing Spades, and then the other on Don Shirley, another person who people don’t know enough about, until they saw the movie “Green Book,” which you weren’t a big fan of.

Nah, man.

I ride with you on that one all day. I wasn’t the biggest fan of “Green Book,” I’ll just say that. Happy for the people involved and its success, but I wasn’t a big fan of it. Talk about you as a Spades player. What is that Spades culture? Was it something you guys did for money, or was it something that you picked up as you found your way into your artist community?

Well one, I’ll say as Spades player I’m much like a dancer, where it’s like I probably need a partner who’s better than I am, and then I’m steady, but I’m a get out the way. I don’t want to give away too much of my spades.

Give away? Nah, you can’t get out the way of your Spades. It don’t work like that.

I definitely don’t play it safe every hand, but one thing I’m really good at is looking at my hand and being able to pinpoint exactly how many tricks I could take. There comes a time to take risks. If a partner goes nil, I’m an elite. I can hold you if you go nil, almost no matter what. But it’s because in my house we played Spades. I’m the youngest of four, so having older siblings and having parents who played cards and coming up in a neighborhood where people play cards and coming up around hustlers who play cards.

I don’t even remember where I learned Spades, but I feel like I just learned it by watching. No one ever told me like, “This is how you play.” I was just around cards. We played in high school for money. Definitely played in college for money because at the college I went to there weren’t a ton of Black folks, and we all hung out together, and all we knew was how to play cards for money. College is where I really learned that depending on where you’re from, people just play Spades differently.

Did you guys come up playing Tonk?

I played Tonk a little bit, yeah, but it wasn’t in my house. We didn’t play in Columbus. I didn’t learn it until college.

It’s such a regional thing that everywhere you go the rules are a little different.

I had no idea what it was until like one of my homies in college, he was from Alabama, taught me. I’m sure people play it in Ohio, but in my neighborhood no one was playing it. Spades is so fascinating to me because the story of Spades, in a way, is the story of Black migration where depending on where you land on the map, someone’s going to play it a different way with a different language, a different set of rules.

And on Don Shirley. The “Green Book” movie didn’t really do enough to show what the industry did to Don Shirley.

Yeah, and the thing about it is, I really wish that Hollywood would maybe divest from this idea of Black biopic movies because I think that so often the work is to condense Black life, a full Black life, into something that will make non-Black people feel good, or feel good about this vague idea of American unity, which that wasn’t Don Shirley’s job, and that wasn’t Don Shirley’s full life.

I can’t speak for Don Shirley, but that wasn’t, for me, the most interesting thing about what Don Shirley contributed to American culture. None of that was. Mahershala’s performance was a beautiful performance, on the whole but that movie was not for me. As someone who grew up listening to Don Shirley and was very interested in Don Shirley, I probably went into that movie with the wrong expectations and came out of it very frustrated. But it also was a pattern of times I’ve gone into movies that are supposed to be made with a full Black life in mind and walked out understanding that the movie was made to placate a non-Black audience.

Hollywood is starting to be fascinated with also telling the stories of these courageous Black people through the lens of informants and snitches and the people that tried to bring them down, and I’m hoping this is a trend that will end quickly. Hopefully we get past that.

We got to.

When I read your writing and I always think, “Wow. This guy can write about anything,” but it seems like that you are pulled towards music a lot, right? Your Tribe Called Quest book “Go Ahead in the Rain” being one of the great examples of that. What draws you to music as a fan or as a person who connects with it enough to dedicate a whole project to it? Are there any current artists that you feel like you could write a book on?

Oh course. Well, current for me is like folks who are still living who I think deserve their flowers, like Miss Patti LaBelle, or I was thinking about Gladys Knight the other night, or Sly Stone. These folks. But music has helped me make sense of the world. The way that music has created a map for me and unraveling my own emotional messes has allowed me a clarity that I can approach the world better with, and I think I owe an articulation of that in my work. I owe my work to that.

I owe how my life has been soundtracked. In the book I write about ’02. I write about The Diplomats and Juelz Santana. I remember that era more than I remember most anything else. When a soundtrack is the most immense part of my lived experience, I think I owe it to that soundtrack to be real about that. I will say though, my next book is about basketball. I’m writing a book about Ohio, the high school era of basketball in Ohio from like ’94 to 2001, the LeBron James era, because I’ve always wanted to write a basketball book, and I know I’m kind of preaching to the choir. I know Baltimore’s high school basketball history is well-documented, and as well-documented as it is, it’s still not enough, because you all got a history that’s maybe better than any other city.

Bro, I’m writing Carmelo Anthony‘s memoir, so I’ve been in the basketball world the whole past week and I’m kind of like, “Oh, I want to go deeper.”

I’m fascinated by the era of high school basketball and who makes it and who doesn’t, and what making it is defined by. Then I got to thinking about Columbus and how we had some runs that were not like that, not as great as that, but like similar when I was coming up. Great ball players that came out of here, Michael Redd, Kenny Gregory, Estaban Weaver, that led to this LeBron James era. I wanted to write about that. So yes, of course I write about music primarily, but in the back of my head always there’s a basketball book I want to get to, and I’m really excited to get to it next.

Your work does so much for living Black artists and I think it’s extremely important. I don’t know if that’s the goal for you, but how do you see the larger context of your work?

I think so much of what I’m trying to do is give people their flowers in real time, or to re-contextualize someone’s living so that it is fully appreciated before it gets swept away by history, or before it gets reformatted for an audience that doesn’t have the best intentions for that person’s full living.

When I think about someone like Merry Clayton, who I write about in the book, I wanted to give her her flowers through the only lens I could, which is deep gratitude before someone kind of wrestled that story away and then reformatted it to serve a different audience. It’s kind of like plugging the leaks that history punctures. So often history punctures a legacy of these Black artists to make them more palatable, and I’m trying to plug those leaks to say, “No, no, this is a full person who does not need to be drained of their radical history, or their revolutionary history, or just the fullness of their life that did not serve the machinery of whiteness.”

Facts. You create so much literature. You write a lot. You have a lot of stuff out. What are you doing right now as far as what kind of art are you consuming outside of just your own stuff? I know I get tired of myself.

I’m sick of myself right now because I’m in the book cycle. I’ve definitely been running into other art. I’ve been reading a lot of poems, a book, “Inheritance” by the poet Taylor Johnson, which I love a great deal. I keep it by my nightstand. The book “All Heathens” by Marianne Chan, which I’ve been rocking with for months. I’ve been reading a lot of Black punk zines, old and new, that I get from this spot called Brown Recluse Zine Distro. I’ve been really on old Black magazines that I get from like BLK MKT Vintage, like old Ebony. Just kind of immersing myself in the way profiles used to written, all this kind of shit. And music, man, every Friday I’m listening to new stuff. The album that I’m super on right now, Starrah’s new album. Joyce Wrice’s album.

And then sneakers, I’ve been on this tip lately where I’ve been trying to go back and get like OG joints, like original joints from the years. Early in the pandemic I got the original 2000 Space Jams, and I got these ’94 Bred Jordan Ones that I had to send out to get resoled because the sole was kind of starting to crumble a little bit so I got those refinished.

I gave my nephew some original Space Jams, and this fool went out and hooped in them and they crumbled.

Yeah, you can’t hoop in those joints. You got to take care of them.

The problem with the older sneakers for me is that technology has changed. Some Jordans from the ’80s is not going to feel like the Retros. The Retros got like new cushion, new technology. They feel a little better. You ever think about that?

Oh yeah. Some of them ’85s feel like you’re walking straight on the concrete. And that’s why I will wear them, but I’m a wear them like very selectively, like maybe once or twice a year. Not because I’m on some s**t like I got to protect them, but because some of them joints, if you wear them long enough in a day it feels like you’re straight walking on the actual concrete with no shoes on because the cushion’s not there. They were made kind of specifically for hooping in, where some of the Retros were made for fashion in a way. So I feel like around ’96 is when they kind of started being better for just like everyday wear.

In Baltimore all we wore was like the Foamposites and Uptempos. I remember when the Pennys first came out and going to New York and playing this basketball thing. New York dudes were so in awe that somebody would not only spend $200 for a pair of sneakers. That was kind of rad back in 1996 for you to pay $200 for some sneakers, but let alone pay $200 and hoop in them. Foamposites becomes this big thing in my region, and then D.C. It goes back and forth with Baltimore over who came out with Foamposites, who came with the New Balance, who came with this and that.

I think for me, I have a couple pairs of Fives, but I’m really big on like Ones, Threes and Fours and 11s. It’s funny, when I was a kid I would cop anything, but now it’s like I look at Sixes and Sevens especially and Eights, Six, Sevens, Eights, I’m like, “Yo, I maybe gassed those up when I was younger, but these shits ain’t hitting.” Eights are so weird, because you can’t even like tie in them, and like strapping them up . . .  It’s like, “Yo, I can’t. These don’t do it for me.”

We could talk about sneakers all day. Can you drop a couple of words for some young artists trying to find their voice or just trying to figure out how to master being themselves? So many people feel like they got to sound like this person, or sound like that person.

I think I was lucky in that I came up reading widely and taking inspiration from a wide number of places, and through that I think that you build your voice, or I built my voice, out of the pieces of many other voices. That how I think you become an authentic self, is that you don’t tie yourself to one writer or one artist and chase only that inspiration. You perhaps allow yourself to flow.

I’m as much Morrison as I am Virginia Hamilton, as I am Zora Neale Hurston, as I am Adrian Matejka, as I am Terrance Hayes, as I am Khadijah Queen, as I am Tyehimba Jess. All of these folks I’m borrowing from to build up a voice that feels authentically mine. Pursuing the excitements that I find in their work has informed my own, and then you’re really yourself, because you’re taking percentages of other people that make up your own and you’re not taking the same percentages other people are going to take. Build your voice out of the many parts of others and you’ll never be like anyone else.

Tell everybody when the books drop and where they can get it.

“A Little Devil in America” comes out March 30th. You can get it anywhere. Try to cop it from an independent book store if you can. Support those. If you’re in a space that has a Black-owned bookstore, definitely slide through there. And the Black-owned bookstores have been so great to me through my career in general. Like Loyalty in D.C. and Source bookstores in Detroit and Marcus in Oakland, and a lot of these are institutions that deserve our support.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson smears AOC as a “low-IQ race-baiter” over her immigration stance

Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a “low-IQ race-baiter” on Thursday while claiming that she seeks to change the demographic make-up of the nation to shore up Democratic Party power. 

The “Outnumbered” segment — part of Fox News’ daytime programming — featured Carlson responding to a clip of the firebrand progressive lawmaker pushing back against the characterization of the current situation at the southern border as a “crisis.” During the clip, Ocasio-Cortez further stated that Biden’s positions on the border haven’t yielded “the same as what happened during the Trump administration, where they took babies out of the arms of their mothers.” She also argued that reparations should be allocated to migrants impacted by the harsh treatment at the border.

“It’s just interesting to come to a place where a low-IQ race-baiter like that has an important voice in national policy,” Carlson said. “Who cares what she thinks? She’s totally reckless. And she’s racist, openly.”

Carlson did not elaborate on that claim, pivoting instead to accusing Ocasio-Cortez of seeking to change the country’s population demographics in order to make her own party more powerful.

“I think the key is though is to think clearly about what is best for the United States. Obviously, the border policy now is a disaster — to be fair, it’s been a disaster for a long time,” Carlson continued. “It doesn’t serve the interest of most Americans, and it won’t because people like that use the magic word, which is ‘racism,’ to cow the rest of the country into submission.”

“She wants to change the population, she wants her party to be more powerful,” Carlson further declared. “I get it, but we’re allowing her and people like her to do that because we are afraid of being called names.” 

Carlson concluded his comments by insisting that, in fact, viewers shouldn’t care about what Ocasio-Cortez has to say, after allocating nearly a minute and a half of air time to responding to her, arguing that “rational” immigration reform can’t happen “until decent people shed their fear of being smeared by someone whose opinion you really shouldn’t care about.” 

“I don’t care whatever that woman’s name is thinks, and no one should care what she thinks,” he concluded. 

Fox News’ audience likely does know “whatever that woman’s name is,” as the network has covered Ocasio-Cortez extensively since she rose to national prominence in the 2018 midterm elections. A Media Matters study found that in one six-week period in 2019, the New York lawmaker was mentioned at least 3,181 times on Fox News and the Fox Business Network just under 76 times a day.

“Not a single day passed in that time frame when Ocasio-Cortez was not mentioned on the networks,” Salon reported on the study. “More specifically, host Tucker Carlson called her an ‘idiot wind bag,’ a ‘pompous little twit,’ a ‘garden-variety hypocrite,’ ‘self-involved and dumb,’ a ‘moron, and nasty and more self-righteous than any televangelist.'”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Progressives say Biden infrastructure bill isn’t big enough: “We can’t go back to business as usual”

President Joe Biden proposed a $2 trillion federal spending package on Wednesday that would revamp the country’s crumbling infrastructure, taking specific aim at pollution, job creation, housing and corporate taxes. But many on the left who have championed the Green New Deal say the president’s plan isn’t big enough. 

“This is not nearly enough,” tweeted Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, regarding the size of the bill. “The important context here is that it’s $2.25T spread out over 10 years. For context, the COVID package was $1.9T for this year *alone,* with some provisions lasting 2 years. Needs to be way bigger.

“I think it’s a step towards our vision of a Green New Deal,” Ellen Sciales, a spokesperson for Sunrise Movement, echoed. “But the truth is this does not meet the scale and the scope of what we need to meet the true scale and urgency of the climate crisis.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, likewise called the bill a “fine starting point.”

Under Biden’s current proposal, the federal government would, among other measures, allot $621 billion to transportation infrastructure such as bridges, ports and roads; put $580 billion toward American manufacturing, job training, and research and development; designate $400 billion to care for eldery and disabled Americans; invest $300 billion into constructing and repairing affordable housing, as well as schools; infuse the U.S. electric vehicle industry with $174 billion; and dedicate $5 billion to repair every lead pipe and service line nationally.

“These are investments we have to make,” Biden said of the bill on Wednesday. “We can afford to make them. To put it another way — we can’t afford not to.”

However, many progressive Democrats have already proposed a spate of separate bills designed to expand the bill’s scope of influence. For instance, Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Andry Levin, D-Mich., introduced a bill that would subsidize the purchase of sustainable products made in America. 

The Progressive Congressional Caucus on Monday floated the Transform, Heal and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE) Act, which calls for a $10 trillion investment in green infrastructure, renewable energy, and other climate justice measures over the next decade. The bill heavily addresses racial inequality and dedicates 40% of federal investments to minority groups that have been “excluded, oppressed and harmed by racist unjust practices.”

“We are facing a series of intersecting crises,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, the bill’s co-sponsor, said. “Climate change, a public health pandemic, racial injustice and economic inequality. We can’t defeat any of these crises alone. We must develop a roadmap for recovery that addresses them all.”

An analysis conducted by the Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit, found that the THRIVE Act would generate 15 million jobs. The bill is part of a broader push spearheaded by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who unveiled the THRIVE agenda when she was representative for New Mexico. According to Data for Progress, Haaland’s agenda drew broad support from Americans, especially swing voters.

“We need a plan that will end the unemployment crisis, but we need this plan to also fight systemic racism, protect public health and drastically cut down on climate pollution,” Markey said. “We cannot go back to business as usual. We have a chance to truly, in this moment, to build back better and greener than ever before.” 

Biden’s infrastructure bill is popular — so Republicans are trying to make it a culture war fight

Conflict drives engagement and ratings, so it should be no surprise that media coverage is framing President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill as controversial. “Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Meets Skepticism, Signaling Fight to Come,” reads the New York Times headline. “Biden’s infrastructure plan faces controversy over price tag and design,” reads the Washington Post headline. Politico’s Playbook declares, “Fault lines form on Biden’s massive infrastructure plan.“

But this kind of framing is misleading. It is true that congressional Republicans oppose this bill and there is nothing that Biden could do, any concession he could make, that would induce Republicans to vote for it. But with the actual public? Well, this bill is a big hit. It is even a bipartisan hit. 

This follows polling from Data for Progress that shows 69% of Americans support the plan, including half of Republicans.

Republican politicians oppose the bill, alright, but it’s because the bill is popular. The entire GOP political strategy, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is to block popular bills, and then run against Democrats for not getting anything done. If that means Republicans screwing over their own constituents, so be it. 

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The real story of the infrastructure bill is not, it turns out, one of a country divided against itself. It’s a story about how unpopular the Republican agenda is. It’s why the GOP has increasingly focused its resources on preventing Americans, especially people of color, from even having a chance to register their opinions at the ballot box. And it shows why right wing media so desperately clings to B.S. stories like the fake controversy over Potato Head’s gender or absurd claims that Dr. Seuss is being “cancelled.” Republicans need to keep the diminishing number of voters they do have distracted by culture war nonsense, no matter how fake it is, so those Americans don’t notice that Democrats keep trying to do stuff those voters like. 

“[C]ulture war filler narratives intended to excite and outrage right-wing audiences are taking up an increasingly large amount of airtime,” Parker Molloy writes in an analysis at Media Matters, pointing to how, on Fox News, manufactured controversies over children’s books and toys crowded out coverage of Biden’s coronavirus relief package, which is also broadly popular. 

“Unable or unwilling to adjust its actual policy positions to fall more in line with public opinion, the Republican Party has instead opted to play to its base’s sense of grievance and victimhood,” Molloy concludes. 

Republicans are facing a conundrum, however. Many of them are beginning to question whether it was the right call to use the strategy of ignoring the Biden’s last big bill, the American Rescue Plan, and distracting their voters with bright and shiny objects like the gender identity of toys. It might have kept the base riled up, but it did nothing to stop the bill, which is likely going to be a big boost to Biden’s re-election prospects.

So they’re trying something else with the infrastructure plan: Lying about it wildly, and trying to turn it into a culture war issue of the Potato Head/Seuss variety. 

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell kicked off this strategy Wednesday, arguing that the bill is not really an infrastructure bill at all, but a “Trojan horse” for some secret progressive agenda, and falsely claiming that the bill “would spend more money just on electric cars than on America’s roads, bridges, ports, airports, and waterways.” 

In reality, the $621 billion earmarked for roads and bridges is the biggest part of the bill and is three and a half times more money than the $174 billion geared towards moving more Americans to electric cars. In addition, the bill has $100 billion to expand broadband internet to rural areas, a longstanding issue in McConnell’s state, and another $100 billion to modernize the nation’s electrical grid, something that the recent weather crisis in Texas highlighted as an overdue need. Plus, there’s $213 billion to improve building infrastructure, including schools and veteran’s hospitals. 

In other words, it’s a bunch of stuff that would really benefit red Americans as much as blue Americans. But it’s quickly becoming clear that Republicans are going to adopt a strategy of hand-waving facts away in favor of freaking out about the environmentalist provisions, as if weatherizing buildings to make them more energy efficient is a direct assault on American manhood itself. In other words, they’re going to try to turn this into the kind of culture war issue that gets their base going. 

Sean Hannity rolled out this strategy for covering the infrastructure bill Wednesday night, when he took a potshot at the $80 billion “marked as a handout to Amtrak.” That’s only a small fraction of the bill — and a necessary one, since Amtrak is crucial to the densest parts of America. Still, right wing media has spent decades training their audience to hate and fear trains and other forms of public transportation as exotic forms of transportation for the “coastal elite.” It might not be as exciting to Hannity’s audience as Potato Head — or as the viciously racist propaganda against undocumented immigrant schoolkids he pivoted to during the same episode — but it gives his viewers a reason to believe this bill is “liberal” instead of an investment meant to help all Americans. 

As E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post writes, Biden’s plans are oriented around the idea that “active government can foster economic growth, spread wealth to those now left out, and underwrite research and investment to produce a cleaner environment and a more competitive tech sector,” but come “wrapped in a big but thoroughly traditional government spending program that offers a lot of things to a lot of constituencies.” Including, importantly, voters in rural and suburban areas who have also suffered from decades of neglect under Republican leadership. 

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Roads are popular. Schools are popular. Broadband internet is really popular. People want these things and Republican want to continue denying the public even the most basic of government services. Right wing media’s singular goal will be to distract their audiences from these basic facts. They would rather talk about anything but their party’s own policies, which even their own voters would realize stink — if they ever turned off conservative media long enough to hear about it. 

A conservative TV job for Matt Gaetz seems unlikely: Fox News, others say it’s not happening

Before the news broke that the Department of Justice was investigating Rep. Matt Gaetz over an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, the Florida Republican was reportedly shopping around for a new job as a cable news host. Axios had reported that Gaetz, who denies the misconduct allegations, was “seriously considering” leaving Congress for a gig at Newsmax. Additional reporting from The Daily Beast, published on Wednesday afternoon, revealed that Gaetz was casting more widely within conservative media, angling for a job at One America News Network (OAN) or Fox News, among others. 

And yet public statements by networks, in addition to reported insider sources, are casting doubt on Gaetz’s prospects, despite his history as a frequent conservative media guest.

According to Axios, ahead of the New York Times’ report on the probe Tuesday night, Gaetz “privately told confidants he’s seriously considering not seeking re-election and possibly leaving Congress early for a job at Newsmax.” Following the news of the Justice Department’s investigation, reports have emerged noting that the flamboyant Donald Trump defender claimed to be eying opportunities at both the more mainstream Fox News and upstart OAN. But cable news networks appear to be distancing themselves from the congressman following reports of the probe and the subsequent claim made by Gaetz that he’s actually the victim of an elaborate scheme to extort his family to the tune of $25 million. 

Asked by The Daily Beast about the reports’ veracity on Wednesday, the Florida congressman said he had been in talks with various networks about his “life after Congress.”

“These conversations have been very general in nature and have never included me soliciting or receiving an offer of employment. There is not a single conservative television station I haven’t had a passing conversation with about life after Congress,” Gaetz told The Beast. “I have neither received nor solicited offers from any of them. But yes, I’ve talked to either executives, producers, or hosts at Newsmax, OAN, Fox, Fox Business, Real America’s Voice, and probably others I’m forgetting in this moment as I focus intently on refuting false accusations against me.”

A Fox News spokesperson refuted the claim that the network had been in talks with the congressman. “No one with any level of authority has had conversations with Matt Gaetz for any of our platforms, and we have no interest in hiring him,” a Fox News media spokesperson told Salon. 

Gaetz did appear on Fox News this week as a guest, where he apparently made quite an impression. Tucker Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated primetime host, is reportedly fuming at Gaetz over the congressman’s attempt to rope him into the controversy during an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that Carlson characterized immediately after as “one of the weirdest” he’s conducted. “It pissed him off,” a source familiar with Carlson’s reaction to the interview told CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

One America News CEO Robert Herring told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that “somebody did call me” to say that Gaetz “might be looking for” a cable news job, but that he thinks Gaetz should stick to politics. “Right now, I’m not really hiring anybody for talk shows. I think he is a great congressman, and I told [that ‘somebody’] to tell him to stay there,” Herring told The Beast. “That’s what I want Congressman Gaetz to do.”

Newsmax didn’t immediately return a Salon request for comment, but the prospects of a gig for Gaetz there don’t sound likely either. “Multiple Newsmax insiders also echoed similar doubts that Gaetz has any future as a cable-news host, with one source pointedly declaring, ‘Highly doubt it, highly,'” The Beast reported. 

“Damning” report exposes failures of Ivanka Trump’s signature policy initiative

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that Ivanka Trump’s signature policy initiative suffered from systematic implementation failures. The report, which was released on Wednesday, has been described by media outlets as “damning.” 

Trump rolled out her Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative as part of the 2018 Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empower Act (WEEE Act) in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to Politico.

The program, which supporters saw as a “whole-of-government approach,” was designed to bolster women’s programs in 10 different government agencies with the specific goal of supporting low-income entrepreneurs. One of the agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development, was given $265 million per year to subsidize the expansion of micro, small, and medium-sized business enterprises. Half of the funds were earmarked for women. 

Trump originally hailed the W-GDP as a sweeping initiative that enabled her father’s administration “to rigorously track the execution and the efficacy of the money that we are spending.”

However, according to the GAO’s 14-month audit of the program, it appears that her claim could not be further from the truth. No process was ever established by USAID to successfully direct money to its intended target groups, the agency said. Furthermore, no system was put in place to monitor the funds, and no clear eligibility requirements were drawn up to regulate which businesses could benefit from the program. 

“We identified three key gaps that impair USAID’s ability to develop such a process,” the report started. “First, USAID has not identified the total funding subject to the targeting requirements. Second, although USAID has programs designed to help the very poor, it is unable to determine the amount of funding that reaches this group. Third, although USAID has MSME activities that benefit women, it has not defined enterprises owned, managed and controlled by women and does not collect data by enterprise size.”

According to the GAO, the gaps in knowledge surrounding Trump’s initiative leave USAID “unable to determine what percentage of its MSME resources is going to the very poor and enterprises owned, managed and controlled by women.”

One Trump administration official told Politico that 2017 was a year plagued by a disorganized potpourri of women’s empowerment programs that never had any “clear goal or purpose.” White House officials reportedly had little control over USAID, which was charged with carrying out WEEE spending.

However, Trump was said to have held frequent meetings with the officials who ran the program. At one point, she alleged that the W-GDP helped 12.6 million Americans in 2019 alone. Ultimately, the GAO found no clear indication of success. “USAID has not defined and does not collect information necessary to meet its statutory targeting requirements,” the report concluded. 

For remedy, the report issued six recommendations, which suggest “a definition for enterprises owned, managed and controlled by women” and establishing new ways of assuring that allocated funds are distributed by the program as required. Gloria Steele, the USAID’s acting administrator, told The Hill that the agency had accepted all six of the recommendations.

An open-eyed history of wildlife conservation

Today’s conservationists are taxed with protecting the living embodiments of tens of millions of years of nature’s creation, and they face unprecedented challenges for doing so — from climate change and habitat destruction to pollution and unsustainable wildlife trade. Given that extinction is the price for failure, there’s little forgiveness for error. Success requires balancing not just the complexities of species and habitats, but also of people and politics. With an estimated 1 million species now threatened with extinction, conservationists need all the help they can get.

Yet the past — a key repository of lessons hard learned through trial and error — is all too often forgotten or overlooked by conservation practitioners today. In “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis shows that history can help contextualize and guide modern conservation. Indeed, arguably it’s only in the last 200 years or so that a few scattered individuals began thinking seriously about the need to save species — and it’s only in the last 50 that conservation biology even emerged as a distinct field.

“Beloved Beasts” reads as a who’s who and greatest-moments survey of these developmental decades. Through the eyes and actions of individuals, it portrays the evolution of the surprisingly young field from a pursuit almost solely of the privileged Western elite to “a movement that is shaped by many people, many places, and many species.”

It’s in the gray area of the personal, though, that the book is most fascinating. Even the most celebrated and successful conservationists had human flaws, and Nijhuis does not shy away from these details. As she writes, “The story of modern species conservation is full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.”

In one chapter, for example, Nijhuis tells the story of William Temple Hornaday, an American taxidermist who served as the first director of what is now the Bronx Zoo, and who is credited with saving the American bison from extinction. By the late 19th century, evidence clearly pointed to the fact that bison, a species that once numbered tens of million, were set to disappear due to wanton overhunting. Yet at the time, most people assumed that “species were static and enduring,” Nijhuis writes, and those who did catch wind of the fall of the American buffalo mostly responded with a shrug.

Strangely for his time, Hornaday became obsessed with the animal’s plight. He decided that the only way to preserve the species from extinction was to establish a captive herd to, as he wrote, “atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in the wild state.” With Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, Hornaday established a small bison herd in the Bronx in 1905, one whose urban descendants became founders of some of the 500,000 bison that survive today. More than just save a species, Hornaday’s work helped bring public recognition of extinction as a “needless tragedy” rather than an inevitable cost of expansion, Nijhuis writes.

Yet despite all the good he did for the natural world, Nijhuis points out that Hornaday’s successes — like many conservation gains of the 19th and 20th centuries — were built on a foundation of nationalism, sexism, and racism. “For Hornaday and his allies, the rescue of the bison had nothing to do with the people who had depended on the species — and a great deal to do with their own illusions about themselves,” Nijhuis writes.

Bison were slaughtered en masse in the 1800s, not just for their hides but also “as a convenient way to control” Native Americans who depended on the animals for food, Nijhuis writes. At the same time, White men like Hornaday and Roosevelt began appropriating bison as a symbol of rugged Caucasian masculinity, both for the animals’ association with a “strenuous life” and as the target of choice for of wealthy White male hunters. Despite evidence to the contrary, Hornaday placed partial blame for the bison’s demise on Native Americans, and his Bronx-raised bison, Nijhuis points out, were released on land seized from the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa. Protecting bison, therefore, meant protecting “a perniciously exclusive version of natural progress,” Nijhuis writes.

With each subsequent generation, though, the conservation field has gradually improved in terms of its scope and ethics. In his older age, Hornaday, for example, supported and encouraged the activism and ecological education of Rosalie Edge. A bird-loving New York socialite, Edge helped to reform the Audubon Society, which, at the time, supported the eradication of raptors and opposed tightening of hunting restrictions.

A year before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1934, Edge discussed with Hornaday a groundbreaking realization she had come to: that species should be protected not only because they are of interest to humans — as had motivated Hornaday and the men of his time — but because each forms a vital link in a living chain. A decade after Edge and Hornaday’s conversation, the centrality and fragility of ecological connections would become all the more apparent when Rachel Carson pondered the impacts of the pesticide DDT on raptors at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, a protected area Edge founded.

Ideas and connections continued to build. Around the same time Edge was campaigning for birds, Aldo Leopold popularized the idea that ecosystems, not just species, need to be protected, and that game is a public trust that should be managed by science-based law. This zeitgeist shift resulted in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Leopold “believed it was possible to love other species and use them wisely, too,” Nijhuis writes.

The conservation movement gained momentum in the wake of World War II, Nijhuis writes, when the word “global” came into wider use, and the interconnectedness of the world — both ecological and human — became glaringly apparent. Data compiled by the newly established International Union for Conservation of Nature also revealed just how many species faced extinction, and shifted the movement’s focus to emergency relief. But as conservation spread to other continents, especially Africa, it continued to work through various growing pains, including racist views about independent Africa’s inability to manage its own natural resources. “Many foreign conservationists saw the African landscape as John Muir had seen Yosemite — as an extraordinary place meant to be visited, not lived in,” Nijhuis writes.

This so-called fortress conservation approach perpetuated in the 1950s and 1960s — a top-down enterprise in which global authorities ultimately inform national and local agendas — has since come under fire and has been increasingly replaced by a version of conservation that acknowledges that humans are an inextricable part of the landscape. Additionally, time and time again, conservationists have learned (oftentimes the hard way) that protection of wild places can never succeed without buy-in from the people who live there. “To protect biodiversity — to provide other species with the resources they needed to adapt, survive, and thrive — conservationists, including conservation biologists, had to persuade some of their fellow humans to make some sacrifices, at least in the short term,” Nijhuis writes.

The problem, Nijhuis continues, “isn’t inattention to human needs, but inattention to human complexity.” Conservationists too often view humanity the same way they would a population of species that fits into a single ecological niche with set relationships and dependencies, Nijhuis argues, rather than as thinking and technologically endowed beings aware of our place among other species and each other. Nor are we passive players. “As the future perfect turns into the present perfect, we can apply ourselves to creating a tolerable present and future — for ourselves and for the rest of life,” Nijhuis writes.

The decisions we make are often unpredictable, though, informed by a vast array of social, cultural, and individual factors. “Conservation biology, in other words, can’t be left only to the biologists,” Nijhuis writes. It’s for this reason that the field has begun to draw upon other realms of expertise outside of pure ecology, including economics, politics, social science, and more. This need for diversity — not only in nature but also within human endeavors to protect it — is something that Leopold and others recognized decades ago, but has only just started to come to fruition in any practical way.

History is an integral part of that complexity, too. Just as we cannot protect something that we do not know exists, past failures and successes likewise cannot be taken advantage of for future gains if history is forgotten. “Beloved Beasts” is therefore compelling and necessary reading for anyone interested in the field of conservation. As Nijhuis writes, “We can move forward by understanding the story of struggle and survival we already have — and seeing the possibilities in what remains to be written.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.