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The GOP’s war on trans students hurts all kids: The right is coming for cis girls, too

Despite the rapidly changing times we live in, one truth remains eternal: Whenever conservatives claim they’re “protecting” women, women better be on their guard, because they’re always coming for our freedom.

In the 19th century, chivalrous rhetoric about women being the “angels in the house” was used to ennoble antagonism against women’s suffrage. Anti-feminists in the 1970s attacked the Equal Rights Amendment by falsely insinuating the housewives would be abandoned by their husbands. Reproductive rights opponents still justify onerous obstacles on abortion access by suggesting women can’t be trusted to make important decisions about their own bodies. And, as the current protest movement in Great Britain demonstrates, women’s freedom to socialize or even leave the house is often attacked under the guise of “protecting” them from violent men. 

Chivalrous rhetoric is being dusted off once again to abuse some of the most vulnerable people in our society: young trans people, especially those who are still minors. Across the country, the New York Times reports, “Republicans are diving into a culture war clash that seems to have come out of nowhere,” which is the growing hysteria over trans people competing in sports.

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People are being whipped into a frenzy over false claims that young people assigned male at birth are transitioning to female for the opportunity to compete on girls and women’s sports teams. And the story doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Transitioning is often medically invasive and is almost always disruptive to someone’s life on every level, not something one does just to get a gold medal at a high school track meet. But, as hysterias of the past demonstrate — think of urban legends like “Satanists hide messages in rock albums” and “people are hiding razor blades in Halloween candy” — many people’s will to believe trumps common sense.  

“Everybody must have seen the movie Juwanna Man and thought it was a real-life thing,” Renee Montgomery, former Minnesota Lynx player and current co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, joked on the podcast “Lovett or Leave It”. But as reporter Jeremy Peters notes, this panic isn’t really coming out of nowhere, but “has been brought about by a coordinated and poll-tested campaign by social conservative organizations.”

The GOP needs a highly emotional wedge issue that preys on people’s worst impulses, like the homophobic panic over same-sex marriage that helped George W. Bush win a tight election in 2004. Trans people, unfortunately, make a perfect target, as many cis Americans, those whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth, are ignorant about the realities of trans lives, making them easy to bamboozle with misinformation. But it has not passed the notice of people who actually care about women’s sports that the conservatives claiming they want to “save” women’s sports from trans athletes are the same people who have hobbled women’s sports at every turn through underfunding and outright mockery. 

“As a woman who has played sports my whole life, I know that the threats to women’s and girls’ sports are lack of funding, resources and media coverage; sexual harassment; and unequal pay,” Women’s World Cup champion Megan Rapinoe wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday. “[W]hat if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, ‘We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay’?” Lindsay Crouse, a journalist and long-time champion of women’s sports, wrote in the New York Times last week.  

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It’s not really hypocrisy that all these right-wingers claiming to be “protecting” women’s sports are also the same people who tend to otherwise treat women’s sports like a joke. On the contrary, the attacks on trans rights are all tied up in the assumption that women’s sports and female athletes are inferior. The myth that men are merely pretending to be trans in order to compete in women’s sports depends on seeing women’s sports as a consolation prize, an inferior product that someone only settles for if they can’t get the real deal. Claire Thorton’s interviews with trans athletes and their families for USA Today illustrate how conservative rhetoric around this is inherently reductive and demeaning to both the kids and to the very concept of women’s sports. 

“[Basketball] teaches you how to be a team player, it teaches you how to communicate, it teaches you how to work hard,” explained Layne Ingram, a college women’s basketball coach and a trans man who grew up playing boys basketball. 

The push to discriminate against trans students ends up reducing the entirety of women’s sports to not just athletes’ bodies, but their genitalia, reinforcing notions that women’s reproductive systems should define their entire existence. The primary victims of this shiny new GOP wedge issue are trans kids, but make no mistake, the rhetoric being employed hurts all sorts of kids, cis or trans.

The attacks on trans girls for supposedly not being “feminine” enough to play girls’ sports also affect cis girls whose bodies or behavior don’t conform to what sexists believe proper little ladies should look or act like. As Jett Jonelis, ACLU of South Dakota’s advocacy manager, said in response to a GOP-sponsored bill that would ban trans kids from sports in the state, “These attacks on trans women and girls are rooted in the same kind of gender discrimination and stereotyping that has held back cisgender women athletes for centuries.” 

Many of the anti-trans bills in states open the door to gender-testing that affects all kids, trans or cis. Put bluntly, in places like Idaho, the anti-trans laws give permission to schools to force kids to submit to an investigation of their genitals, a process that will be no less traumatic for cis girls who “pass” the inspection. As with laws requiring women who want an abortion to undergo vaginal ultrasounds, conservatives cannot wait to punish women they see as transgressing their standards of femininity — either by being trans, by playing sports, or by getting abortions — by subjecting them to humiliating invasions of their privacy. 

Such policing of gender expression, without regard to fairness, is neatly exposed by a case in Texas, where 17-year-old trans boy Mack Beggs was forced in 2017 to wrestle on the girls team and not the boys team. Beggs, who was taking testosterone to transition, ended up being utterly dominant in the sport. He took no joy in it, however, recently explaining to Yahoo! News that it was a “no-win situation” because “You have to wrestle against girls — but you really want to wrestle against guys.”

Far from “protecting” girls sports, trans bans make a spectacle out of girls sports, humiliating both trans and cis female student-athletes.

Conservatives have long resented women’s sports, especially since Title IX was passed in 1972, requiring public schools to treat men and women’s sports equally. It’s a provision that the right has spent decades trying — with great success — to undermine. Now trans athletes give them a twofer, a chance to both abuse a group of children and reinvigorate narratives that paint women’s sports as silly and inferior. And if they can toss on genital inspections of female athletes and force high school girls to wrestle boys, it’s only that much better. 

No feminist should be fooled by this phony language about “protecting” girls and women in sports. Policing trans kids is about reinforcing the same rigid gender norms that are used to trap cis women all the time, with assumptions about how we should look and act — and what our bodies should be used for — based on our gender. The people who, given a chance, would kill Title IX in a heartbeat are not the champions of women’s sports they pretend to be. They’re just the same old bigots and sexist, who have only put fresh coat of paint on the same old regressive arguments they’ve always made.  

Deborah Birx says Trump’s COVID response may have cost 400,000 lives: Did she do enough?

The head of former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the administration’s inadequate pandemic response may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Multiple task force members revealed, in interviews aired in a CNN special Sunday, that the response was even worse behind the scenes than previously known. Dr. Deborah Birx, who stood alongside Trump at his supposed press briefings and frequently defended the administration’s pandemic policies, told the network that she believes the vast majority of the nearly 500,000 deaths could have been prevented with a more aggressive response.

“I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” she said. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

Birx said later in the interview that the federal government “did not provide consistent messaging” on the pandemic.

“That was fault No. 1,” she said.

The comments drew severe backlash from some Democrats, who have long criticized Birx for enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Last March, Birx praised Trump as “so attentive to the scientific literature” and touted his “ability to analyze and integrate data.” She was also castigated for presenting overly optimistic data and staying silent when Trump suggested injecting coronavirus patients with bleach.

“Where was your voice last year?” questioned Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. “After a year of such tremendous loss, we need to make sure we remember the truth. This lost year should never have happened.”

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., argued that Birx was partly responsible for Trump’s “malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”

“Who was one of his enablers?” he tweeted. “Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him.”

Birx’s estimate of how many deaths resulted from the administration’s response is higher than some recent analyses. A commission impaneled by the Lancet medical journal concluded that roughly 40% of COVID deaths last year were preventable. An analysis by Harvard Researchers last June compared the U.S. response to other countries and concluded that more than 70% of early U.S. pandemic deaths were avoidable.

Birx told CNN that she drew Trump’s wrath when she did speak out about the threat posed by the spread of the virus. She recalled an interview with CNN last August CNN in which she warned about outbreaks in rural communities.

“That got horrible pushback,” she said. “That was a very difficult time because everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity I brought about the epidemic.”

Birx said Trump called her personally after the interview.

“I think you’ve heard other conversations other people have posted with the president. I would say it was even more direct than what people have heard,” she recalled. “It was very uncomfortable, very direct, very difficult to hear.”

“Were you threatened?” asked CNN’s Sanjay Gupta.

“I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation,” she replied, adding that someone later blocked her from future national TV appearances.

“My understanding was I could not be national because the president might see it,” she said.

Birx previously told CBS News in January that she had been “censored” by the Trump White House and had “always” considered quitting.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he was freer to be the “skunk in the picnic” and push back against Trump’s claims because he had the backing of the National Institutes of Health and did not work directly in the White House.

“Deb had a much more difficult situation,” he told CNN. “She had an office right there in the West Wing. So, I am very, very reluctant to condemn anything that — even though people felt she should push more, she did a lot of good.”

Elsewhere in the special, Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar of pressuring him to revise reports detailing the pandemic’s weekly death toll.

“The one time that was the most egregious was, not only was I pressured by the secretary and his office and his lawyers, but as I was driving home, his lawyer and his chief of staff called and pressured me again for at least another hour,” Redfield said. “Even to the point of, like, accusing me of failing to make this change that would cost, you know, thousands of lives. I finally had a moment in life where I said, you know, enough is enough. You know? If you want to fire me, fire me. I’m not changing the [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report].”

Azar told the network that “any suggestion that I pressured or otherwise asked Dr. Redfield to change the content of a single scientific, peer-reviewed MMWR article is false.”

“Now he may deny that, but it’s true,” Redfield said.

Former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn also called out Azar, telling the network that he prevented the FDA from regulating coronavirus tests. Hahn told CNN that was “a line in the sand for me.”

Gupta pressed Hahn on reports that Azar shouted at him over the spat.

“You should ask him that question,” Hahn said.

Azar told CNN that “Hahn’s recitation of this call is incorrect” and “the only intemperate conduct … was Dr. Hahn’s threat to resign,” which Hahn denied.

Brett Giroir, the Trump administration’s testing czar, also told the network that top administration officials lied about the number of tests that were available.

“When we said there were millions of tests — there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were components of the test available but not the full deal.”

Birx said that White House officials really believed Trump’s frequent claim that “testing was driving cases, rather than testing was a way for us to stop cases.”

But public health experts say the task force officials failed by not pushing harder for Americans to know the truth about the deadly pandemic.

“It’s ridiculous,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s public health school, told The Washington Post. “Brett Giroir knew we had a problem with testing. With PPE. With vaccine distribution. He told me as much. But he felt he needed to say what the administration wanted to hear publicly.”

Some former administration officials agreed.

“They were all complicit in a narrative to downplay the threat because they felt that’s what Trump wanted,” a former official told the outlet. “They manipulated their statements to please Trump, right up until the point that it was painfully clear they had made a bad personal trade.”

Pressed by Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham admits GOP’s new voter restrictions don’t make sense

In a Fox News interview, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., admitted on Wednesday that Georgia’s new GOP-backed voting law––which, among other things, makes it illegal to give food and water to Georgia voters waiting in line––doesn’t “make a whole lot of sense.”

Last week, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a new voting bill sponsored by state Republicans that imposes heavy restrictions on Georgia residents. Measures in the bill include stricter voting ID requirements, slashing the number of drop boxes, entitling state officials to more managerial power, cuts to early voting days, criminalizing the practice of handing out food or water to people waiting in line to vote. 

On Sunday, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace took aim at the sheer absurdity of the last measure, asking Graham, “Senator, why on earth if Americans are willing to wait for hours to vote, would you make it a crime for people to come and give them a bottle of water?”

“Well, all I can say is that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” Graham responded. “I agree with you there.”

Section 33 of SB202, Georgia’s voting law, states the following: “No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast.”

The law, which follows President Joe Biden’s win in the state as well as the defeat of the state’s two incumbent GOP senators, is part of a broader GOP push to heighten voting restrictions throughout the nation. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 43 states have introduced over 250 Republican-backed bills that intend to restrict voting. Last week, Biden condemned the recent wave of voter-suppression bills as “sick and “un-American,” specifically calling the new law in Georgia “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”

Graham, who reportedly attempted to pressure the Georgia state secretary into discounting last year’s presidential ballots, ranted about Democrats painting the GOP as racist and framed H.R. 1––the Democrats’ democracy reform bill––as the “biggest power grab in history.”

“Any time a Republican does anything, you’re a racist, if you’re a white conservative, you’re a racist,” Graham complained to Wallace. “If you’re a Black Republican, you are either pop or Uncle Tom. They use the racism card to advance the liberalism agenda. H.R. 1 is sick, not what they’re doing in Georgia.”

The South Carolina Republican also criticized Biden’s recent claim that the filibuster is rooted in racism of the Civil Rights era, a conclusion shared by former President Barack Obama. “You know what’s sick is that the President of the United States played the race card continuously in such a hypocritical way,” Graham noted.

https://twitter.com/FoxNewsSunday/status/1376181111257194496

Voting rights activists have called upon Georgia’s corporate sector to raise awareness of the Republican electoral attack. Companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines have been targets of “intense criticism” for not coming out against the new law. Some activists have called for a boycott of any business that does not explicitly oppose the law. 

Last Thursday, three groups –– New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund, and Rise –– announced a lawsuit intended to block the bill, arguing that it puts “unconstitutional burdens on the right to vote.”

“None of the bill’s burdensome and discriminatory changes to Georgia’s election code will increase the public’s confidence in the state’s election administration or ensure election integrity,” the groups argued. “Rather, the grab bag of voting restrictions that populate SB 202 make clear that the Bill was animated by an impermissible goal of restricting voting.”

Don’t blame Facebook: How Fox News became the beating heart of the white nationalist movement

Political analysts are still trying to figure out just what has caused the Republican Party in this country to move so far to the right in recent years, and there are many theories. Much has been made of the Trump-loving white working class’s perceived loss of economic success due to outsourcing and international trade and we’ve endlessly discussed their various grievances about losing the status and privileges they believe they are entitled to. We try to understand their confusion about changing cultural norms and the cascading disinformation that permeates social media. In the end, all we really know is that they are very upset and Donald Trump gave voice to their overwhelming anger and disdain for their fellow Americans.

Last week there was yet another congressional hearing with the top social media executives, this one focusing on the role of their companies in promoting extremism, misinformation, and cyberbullying. Republicans were most concerned about the companies censoring right-wing voices (although interestingly, they didn’t complain much about Donald Trump’s expulsion from all the platforms) and Democrats complained about disinformation and extremism being allowed to flourish on the platforms.

We don’t really know at this point how much of that affected the 2020 election. As Kevin Drum pointed out, we are still awaiting data to tell us just how much people relied on social media for their political information during the election but judging by past analysis of election campaigns, it really isn’t as influential as we might assume. There’s no doubt that Facebook and Youtube and to some extent Twitter can lead people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, and there’s little doubt that right-wing extremism has had a very comfortable home on all those sites. But according to the analysis that Drum cites, TV and talk radio are still where the action is. Fox and OAN and Newsmax may pick up ideas that percolate up through the fever swamps to social media. But really, it mostly goes the other direction.

Journalist Peter Slevin spent some months in Iowa before and after the election to get a sense of what the mostly rural, Republican voters were thinking. He reports in this piece in the New Yorker that basically, they are awash in disinformation and as a result have come to believe that Democratic voters are hardly even Americans anymore. Their own form of “identity politics” has been distilled down to “I am a Republican” in opposition to their enemies.

They believed that Donald Trump was the only person who could control the violent, socialist mob that was threatening their way of life. And they believed everything he said:

I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said, “People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that’s not going to denounce rioting.” Pont believes covid-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a “figurehead,” and Harris is unqualified. “I’m terrified,” she told me. “She is the most left-leaning of all the senators.” When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her “disappointed and disillusioned.”

Slevin noticed that in every house and business, right-wing talk radio was on in the background and the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh were saying things like this:

Obama’s been running the Democrats’ show since 2016. He ran the operation against Trump. He ran the Russia sting. He ran the Russian coup. He ran everything, and he’s running this.”

None of that is QAnon weirdness or Alex Jones and Infowars. It is standard issue mainstream conservative media, which millions of Republicans listen to every day and watch on Fox News and the lesser cable channels at night.

Throughout the Trump administration, there was an ongoing question about whether Fox News was the president’s brain or vice versa. I came to believe that it was a feedback loop with disinformation coming from both sides. There were numerous examples of Trump tweeting out some outlandish insult or idea just seconds after it had aired on the network. And the Fox News universe was dedicated to ensuring their audience saw Trump as their savior, often cleaning up his misstatements and amplifying his most effective messages to the faithful. They were a team.

Trump has begun to call into the shows again, clearly unable to keep out of the spotlight any longer. He checked in with Laura Ingraham a few days ago and made this stunning comment about January 6th:

You will note that at the end he said of “the left”: “they truly hate our country.” That is the message those people in Iowa hear from him and all the talkers on the radio and right-wing cable news.

The question is where they go from here. It’s unknown if Trump will maintain his influence. He intends to, of course, and unless he fades, these blatant lies will continue to be believed by tens of millions of people. He can draw an audience. But he can’t last forever and there’s little reason to believe that his offspring have whatever it is he has that appeals so much to these folks. But one Fox News celebrity is laying out a roadmap:

You’ll note that this is all predicated on the notion that the liberals are making them do it. Carlson is the most flagrant white nationalist of the big-name Fox News celebrities and he gets the biggest ratings, which I suspect is not a coincidence. Before this guest joined Carlson, the host was nearly hysterical about the migrants at the border. He said:

You’d think that if you’d caused a crisis of this magnitude that was going to change your country forever, possibly for the worse, you’d feel a moral obligation to learn a lot about it because it’s your crisis. You own it, you did it. But Biden hasn’t.”

A moral obligation to learn about a crisis? This is the same person who backed Trump’s COVID response to the hilt and has been recently pushing anti-vax propaganda.

If you want to know what’s fuelling right-wing extremism, you don’t have to dig deeply into obscure corners of the dark web. Look no further than Fox News. It isn’t just a ratings game for them and it isn’t all about money. Fox News is the beating heart of the white nationalist movement in the United States and they are indoctrinating millions of people day in and day out. In fact, Donald Trump himself is one of those people, he just doesn’t know it. 

The tamis is the underrated kitchen tool I can’t stop thinking about

I feel intimately connected to every item in my kitchen. There’s the bowl I love to eat my oatmeal out of, the mug I only use for morning coffee, my favorite fork, the whisk I bought in college, my light green mandoline. I carry my favorites with me from apartment to apartment, sometimes even city to city. Some items — the hard-boiled-egg slicer — don’t stand the test of time. But the tried-and-true are here to stay.

That’s why, when I uncover a new, must-have kitchen tool, it feels like a revelation. Enter the tamis. What is a tamis? It looks like a springform pan, but with a flat metal sieve across the bottom. In Indian cooking, a chalni accomplishes a similar purpose. Others may know the tamis as a fine mesh strainer or a drum sieve (named for its shape).

Though for many the tamis may be nothing new, for me it’s opened an entire world of culinary possibility.

The crux of the tamis’s magic is in its flat mesh bottom. Unlike, say, a colander or a cylindrical strainer, the horizontal bottom allows for a more even and controlled straining experience, especially if you coax the substance through with a scraper.

Writers like Amy Scattergood have been proclaiming the benefits of the tamis for over 10 years now. In 2007, she published a piece in The Los Angeles Times extolling the virtues of the lesser-known kitchen tool. She talks to a bevy of restaurant chefs who swear by the tamis to accomplish anything from sifting flour to preparing gnocchi dough.

Andrea Galan, a former MasterChef contestant who’s worked in New York City and Barcelona, says every professional kitchen she’s worked in has used a tamis. “I remember at Abac, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Barcelona,” she says, “every day I had to make fresh mashed potatoes and I had to peel, boil, and strain tiny potatoes using the tamis.” At Dirt Candy in New York, she passed a spinach purée through their tamis to make a super-smooth concentrate that would form the base of a spinach spaetzle. “It’s a great tool for separating fiber.”

Our former test kitchen chef, Josh, even created a mashed potato recipe that calls for using a tamis. After softening the spuds in boiling water, he recommends smashing them through the tool. I imagine a dough scraper would work perfectly here, and can just see the softened potato eking through the mesh bottom, falling below into a soft mound of purée.

“I had never heard of a tamis until I started working in kitchens, but chefs love them for sifting clumpy dry ingredients like cocoa powder or confectioners’ sugar, or analog-puréeing softies like roasted sweet potato or ripe avocado,” says Food Editor Emma Laperruque. “The catch is it’s bulky, which is probably why I never invested in one in my own kitchen. I might not have anything as versatile as a tamis, but there’s almost always a tamis understudy (like a fork or whisk or fine mesh strainer) for whatever I need to get done.”

Though the tamis dates back to the Middle Ages, it hasn’t trickled down into the average home cook’s arsenal. A cursory search for #tamis on Instagram reveals a tool used more for decor than any hardcore kitchen tasks. Perhaps it’s time that changed.

More essential tools:

Dominion attorney lays out how Fox News executives screwed up their billion-dollar lawsuit defense

Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” an attorney from Dominion Voting Systems explained this client’s case billion dollar defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News and hinted the company is still pondering a lawsuit aimed at former President Donald Trump.

Speaking with host Brian Stelter, attorney Stephen Shackleford explained that top executives at the conservative news network already know the case is lost because they tried to make amends by backtracking on comments made by the network’s personalities while on-air.

As Shackleford explained, the rush to correct the stories after weeks of their employees pushing the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump was an admission of guilt. Add to that they ran disclaimers during low viewership hours while still promoting the lies at other hours.

“As you know, part of proving that a statement is defamatory is to prove that it was made either knowing the stories were false or with reckless disregard for the truth,” the attorney stated. “You pointed out to your viewers that our complaint lays out in gory detail of days and days over weeks and weeks Fox kept spouting lies about Dominion, devastating lies about Dominion on their airwaves even while being told the truth over and over again.”

“And yes, they were told the truth by Dominion,” he continued. “Dominion sent multiple emails and retraction demands — there was a chorus of bipartisan officials explaining how the lies were false. How the election — how Dominion machines performed as they were supposed to and accurately counted the votes.”

“Fox was not reporting the news with the news outlined in the complaint,” he told the CNN host. “Fox was repeatedly stating as fact, putting on Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and also with their own anchors endorsing what Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani were saying, all of these lies about Dominion and stating them as fact and they did have a Dominion spokesperson on at one point but it was much smaller viewership and Fox did not promote it like they promoted [the segments done by Maria] Bartiromo and [Lou] Dobbs and other shows they put throughout their massive social media network.”

“But you can’t get away from defamation by saying the truth in the morning and lying through your teeth in the afternoon,” he explained. “If that was the case, all the media would have to do is issue a retraction after the damage. But that is not the law of defamation, knowing with reckless disregard.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Philosopher Jason Stanley: Fascism’s definitely not beaten — but there’s reason for hope

The hope-peddlers and their related ilk in the mainstream news media and elsewhere would like the American people and global public to believe that Donald Trump and his neofascist movement were defeated on Election Day and by Joe Biden’s ascendance as president of the United States. They were not.

Trump’s forces attempted to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, a plot that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Law enforcement and other experts predict that the United States may experience years, if not decades, of terrorism and other political violence by right-wing insurgents who have been inspired and mobilized by Trump’s presidency and movement.

The Republican Party is the front organization — the “polite face” — of American neofascism. In that role, the party and the broader “conservative” movement (including think tanks, interest groups and consulting firms, as well as individual political operatives) have escalated their long-planned strategy to destroy multiracial secular democracy.

In Georgia and 42 other states, Republicans and their operatives are enacting legislation to stop Black and brown voters and other members of the Democratic coalition from voting. Ultimately, this is an attempt to impose a new Jim Crow-style apartheid regime in America.

The New York Times summarizes the details of this new war on voting rights:

After record turnout flipped Georgia blue for the first time in decades, Republicans who control the state Legislature moved swiftly to put in place a raft of new restrictions on voting access, passing a new bill that was signed into law on Thursday.

The law will alter foundational elements of voting in Georgia, which supported President Biden in November and a pair of Democratic senators in January — narrow victories attributable in part to the turnout of Black voters and the array of voting options in the state.

Taken together, the new barriers will have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Republican legislation will undermine pillars of voting access by limiting drop boxes for mail ballots, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting and making it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Long lines to vote are common in Black neighborhoods in Georgia’s cities, particularly Atlanta, where much of the state’s Democratic electorate lives.

Republican policies and ideas are unpopular with the majority of Americans. Demographic changes are also making the Republican Party’s white supremacy and racism unappealing to large swaths of the public. In response, Republicans and the white right are attempting to end multiracial majoritarian democracy and replace it with a pseudo-democratic system political scientists describe as “competitive authoritarianism.”

In a recent tweet, the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer neatly describes this anti-democratic and anti-human logic: “The country is simply theirs; if democracy produces an outcome other than Republican victory then democracy as they understand it has ceased to function.”

The hope peddlers, stenographers of current events, professional centrists and others who have consistently underestimated the Republican threat to democracy have done so largely because they deluded themselves into believing that fascism is something that happens “over there,” and was defeated on the battlefields of Europe and Asia during World War II.

The troubling reality is that American fascism has existed for centuries in such forms as white on black chattel slavery; genocide against First Nations people; the creation of a white American empire under Manifest Destiny; concentration camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned; white supremacist violence against brown people along the U.S.- Mexico border and in Texas, California, and the Southwest more generally; and Jim and Jane Crow terrorism and its legacy in “post-racial” America in the Age of Trump and beyond.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of several books, including “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works.” His essays and other commentaries have been featured in such leading publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Review and the Guardian.

In this conversation he explains how the Republican Party and white right are manipulating language and symbols in their campaign to stop Black people from voting in Georgia as part of a larger attack on democracy. Stanley also details how Trump’s coup attempt and his forces’ attack on the Capitol was a crystallization of various elements — including Christian Nationalism, the QAnon conspiracy theory, the neo-Confederate movement, and right-wing paramilitaries and militias — which constitute the core of the American fascist movement and imagination.

Stanley also warns that the attacks on democracy in Georgia and across the country are an ominous sign: Donald Trump may no longer be president, the neofascist movement marches on and American democracy is still imperiled.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Joe Biden’s approval level is high, and even some Republicans are temporary converts to his cause of healing the nation. The American people have gotten more support through Biden and the Democratic Party’s survival checks and other programs. Biden is trying to be a true leader who obviously cares about the American people and loves the country. But he has only been president for two months. There is all this organized forgetting about the evils of the Trump regime. The American people have been so traumatized that they are desperate for hope. But it is far too early to celebrate given Trumpism’s enduring power, his coup attempt and a growing right-wing terrorist insurgency. Am I being too cynical?

You can’t have unrelenting hopelessness. At a certain point people just shut off. Hungary is a good example of a country without any political hope at all right now. Democracy is done there. Viktor Orbán is going to be in power until he dies. What happens if a people do not have any success in fighting back and resisting to save their country’s democracy? They acclimate. If you are going to live your life in an authoritarian society, often with brutal dictators, a person acclimates to it. They shut off their political side.

I think it’s important to have those moments, like in Georgia, those victories that people can look to. The battle there is by no means over. The Republican Party knows its weakness in terms of winning elections democratically. Now the Republicans are systematically targeting democracy. The other day I was thinking: What was it like to live during Jim Crow as a white person in the North? You knew that the South was robbing all Black Americans of the right to vote. Well, we are looking at such a situation now, with the Republicans systematically taking away the right to vote. It is an emergency. The rot is deep. The Republican Party has become an anti-democratic party and they know that they are not going to win elections by a majority vote. Democracy is not over – but there is a potentially very grim future ahead.

As an expert on fascism, what did you see as you watched Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol?

It was a moment of social chaos. With Trump’s claims about the election, it gave license to his followers. But I was actually expecting much worse and I have felt that way for some time.

I am surprised the attack on the Capitol was not more violent. I was also concerned that law enforcement agents would join in the attack too. There were concerns about other formal parts of government too given the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.

How does the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 by Trump’s supporters cohere into an over-arching narrative of American neofascism?

The kind of fascism here in the United States is white Christian nationalism that is connected to the Southern Confederacy “lost cause” mythos. Now there is an additional dimension, which is a new “lost cause” myth that is the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and his movement.

At the Capitol attack there were people dressed up like Vikings and other characters from Norse myths, which is more of an example drawn from classic European fascism — for example, the “shaman” wearing the horns. In total, the attack on the Capitol involved the unification of Southern white Confederacy supporters, the lost cause, and Christian nationalists. Add the worship of Trump, and it is a cult of the leader.

What is the role of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and conspiracism more generally, in American neofascism?

It is utterly central, in that the “enemy” is not legitimate in terms of democracy. The “enemy” is depicted as being a fundamental threat to the nation. The structure with this new American neofascism and its conspiracism mirrors KKK ideology and Nazism with the idea that there are these “leftist elites” — in the past and even in the present, those “leftist elites” would be “the Jews.” In that imaginary, “the Jews” are trying to provoke and manipulate Black people into a “race war” that would destroy the nation. Now they have included feminism and the rights of gays and lesbians in their conspiratorial narrative.

In the end, it is really an old story about “defending the nation,” which in turn means defending white Christian patriarchy. The importance of patriarchy in these neofascist conspiracies must be remembered. These conspiracy theories are deeply patriarchal. They are centered around child sex abuse and the sex trafficking of women.  At its root the narrative is: “Your women are at risk and you need a strong leader to protect them.” Those enemies want “your women.” The enemy is going to turn your boys into girls. They’re going to take “your women” and traffic them. They’re going to take your children. These conspiracy theories are central to a politics of fear, and a politics of fear makes a person and group crave a strong leader.

The role of emasculation, both literally and metaphorically, is important in the QAnon neofascist imagination. That and many other right-wing conspiracy theories are fixated on embattled masculinity and weakness, and fears by men that they cannot protect their women and children. And the ultimate protector in their view of the world is the white Christian male.

That is correct. These types of conspiracy theories such as QAnon make that aspect of fascism very salient and central. If a man cannot protect “his women,” then he is truly emasculated.

The “cancel culture” right-wing myth-making is also centered on similar threats and anxieties. It is all deeply existential, where the internal logic is that we white right-wing Christian conservatives are going to be “canceled,” meaning destroyed by “those people.” Violence, then, is a natural and logical response.

The economic is shifted to the cultural. Then the language becomes one of how it is a culture war of annihilation. You are correct: The culture war narrative is about existential enemies. What the right-wing’s narrative involves are claims of existential threat because “they,” “the enemy” — here being the “left,” Democrats, progressives, liberals, etc. — are trying to destroy “our” culture.

Now the focus becomes central elements of childhood. The “enemy” is trying to rob you of your childhood identity. And remember your childhood? It was nostalgic and innocent. They’re trying to rob you of your past! The right-wing culture war narrative is creating a narrative and logic that “the enemy” is doing a horrible wrong to you. The sense of anxiety you feel, it’s because your past was stolen away. They’re trying to say that your past, the nostalgic childhood things you loved, are evil. Dr. Seuss, Disney. And moreover, they’re trying to tell you your childhood was racist and evil. The right-wing cancel culture strategy makes their public furious. Now the anxieties about the future are refocused there instead of on other matters.

How does one counter this?

The first thing is to remove the sense of impending doom and anxiety from them. That’s what the Biden administration is trying to do. The only way we know how to do that is economically. You will always have people with immature emotional impulses. The only thing you can do is try to minimize the anxiety.

The idea that white supremacy, racism, neofascism and other anti-human philosophies and movements can be stopped through money and resources is a very orthodox left way of approaching these problems — this idea that material realities are at the root of such social problems. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. For example, there are many rich or upper-class white people who support Trumpism and other forms of American fascism. They are not suffering from “economic anxiety.”

We are never going to get rid of the problem. We can only reduce the support for these types of fascist conspiratorial ideas and movements.

Slavery and Jim Crow are America’s native form of fascism. How does that help to explain what is happening in Georgia and other parts of the country, with these efforts to stop Black and brown people from voting?

What is happening in Georgia and other parts of the country is clearly continuous with our Jim Crow past, with superficially race-neutral barriers to voting designed specifically to place serious obstacles to voting for Black, poor and urban voters. Instead of literacy tests, you have well-designed strategies based on empirical research about voter access that are being implemented to impede democracy. Most frighteningly, these laws further politicize the election administration process, to a degree that compromises the claims of states that pass such legislation to be democracies.

Republicans clearly were paying attention in 2020 to the obstacles that prevented Trump from overturning the election. They have focused precisely on those obstacles across the relevant states and removed them with surgical precision. You will now legally be able to discard votes from Black-majority cities. It’s legal. That’s vitally important to pay attention to — when you write into law the basis for disenfranchising populations you don’t like, it’s time to reevaluate whether or not you are living in a democracy.

What did you make of the anti-democracy Georgia voting bill being signed into law in a room of masked white men, under a painting of a Black slave labor prison camp, while a Black Georgia state representative, Park Cannon, was being arrested for trying to enter the governor’s office to witness these events?

Politicians pay close attention to imagery. It is implausible to think that the symbolism was not intentional.

How are the Republican Party and white right using propaganda and other manipulations of language — which are in fact assaults on reality — to create a new Jim Crow system?

This is what I describe as “undermining propaganda.” You use an ideal to subvert that very same ideal. “One person, one vote” is used to push voter disenfranchisement laws. You claim that you are “protecting” democracy while in fact you are undermining it. It is a standard approach to propaganda — undermine the thing you are claiming to protect. An even better description for that strategy is “immolation.” Democratic ideas are being immolated. The way the destruction is concealed is by racism. The Republican Party and broader right wing, in its attacks on democracy, say that they care about “real votes” and “genuine votes.” What are the genuine votes? In their mind, the genuine votes are the white votes.   

Republican legislatures across the country are keeping the Trump agenda alive

GOP state lawmakers across the country are pushing a tidal wave of anti-progressive bills addressing cracking down on voting, protesting, pandemic management, Medicaid expansion, and transgender protections.

In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a new law on Thursday banning transgender women and girls from competing in school sports teams that correspond with their gender identities. A trio of Iowa GOP lawmakers introduced a bill in the same spirit, but quickly withdrew it from consideration last week. The Iowa bill would have required students to present signed statements from licensed doctors confirming their biological sex before being admitted to any sports team. On Monday, North Carolina hopped on the anti-trans bandwagon, with lawmakers introducing a bill that would apply similar restrictions on transgender students in middle and high school. Mississippi and North Dakota passed similar laws last month.

Activists say that the Republican state-level pushback indicates a “coordinated attack” against the transgender community. Opponents of equality failed to claw back marriage equality and failed in their push for bathroom bills,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a statement. “These bills are not addressing any real problem, and they’re not being requested by constituents. Rather, this effort is being driven by national far-right organizations attempting to sow fear and hate.”

State Republicans have also taken aim at public demonstrations in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which triggered a cascade of vague handwringing from GOP lawmakers about so-called “left-wing violence.”

On Thursday, the Florida House opened debate on H.B. 1, a bill that would strengthen penalties against rioters by designating misdemeanors as felonies. “We’ve proposed the strongest anti rioting, pro-law enforcement reforms in the nation,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said to lawmakers earlier this month. “We will not allow our cities to burn and violence to rule the streets, and we will not leave any doubt in the minds of those who wear the uniform that the state of Florida stands with you.” 

Opponents of the bill have railed against its overbroad definition of “riot,” stressing that it would heighten the potential for police violence by expanding the circumstances in which the use of force is warranted. The Florida bill was preceded by a flurry of similar anti-protests bills introduced in state legislatures immediately after the Capitol riot, according to The Intercept. At the time of the report’s publication, at least nine states were considering 14 anti-protest bills. 

In Georgia, a bill currently under review increases penalties for anyone that commits a crime during a protest. A Kentucky bill would criminalize insulting a police officer.

Republican state officials have also systematically blocked any expansions to Medicaid.

In Missouri, the House Budget Committee voted along party lines to impede a bill that allowed the state to spend respectively $130 million and $1.6 billion in state and federal funds in order to bolster Medicaid, a move that would allow 230,000 uninsured low-income Missouri residents to get coverage. Although Missouri voters approved the measure on a ballot question last August with a 53% majority, Republicans have argued that the cost of expansion would be too high, even though the Affordable Care Act already covers 90 percent of the cost. Mississippi is pulling a similar stunt, as Salon reported last week. The Magnolia State’s governor, Tate Reeves, signaled on Mar. 14 that he would not expand the state’s Medicaid program, even though the move would make the state eligible for a 15% federal match in funding. As already noted, since the Affordable Care Act already covers 90% of the cost, the governor is effectively turning down a 105% match, or 5% credit. 

Many states are also facing a severe curtailment of voting rights.

On Wednesday, Michigan Republicans filed 39 election reform bills with proposals that would, among other measures, require voters to request absentee ballots, prohibit online absentee voting, and bar clerks from providing prepaid return postage on absentee ballots. State Democrats have demurred the bills as both undemocratic and racist, as they would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.

Earlier this month, the Georgia state legislature passed a similar bill that, as Salon reported, would “limit Sunday voting to a single day, restrict mail ballot drop boxes to early voting locations, require voter ID for mail ballots, set the deadline for voters to request mail ballots to 11 days before the election, and cut the amount of time between general elections and runoffs from nine weeks to four.” Former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, D, said the bill likens “post-Reconstruction Jim Crow-era laws.” Texas also joined the fold last week by introducing a new wave of voting restrictions that would prohibit drive-thru voting, restrict voting machines at polling centers, slash early voting hours, and more.

Other states around the country are continuing to undermine federal public health guidance as the pandemic wanes. Ohio’s state legislature, for example, voted on Wednesday to limit the ability of Gov. Mike DeWine, R, to issue public health orders. DeWine has argued that the move “jeopardizes the safety of every Ohioan” and “restrict local health departments’ ability to move quickly to protect the public from the most serious emergencies Ohio could face.”

Fox News host complains about Biden’s travel in first 100 days, fails to mention Trump’s golf trips

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday complained to Eric Trump about President Joe Biden’s weekend trips to his family home in Delaware.

“If the Biden and Harris administration does not want to visit the border then President Trump says he will go to the border,” Bartiromo said during her introduction of the former president’s son.

“Eric, great to see you today,” she said. “It’s worth noting that Biden spent this weekend in Delaware, his fifth trip home since becoming president. That’s his sixth weekend away from the White House. We’re not even 100 days in!”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Trump replied. “It’s heartbreaking to us. I saw how much time and effort my father put into the job.”

“You know how many times my father went down to the border?” he continued. “Because it’s a serious issue that, you know, plagues this country. I mean, you’ve seen it and you see these children and my father had the issue fixed, Maria.”

The Fox News host failed to mention that former President Donald Trump played golf 19 times during his first 100 days.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

GOP’s invented “border crisis” is just a political distraction, immigration activists say

As Republicans attempt to portray the arrival of unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors at the U.S.-Mexico border as a threatening crisis caused by the Biden administration’s supposedly lenient policies, immigrant rights advocates are warning that this right-wing framing of the situation is a “trap” designed to score political points while dehumanizing migrants.

“The GOP’s framing of migrant children arriving at the border as a ‘crisis’ is nothing but a divide and distract tactic,” America’s Voice, an immigrant rights organization, said Saturday in a video statement. “Their focus on the border is a cynical and strategic racist play for political gain.”

America’s voice pointed to what Stephen Miller, a white nationalist and top adviser to former President Donald Trump, said last month: “From a purely political standpoint, [immigration] is a recipe for Democrats to have a historic drubbing in the midterms if we can make it even as big an issue or bigger than Obamacare.”

As America’s Voice noted, many in the GOP are “fully embracing” Miller’s strategy. The National Republican Senatorial Committee “has already started running xenophobic dog-whistle ads” against President Biden and congressional Democrats, and more than 32 GOP lawmakers have “used the hashtag ‘BidensBorderCrisis’ alongside hate groups and far-right media personalities.”

The most high-profile stunt came Friday when more than a dozen congressional Republicans traveled to Texas, where they engaged in a “fear-mongering photo op,” as America’s Voice described the lawmakers’ tour of the Rio Grande aboard machine gun-equipped boats.

“For the GOP, the border is all about politics and cruelty, not policy,” said America’s Voice. The organization alluded to a tweet shared last week by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that criticizes Biden for “emphasiz[ing] the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status,” rather than following in the footsteps of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who cracked down on immigrants in the 1990s.

Congressional Democrats also sent a delegation to the border on Friday.

In sharp contrast to the GOP — which is “terroriz[ing] the children who are coming here to seek asylum,” as journalist Jacob Soboroff put it — Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the purpose of their visit was to ensure that unaccompanied minors being detained in Texas are “treated humanely.”

“This isn’t about politics and it isn’t about playing games,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said Friday from the Carrizo Springs detention facility. “It’s about the humanity of these children. It’s about respecting their dignity and it’s about empathizing on what it means to be in their situation.”

America’s Voice argued that “the GOP’s coordinated efforts are meant as a tactical political distraction.” 

As the Washington Post reported Thursday, there has not been an uncharacteristic “surge” in migrants entering the U.S. at the southern border, but rather a predictable bump in border crossings that typically happens at this time of year, augmented by the arrival of people who would have come in 2020 but could not due to the clampdown on immigration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that “since March 20, 2020, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its order invoking Title 42, U.S. border officials have claimed unchecked, unilateral authority to summarily expel from the country hundreds of thousands of” undocumented immigrants — including single adults, families, and even unaccompanied children and mothers with infant U.S. citizens — “without due process or access to asylum.”

While Biden has kept the Trump-era policy in place for single adults and families, the White House last month reversed the previous administration’s xenophobic “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers and announced that it would not deport unaccompanied minors.

Thousands of migrant children are now being held in overcrowded facilities run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which falls under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Although DHS is supposed to transfer minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours — after which children are housed in Department of Health and Human Services-approved shelters until they can be placed with a family member or another suitable sponsor — thousands have been stuck for far longer than legally allowed in squalid conditions.

The Post emphasized that the changes enacted by Biden are not responsible for the rise in border crossings: “We analyzed monthly U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from 2012 through February and found no clear evidence that the overall increase in border crossings in 2021 can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase fits a pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.”

“CBP has recorded a 28% increase in migrants apprehended from January to February 2021,” the Post noted. “During fiscal year 2019, under the Trump administration, total apprehensions increased 31% during the same period.”

“Migrants still came to the U.S. under the cruelty and chaos approach the GOP employed under Trump,” America’s Voice pointed out, which negates the claims of Republican lawmakers and right-wing media outlets that the recent uptick in apprehensions — part of a seasonal pattern — is a reflection of the Biden administration’s deviation from the Trump administration’s maximally cruel response to immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to America’s Voice, “The new administration is fixing an intentionally broken mess and trying to build a safe, humane, and timely system to process asylum claims.”

Biden has come under fire, however, for restricting media access to CBP’s detention facilities, which some have described as “border jails.”

Progressives such as Denise Bell, Amnesty International USA’s researcher for refugee and migrant rights, have acknowledged that unaccompanied minors need a safe place to stay “while the government identifies and reunites them with appropriate sponsors,” but insist that detaining them for long periods of time in ill-suited facilities “cannot become status quo.”

“Kids need a place to call home,” Bell said. “That’s why they should be with their families, friends and community members; this in the child’s best interests.”

Meanwhile, in a Boston Globe column published Saturday, Marcela García criticized Politico for validating Stephen Miller — “the architect of family separation” — by seeking his input on the Biden administration’s handling of migrants at the border.

Even though “Trump banned reporters and members of Congress from child detention centers in the summer of 2019,” Politico allowed Miller to “gasligh[t] the public” with his opportunistic critique of Biden’s lack of media transparency, García wrote.

She continued:

Miller’s appearance not only reflects media amnesia, but also the new obsession with the border, which is rife with falsehoods and phony narratives. It bears repeating: Foreigners who show up at our borders to request asylum are following American and international law. But some of the journalists at Biden’s first press availability Thursday framed their border questions using the Republican, right-wing lens. As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent noted, that’s a deeply flawed exercise because it assumes that not letting migrant children into the United States is an acceptable option.

And yet, the false framing of calling what’s happening at the border a “crisis” can be traced back to — wait for it — Miller himself. And some in the mainstream media were happy to follow suit.

America’s Voice said that the GOP “hopes to fear-monger at the border to distract from their failures,” which the organization listed: “Zero Republicans voted for the relief bill that gave Americans stimulus checks, extended unemployment, and helped reduce child poverty. They helped stoke a terrorist attack on the Capitol and refused to confront those responsible.”

“Instead,” the group added, Republicans “blame children seeking refuge,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., did earlier this month when he said that “they are children today, but they could easily be terrorists tomorrow.”

The framing of border crossings as a “crisis” is a “trap,” argued America’s Voice — one that “only helps dehumanize migrants … and perpetuates the GOP’s strategic racism.” The group implored people not to be deceived by right-wing lawmakers and media personalities who are “dividing Americans and distracting from the work of providing real solutions.”

America’s Voice added that if the GOP actually wants to reform the country’s immigration system and improve migrant welfare rather than engage in photo-ops at the border, several bills have been introduced in Congress this year that Republican lawmakers could help pass.

Fox News host pushes Biden conspiracy theory: Obama is “running things from behind the scenes”

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday floated the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama is secretly “running things” in President Joe Biden’s administration.

During a segment about Biden’s legacy on Fox News, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk claimed that Biden is trying to prove that he can accomplish things that Obama could not.

“He almost wants to prove to Obama that I can do what you couldn’t do when it comes to pandering to the liberal base and implementing progressive policy,” Kirk opined.

“Ah!” Bartiromo replied. “That’s what it is. I know he’s on the phone all the time with Obama, and I’m hearing that he’s running things from behind the scenes.”

Bartiromo, however, offered no evidence that Obama is secretly controlling Biden.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

The “Oscar halo” — how awards and nominations direct where money goes in the film industry

Film awards are more than shiny trophies on a shelf representing the recognition of hard work and talent from fellow professionals. They can have a huge impact on which films gets financed, how much actors and directors get paid for subsequent projects, and can impact whole film industries in certain countries. Hence, it is sometimes argued that nominations matter as much as the awards, by creating extra buzz around films, directors and actors.

Nominations for the Oscars can add around US$20 million (£14 million) to the total income made by the film. Wins are even more lucrative. “The King’s Speech” (2010) was initially projected to gross earnings just US$30 million. But after its Oscar nomination and victory for best picture, it went on to make more than US$400 million at the box office. This is because nominations and awards give films extra publicity, which attracts international distributors. This effect is called the “Oscar halo.”

Awards and nominations can also increase the market value of directors and actors. Actors can get a 20% boost in pay for their next film if they win the award for best actor or actress.

The cinematic map

For films and filmmakers coming from non-western regions, such as Eastern Europe, South America and Asia, awards have an additional value in putting their country on the “cinematic map.”

Czechoslovakian film made it onto the map in the 1960s when it received two Oscars for “The Shop on Main Street” (1965) and “Closely Observed Trains” (1966). These wins attracted attention to the phenomenon of Czechoslovak New Wave and facilitated successful international careers of a few Czechoslovak directors. One such benefactor of this attention was Miloš Forman who went on to direct “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), for which he won best director at the 1976 Oscars.

Equally, the Oscar for South Korean film “Parasite” resulted in increased western media interest in Korean films and a wider international audience. It also drove Netflix to invest $500 million in South Korean cinema.

Film festivals

Outside of the big awards, winning and even showing at festivals also impacts the wider economics of film. Film festivals are a vital link in the chain of global film culture – one that was missing last year due to the pandemic.

Getting on the festival circuit is important to the success of films, and the future careers of directors and actors. They offer international outreach for smaller or lesser-known films, distribution deal opportunities, reviews in the press and audience attention ahead of big awards.

Awards at festivals add prestige to the presented films and filmmakers and are a means to finance their projects. Festivals are attended by distributors, producers and executives. Distributors are responsible for the marketing of a film. The buzz created around a film at a festival can determine whether a distributor picks it up for a wider public release, often in several countries. This can put it firmly on the radar of awards season.

Of course, not all festivals have the same importance. In Europe, the most prestigious are Venice, Cannes and Berlin. In the US, the best known is the Sundance Film Festival. There is a close link observed between receiving an Oscar nomination and debuting at Venice or Cannes. It is widely believed that Parasite winning the top prize at Cannes in 2019 set it on a path to win the best picture Oscar nine months later.

Last year, however, due to the pandemic, festivals weren’t able to go ahead. Instead, 21 festivals, including Cannes, Venice and Berlin, came together to put on We are One. Streaming for free, in return for an optional donation to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 fund, it was not quite the same. Awards weren’t given, and few filmmakers, understandably, chose to debut at it. Thankfully, this year festivals seem to be back on for now.

Festivals matter because they help filmmakers to network, get funding and further their career. Films awarded at prestigious festivals have a better chance to get Academy nominations and awards. Cumulatively, festival awards and Oscars practically guarantee a worldwide financial and critical success.

Even during COVID, when global cinema suffered due to a drop in film production, a crisis of theatre distribution and cancellation or changing format of many festivals, the 93rd Academy Awards, to take place on 25 April, will still carry their usual prestige. It can be even expected that the lack of pomp and glitz at European film festivals will make these awards particularly attractive to a hungry audience, who will be paying closer attention than ever to see what they should watch, whether by streaming or when cinemas reopen.

Ewa Hanna Mazierska, Professor of Film Studies, University of Central Lancashire

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

Audio cassettes: despite being “a bit rubbish,” sales have doubled during the pandemic — here’s why

Described by some as “Europe’s biggest tech show,” the Berlin Radio Show has long been famous for exhibiting the next big thing in consumer electronics. In 1963, that was the compact audio cassette, introduced at the time by its creator, the late Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who died in early March.

Over the course of Ottens’ lifetime, cassette tapes came to redefine listening habits, which until then had been limited to the much more unwieldy vinyl record. Car stereos and the iconic Sony Walkman suddenly made individual listening experiences possible outside of the home. The re-recordable nature of the format, meanwhile, helped music fans collate and circulate their own mixtapes. At its peak in 1989, the cassette tape was shifting 83 million units per year in the UK alone.

Despite having been superseded in functionality first by the compact disc (CD) and then the digital file (mp3 and mp4), the audio cassette retains a special place in the history of audio technology, with mixtapes a precursor to playlists, and the Walkman the precursor to the iPod.

And, despite being considered aesthetically and materially inferior to the vinyl record that came before it, the audio cassette is actually experiencing something of a resurgence – partly for sentimental reasons, but also because, with gigs canceled, it’s a smart way for smaller artists to monetize their work.

Hit rewind

Against a backdrop of a pandemic that has done huge damage to the music industry, 2020 could justifiably be called the year of the cassette. According to British Phonographic Industry figures, 156,542 cassettes were sold in the UK last year, the highest figure since 2003 and an increase of 94.7% on 2019 sales. Seemingly out of the blue, global pop icons such as Lady Gaga, the 1975, and Dua Lipa have started rushing out their new releases on cassette – and they’re selling out.

For those of us who are old enough to remember the cassette tape as a common format of music consumption, their resurgence is somewhat puzzling. After all, even in their heyday, cassettes were always a bit rubbish.

They lacked the aesthetic appeal and the romance of the vinyl LP and its gatefold sleeve. Subsequently, they lacked the usability, flashiness and sonic fidelity of the CD. And there is not a music fan alive over the age of 35 who doesn’t have a horror story to tell about a favorite album or mixtape being chewed up by a malicious car stereo or portable boombox.

Ottens himself was dismissive of the “nonsense” of a cassette revival, telling Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that “nothing can match the sound” of the CD, the development of which he also played a key part in. For Ottens, the ultimate goal of any music format was clarity and precision of sound, though, in a nod to nostalgic listeners, he also conceded: “I think people mainly hear what they want to hear.”

Feeling it

As a scholar of popular music and material culture, I can’t help but wonder if Ottens’ strict utilitarian perspective misses a deeper point about the cassette tape and its recent resurgence as a medium in popular culture.

After all, the cultural enjoyment of music goes far beyond narrow debates about sound quality. Our enjoyment of music, and the cultural rituals surrounding that enjoyment, is a complex and deeply social thing that engages more than just our ears.

The ongoing revival of the record, for instance, is sometimes explained as a turn back to vinyl’s superior sound. But it’s just as often regarded as a cultural turn back to an iconic medium, steeped in musical history, that people can feel, handle, and experience together – unlike a digital file. Though they may be less iconic, cassettes also represent cultural moments of cherished significance to music fans.

In the mid 2010s, I investigated the first signs of this resurgence of cassettes within Glasgow’s indie and punk scenes as part of my PhD, talking to musicians, labels and fans about the resurgence of cassette tapes. In these conversations, the materiality of these objects – their physical, tangible presence – was often highlighted as a motivating factor.

As one fan remarked to me: “I just like having things. They’re all kind of becoming a bit defunct now, but I just like having something. That’s my hobby, music is my hobby, and that’s how I spend my money.”

There’s also an economic component to the cassette resurgence. With debates raging about how music streaming services should reimburse artists, independent musicians have, for some time, been looking to the sale of physical products and merchandise as a means of generating income.

For Glasgow’s indie and punk bands, as with today’s independent artists, cassettes actually represented a cost-effective means of providing a physical product, far cheaper than pressing a vinyl record and printing sleeves and packaging. As one label owner put it, “we tend to release on tape because it’s cheap to manufacture, it’s easy to recoup, and it leaves money left over for the bands to get something”.

While the practices of these small, independent artists may feel quite far removed from the recent embrace of cassette tapes by mainstream pop stars, each arguably has their roots in a desire for analogue products we can touch in an increasingly digital world mediated via screens.

Many people have reported feelings of digital detachment and alienation during the pandemic. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that a desire for something we can actually feel, embellished with a nostalgic glow from a COVID-free past, may also explain the resurgence of the audio cassette, nearly 60 years since its Berlin debut.

Iain Taylor, Lecturer in Music Industries, Birmingham City University

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

Why are Americans obsessed with fitness? The answer: Neoliberalism

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the United States was the world’s largest fitness market with an estimated industry revenue of $96 billion in 2019. From spin to HIIT classes to pilates to hot yoga to commercial gyms, over the last 50 years America’s obsession with working out has only grown. Author and historian Jürgen Martschukat calls time on the so-called “Age of Fitness,” which he examines in depth in his new book, “The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement.”

What’s especially peculiar about the West’s fitness-mania is that it isn’t tied to organized sport, nor to winning a medal, but rather the goal of “achieving a fit body.” That goal has become a mechanism to perpetuate privilege, Martschukat writes. “This body, in turn, stands for an array of partially overlapping forces, abilities and ideals, which point far beyond the doing of the sport,” he says. “These encompass one’s health and performance in everyday life and at work, productivity and the ability to cope with challenging situations, potency, a slim figure, and a pleasing appearance according to the prevalent standards of beauty.”

In other words, Martschukat argues that modern humans don’t just work out to stay healthy, but instead they do it to achieve a body image standard set by society that isn’t merely about beauty, but also a representation of how we function in our lives. This, he says, is a repercussion of life in a hyper-individualistic, neoliberal society.

“The last half-century may be considered the age of fitness, and it is no accident that it coincides with the age of neoliberalism,” Martschukat writes. “Rather than a generalizing call to arms, here neoliberalism denotes an epoch that has modeled itself on the market, interprets every situation as a competitive struggle and enjoins people to make productive use of their freedom.”

If you’ve ever been curious to think more critically about our culture’s obsession with fitness and how it’s tied to today’s dominant ideology in public policy, this book is for you. I spoke with Martschukat by phone recently to learn more; as always, this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Let’s start with why you wrote this book. What sparked your interest in the subject and looking at it through the lens that you did, which was examining the correlation between fitness and neoliberalism?

I have been, what you might call, a “historian of the body” for quite some time. So I’m interested in how bodies have changed in history, how the meaning has changed and also how the body practices have changed over the years, decades, and centuries. And so I’ve done some research on sports history before I embarked on this project and other kinds of projects related to the body. And then what has become more important for me in recent, let’s say, in the last 10 years or so, is writing the history of the present.

This means that I’m interested in understanding phenomena in our present by exploring their past. And when you walk around with open eyes and follow the news, it’s quite easy to see that we’ve quite obviously encountered a certain fitness hype. One one hand, you see all the shaped bodies and people working out, and then there is something that has been deemed the “obesity crisis.”

At first glance, it might seem like it is two opposite forces, but when you look more closely, you see it’s more like two sides of the same coin. Our society and culture are arranged around the idea of a successful self, with the body taken as its indicator. That’s what kind of sparked my interest.

Your book made me rethink why I work out and how I’m contributing to something bigger. And it’s really interesting. I’m wondering if you can just briefly explain to our readers what role fitness plays in neoliberalism?

Well it’s no coincidence that the “Age of Neoliberalism” and the “Age of Fitness” overlap. In the last half-century we have lived in a society and culture that organizes itself very much through the idea of the market and through market practices, and our society and culture praises autonomy and self-government very much and maybe more than ever before in history. Of course the market and the idea of self-government have not been invented in the 1970s or 1980s, but their power has definitely increased. In this context, our body has become something that we might call a “bio-share,” that we try to sell on the market; or, that is taken as representing our abilities on the market.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with colleagues from sociology who do stigma research. And stigma research very much tells us that fat people are heavily discriminated against based on their body shape; for instance on the job market or also in the education system from early age on. What I am interested in is how fitness produces privilege, because it is considered as an expression of our ability to have control over our life, to act autonomously, to achieve things, and to succeed in this market-driven society and culture that we live in.

I love that term bio-share, that’s such an interesting way to think about it. In the book you keep coming back to this idea that fitness in our society right now is grounded in the principle of working on oneself, and like you said, you’re interested in how fitness produces privilege. I definitely think that in America, and I’m sure in Germany too, Americans have become obsessed with this idea of self-care and wellness. It’s kind of like an extension of the fitness craze. Would you agree with that?

Well, as you just said, one thing I’m really interested in is how fitness benefits some people more than others. Fitness is what I call a “regulatory ideal,” meaning that fitness has an impact on who is recognized as a productive member of society and to what extent. Thus, the idea that we are all endowed with the right to pursue happiness, which I like to rephrase as “the pursuit of fitness,” this idea puts a lot of pressure on many people, if not even on all of us, because the right to the pursuit of happiness is not only a promise and an opportunity, but also an obligation.

It’s the obligation that comes along with freedom and that’s the obligation to make the best of our lives. What we are told is that we can all achieve success and happiness, even though we are not so sure what that might be. Even back in the days, in the age of the Founding Fathers, happiness was very often interpreted as economic success and owning property.

We are told that we can achieve happiness and success in life if we only work hard enough. We all know that working hard helps in many cases, but we also all know that this is not true because some people work really hard all their lives and, nevertheless, success and happiness do not come to them, or at least not to the extent that they expect it to be. Therefore, fitness and the idea that we are responsible for our bodies, our success and happiness in life, creates a lot of disappointment and frustration that comes along with this system.

So if fitness trends in the Western societies are often a reaction to the market and economic situation, how can we break free of that pattern?

Breaking free of that pattern, I think, is really a tough challenge because this culture of fitness is so tightly interwoven with the basic principles of our society. One way of breaking free might be to move away from the idea that competition and the market are the most efficient ways to organize a society to the benefit of all. Instead, maybe more solidarity and mutual support would be beneficial to all of us. When it comes to the practice of exercise and fitness itself, approaching fitness in a less competitive manner would then again foreground the pleasure that comes along with it, the pleasure of movement, of experiencing and feeling a working and moving body, of breathing cold air on a nice morning. All the joy that comes along with practices of fitness. If we succeed in practicing fitness separate from this highly-competitive edge, hopefully the beauty and pleasure of fitness move to the foreground.

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I think there’s a lot of joy that’s been lost in fitness now.

And that’s what I also try to stress in my book: it brings a lot of joy and pleasure. I think that’s something that we should not forget.

I thought it was fascinating how you talked a little about how the hyper-focus on fitness lost its appeal in the New Deal era with the rise of work programs. There was a cultural shift from improving the individual to improving the collective. Can you explain the reason behind that shift in more depth?

Well, the Great Depression of the 1930s was a crisis of massive proportion, economic, political, cultural, and also psychological. Up to this point in history, the predominant socio-political philosophy was very much centered on individual responsibility and what was called “rugged individualism.” However, the Great Depression showed that we all depend upon forces that are beyond our control. This led to a change in politics and also modifications in the philosophy of society, from individualism to more solidarity and to collective responsibility for the wellbeing of each and every person.

I do not want to idealize the New Deal policy here. There were many injustices and imbalances involved, but in general, that’s a transformation that came along with the crisis of the 1930s and that affected the body politics of the 1930s. On one hand, strong and powerful bodies were still idealized in the 1930s. If you look, for instance, at 1930s photos depicting one of the major New Deal programs, which was called Civilian Conservation Corps, they endlessly show images of strong young, mostly male, white bodies who do hard work on nature. But, on the other hand and contrary to the notion of “rugged individualism,” there was always this collectivist tone to it, which is the powerful subtext of the imagery and of the cultural and photographic icons of those days. And that’s very different from the fitness and body hype that we experienced earlier around the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th century, and also very different from today.

Do you think that fitness has been weaponized by capitalism?

I don’t know if we should say weaponized. Weaponized sounds to me like it is kind of used by capitalism and employed in order to achieve a certain goal. I would argue that fitness is embedded in capitalism and incorporates the logic of competition and an individualized understanding of success. There is no capitalism that uses a tool called fitness, but fitness, so to speak, is and embodies capitalism and competition. Fitness is part of this notion of a society that organizes itself based on competition, exercise, achievement, and so on.

And corporate fitness, as you discuss in your book.

Yes, of course. Understanding fitness and capitalism as intertwined does not mean that people or corporations are not aware of the power of fitness and of the value of fitness. It does not mean that the fitness craze cannot be exploited. There is corporate fitness on one hand, thus companies trying to nudge their employees to work out and keep fit, and then there is of course the fitness market, which has gained massive proportions since the 1970s.

Where do you think we are right now in history? I mean, I know you can’t predict the future, but where do you think we’re headed in this Age of Fitness?

On one hand, the pandemic underlines that we live in the age of fitness. I don’t know how it is in California, but over here on the streets right now, we see more people than ever before walking, hiking, jogging, and bike riding. After all, gyms are closed right now, but gyms are also very creative. They create outdoor training areas to compensate for the financial losses and to satisfy customers’ demands. Quite obviously, many people feel a strong urge to stay in shape during the pandemic. This is, by the way, underlined by the booming exercise bike market. I recently read that American President Joe Biden takes his Peloton Bike to wherever he goes, which might help them to sell even more of them.

At the same time, according to all we can tell about the pandemic and how it affects different societies across the globe, it indicates that responding to a crisis of this proportion requires a somehow coordinated strategy. Or to put it differently, the pandemic shows that it affects people differently and that we cannot handle every problem by ourselves, or at least not everyone can, and that rugged individualism, autonomy and competition is obviously no adequate response to a crisis of this proportion. What we might be seeing now is the dawn of a new politics of solidarity. Who knows, but let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Jürgen Martschukat’s book, “The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement,” was released on March 22 from Polity.

After the pandemic flour craze, micro-millers take stock

In March and April 2020, as the pandemic crippled our previously reliable food supply chains, many people discovered fresh flour from small, regional mills. I have evangelized about this kind of flour for years, but to have my personal passion take off in popularity because of a terrifying health crisis was far from ideal.

Now that the dust of the pandemic flour boom has begun to settle, I have been talking to small-scale millers to see how they endured. In the grand scheme of flour, these mills aren’t just small, they’re micro. The milling industry is concentrated like the rest of agriculture, and dominated by four companies that run mega-mills around the country. Wheat is grown far from population centers, harvested in bulk, and sold to grain elevators. Everything, including seed varieties, defaults to industrial standards for factory milling and baking.

By contrast, micro flour mills are working with farmers in their region; in some cases the mills are actually run by the farmers themselves. This is a hard part of the food system to quantify: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) isn’t tracking how many small-scale mills there are or tabulating how many acres of grains are harvested for this kind of processing. There is no craft flour guild, as there is for small-scale malting, to support or speak for this neighborhood of local and regional food systems.

I decided to survey local and regional mills around the country to take stock of the state of micro-local milling. How did these businesses weather the early days of the pandemic? Has the increased demand kept up or did those panic-buyers go back to mass-produced flour or stop baking altogether? Below, some of the successes — and challenges — of meeting the pandemic flour boom.

Read more Civil Eats: New Study Shows the Growing Risks of Pesticide Poisonings

Carolina Ground
Established: 2012
Asheville, North Carolina
Pandemic boom: 100% increase in retail sales, 150% increase in milling rates

Carolina Ground was born of another global food crisis, the one caused by commodity grain speculations in 2007 and 2008. Facing impossible prices for flour, a group of bakers in western North Carolina got together to try to secure a local supply. These beginnings undergird Carolina Ground’s business model of serving wholesale bakers.

“We sell our wholesale flour to our bakery customers at a lower price so [they] can make bread that’s affordable,” said miller Jennifer Lapidus. Retail flour sells at a premium to subsidize Carolina Ground’s wholesale business, and by focusing on larger volumes they can drive growth back to farms.

Last year, the mill closed for two weeks to figure out how to keep staff safe. Retail sales doubled when they reopened. A few months later, those sales stabilized to a new normal that was significantly higher than before the pandemic. The boost gave Lapidus confidence about the mill’s stable future: Instead of renewing a rental lease in 2020, she bought an 8,000 square-foot building outside Asheville.

Cairnsprings Mill
Established: 2016
Burlington, Washington
Pandemic boom: 500% increase in retail sales

“We lost 25% of our business when restaurants closed. Opening up to the public saved us,” said co-founder Kevin Morse. The mill is open every Saturday and sells 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of flour each week, but during the early days of the pandemic they were selling 18,000 pounds per week. People now make weekly circuits through the Skagit Valley, where the mill is located, to buy flour, beer, bread, and meat. The consumer response to fresh flour is strong, and this year, Cairnsprings also started an online store and retail distribution to grocery stores.

“Food should be seen as economic development. The need for infrastructure to facilitate food development is key,” said Morse, who worked in rural economic development and at the Nature Conservancy before starting the mill in 2016. The pandemic sent shockwaves through the system — with some positive repercussions for rebuilding middle infrastructure like mills — yet Cairnsprings still struggles with access to business basics, like financing that would help them put in grain silos and another milling line. But, Morse said, “the demand is there.”

Barton Springs Mill
Established: 2016
Dripping Springs, Texas
Pandemic boom: 3,500% increase in retail sales

“Overall, we mill about 12,000 pounds of flour a week, but at the height of it, we were milling 30,000 pounds a week. Between March and April, we went from filling 8 orders a day to 300 orders a day, and stayed at 120 until a few months ago,” said owner James Brown. (This central Texas mill just west of Austin closed for a full week because of the Big Freeze in February, but did not suffer damages.)

Barton Springs stores all 400 tons of its yearly grain needs on-site, so they had plenty of supply to meet the demand. They had plenty of packaging, too. Labor and logistics were trickiest to work out, but Brown hired chefs and sous chefs who were suddenly in limbo to help manage the flow. “It was pretty uncomfortable adjusting, switching from bagging 50-pound bags to 2.5- and 5-pound bags.”

National flour struggles, he said, made a lot more people aware of the grain economy, whether they retain them as customers or not. Right now, their online sales are still higher than pre-pandemic, but only by about 10%. In May, when writing contracts for the next growing season, he decided he couldn’t take any more of a risk, and did not increase the acreage he contracted with farmers. One thing that’s changed, however, is Brown has realized the importance of education. “I know I have to keep our customers returning,” he said. To do that, he has made a commitment to telling more of the story of their flour on social media and other remote educational channels, and he looks forward to reopening the education facility at the mill.

Grist & Toll
Established: 2014
Pasadena, California
Pandemic boom: 200–400% increase in retail sales

“I woke up one morning and our web orders were coming in at one a minute. It was sheer panic,” said owner Nan Kohler. To manage the situation, she shut the website down and began limiting the amount of flour people could buy.

Not wanting to create a backlog, each week she calculated how much grain she had and how long it would take to make each type of flour. Yet when she updated the store, the website would inevitably crash because people were so eager for flour. The pressure was intense, and it strengthened her conviction that the system for producing staple foods in the U.S. needs to change. In particular, Kohler said, California needs four to six regional grain handling facilities to clean, store, and transfer grain because farmers are not able to get crops to the few existing mills. Right now, the nearest cleaning facility is 5 hours away from the Pasadena mill. And where, she asks, is the money going to come from to rebuild this kind of infrastructure?

“Food security needs to become much more compelling to venture capitalists,” said Kohler. This will happen as consumers understand they can create change by choosing good food, she hopes.

Groundup Grain
Established: 2019
Hadley, Massachusetts 
Pandemic boom: 1,000% increase in milling volume

“We had just about everything we needed, a good grain supply and a flour mill,” co-owner Andrea Stanley said of meeting the demand last spring. As the supply chain disruption began, she saw the need for more flour, and contracted with Domoy Farmsin western New York for an extra 40 acres of spring wheat. All of this was possible because Groundup is the logical extension of Valley Malt, Andrea and Christian Stanley’s parallel grain business and pioneering New England malthouse.

Malt business dropped off when breweries and brewpubs were affected by closures, and the mill filled a gap. As their sales demand grew from 1,000 pounds per week to 10,000, they worked 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week, through June, a pace that convinced them to order another mill from New American Stone Mills.

When Groundup Grain opened in July 2019, they sold strictly wholesale flour because as maltsters, that’s what they knew. Switching from institutional sales to retail bagging early in the pandemic was a bumpy process, but they figured it out. Other challenges included setting up online ordering, learning how to get reasonable shipping rates, and trying to physically keep up with running the mill. Prior to COVID, the Stanleys had only long-term plans for retail, but the retail shift has brought home bakers on board, as a really fun addition: Andrea Stanley observed that, similar to the way people are into craft beer, people can get really into fresh flour, and a crowd of excited amateur experts can have a long impact on regional grain economies.

Janie’s Mill
Established: 2017
Ashkum, Illinois
Pandemic boom: 4,000% in sales

“The mental aspect of what we did,” said farmer and owner Harold Wilken, was really satisfying. “We had letters, emails, text messages, thanking us for flour when they couldn’t find it anywhere else.”

Janie’s Mill has a very short supply chain — they own their mill, grow the grain on their farm, and run a cleaning facility — enabling them to quickly adapt to the spike. Finding 30 extra people to run two shifts was simple because college and high school students were home. Ross Wilken, Harold’s son, usually sticks to farming but took on a night shift to meet the demand. Once things slowed down slightly, the mill was able to offer some of their milling capacity to other farmers, like Granor Farm in Michigan.

Since Janie’s Mill sells all its own retail flour through an online portal, they received valuable feedback from customers. They learned that those customers really wanted rye, so Janie’s increased their rye acreage accordingly. The growth has allowed the mill to work with other farmers, too, to get access to heritage corn varieties and grains that grow better elsewhere, like Kamut and durum. The mill is still very busy, and they created a Facebook group as a way to build community and answer questions; close to 800 people have joined already, exploring the mill’s many kinds of flour.

Maine Grains
Established: 2012
Skowhegan, Maine
Pandemic boom: 4,000% increase in online retail sales

“We’re trying to pretend that March and April never happened. A spike like that may never repeat,” said co-founder and president Amber Lambke. Yet COVID also legitimized mills like hers in the eyes of mainstream retailers. “We got calls from mainstream grocery stores we’ve been trying to get into for years,” she added.

Prior to the pandemic, the mill, located in a small town an hour and a half north of Portland, was averaging 24 online orders a week. At last year’s peak, they had 180 orders each day. The pinch point was milling time and bagging, so they bought two extra bagging and weighing machines. High school kids provided the extra hands.

The mill’s income didn’t skyrocket because the costs went way up. Before March, 82% of the mill’s business was selling bulk flour; this quickly dropped to 50%, and has only recently begun to return. Despite the challenges, Lambke said the mill feels even more secure after this experience. She had to reach out to more farmers than usual to meet their needs, and that makes her feels optimistic that eventually Maine Grains will become a conduit for non-commodity grain growing in the state.

Hayden Flour Mill
Established: 2011
Queen Creek, Arizona
Pandemic boom: 400% sales increase

“We had to turn off the tap at one point because we just couldn’t serve all the orders,” said Emma Zimmerman, who runs the Arizona-based heritage grain mill. “We turned 10 this year, and if this happened eight years ago, we could not have managed it.” They wouldn’t have had access to grains, or been able to ramp up capacity because they were still learning the ropes. Last year, however, they had the skills and supplies to pivot to retail.

Locals discovered them, surprised to find there was a mill in their backyard. At the end of the year, they invested the extra earnings by adding packaging equipment and augurs — and gave staff a good holiday bonus.

“It would have been nice to be able to [buy] a little more grain, but you can’t model on a big blip like that,” said Zimmerman. The impulse to be cautious was already in place, especially because even before the pandemic, the larger grain industry had noticed and begun responding to consumer interest in heritage grains.

The future of regional grains

So, what’s the takeaway? The boom didn’t last for most mills, but many millers feel more stable, and have been able make crucial investments. One of the companies that served this movement, New American Stone Mills, got so busy that they moved to a larger facility, where they are building six to eight mills on any given day, rather than the pre-pandemic level of two or three. But 2020 didn’t ultimately change the big picture of flour in the U.S. very much. Every day, 160 million pounds of flour is milled in the conventional industry. And it’s not clear how much change small mills can make without larger systemic investments and policy change.

Not that we needed a crisis to show us that regional agriculture needs processing infrastructure; studies like Vermont’s Farm to Plate local-foodshed initiative made that clear a decade ago. My hope is that small flour mills’ ability to step up and answer needs of consumers early in the pandemic has helped private investors understand the importance of regional infrastructure for grain.

Read more Civil Eats: It’s Time to Reinvent Food Banks, Says Expert Katie Martin

“Without aggregating and processing infrastructure, there really is no way for farmers to step into the (grains) market. Investment in that area is key,” said Heather Darby, head of the University of Vermont’s Crops and Soils Team, a key player in supporting the redeveloping grainshed in the Northeast.

Investment doesn’t have to be dream capital sailing in on a cloud. Changing lending habits and farm policies would help regional grain systems a lot. For instance, the USDA offers very low interest loans for silos to farmers, but mills are not eligible unless they grow the crops they want to store. Farmers don’t always have the opportunity to ensure food-grade or malt grains; crop insurance is set by the patterns of what is already grown in a region. Novelty is not rewarded with protection against crop failures.

Did I expect the surge in sales last spring to recreate grain networks that have been disappearing since the 1870s? Maybe I did, hoping against hope that the food sector I adore is growing so slowly. Magical thinking makes me wish that consumer exposure to fresh flour changed things—but two months of desperately voting with one’s fork can’t reverse 150 years of consolidation in the food system.

It’s going to take generations to rebuild regional grainsheds, as miller Greg Russo from Farmer Ground Flour in Trumansburg, New York, reminded me. “The market is still forming itself. Bakers are still figuring it out. Farmers and millers are figuring out what quality criteria we can use, what we need,” he said. “It’s not so easy to scale this up.”

It’s certainly not easy, but I believe it’s worth the work.

Sen. Lindsey Graham dragged on Twitter after boasting that he owned an AR-15 to fight “gangs”

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s admission on Fox News that he owns an AR-15 to fight off hoards of “gangs” coming to his house after a natural disaster was greeted with rolled eyes and massive mockery on Sunday morning — with one critic dismissing his boast by writing, “Only gang he will see are selling cookies.”

Speaking with Chris Wallace, the South Carolina Republican stated, I own an AR-15. If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last ones that the gangs will come to because I can defend myself.”

And with that, the ridicule of Graham began — as you can see below:

Is aioli just fancy mayonnaise? (Plus, the secret for getting any yolk-based sauce to thicken)

Several weeks ago, I asked “Saucy” readers what questions they had about condiments — from usage, to storage, to ideas to pep up pandemic meals. Together, we took a dive into the versatility of tahini, what to do with XO and whether sriracha actually goes bad. More questions have come in since then, and a surprising number of them centered on one condiment in particular: aioli. 

So, consider this week’s column our unofficial Aioli Week™, and if you have any lingering questions about condiments — aioli or not — send them my way at astevens@salon.com. 

Is aioli just fancy mayonnaise? — Mark 

Borrowing a line from improv, I’m going to say, “Yes, and . . .” Emphasis on the and. 

Classic Mediterranean and Catalan aioli didn’t always contain egg yolks, which are a main component of traditional mayonnaise. Instead, it was a combination of thoroughly crushed garlic combined with salt and olive oil, which is added a single drop at a time so as not to “cut” the sauce. The resulting condiment is more paste-like, sort of like toum, that thick, white garlic sauce served at Lebanese restaurants. 

Through time — and French influence — egg yolks were eventually added to aioli, serving as an emulsifier. This renders it decidedly more mayonnaise-like, if not nearly identical, in some cases, save that extra kick of garlic. Some purists say that only the original egg-free version is truly aioli, while some will allow the egg as long as garlic is the primary flavor. 

As chefs have continued to experiment with the sauce’s form, and as aioli became (an almost laughably predictable) staple at New American restaurants, those “rules” have largely been eschewed in favor of more adventurous flavor combinations. I’ve seen cilantro lime aioli, chipotle aioli, rosemary and lemon aioli and a blueberry-maple aioli that was served on a breakfast slider.

We now exist in a culinary universe where I’m not sure I can look at the spectrums of emulsified dips and identify the point where aioli as we know it ends and flavored mayonnaise begins. Is Heinz’s Mayochup aioli? Someone out there would probably say yes, and then sling it on a gastropub menu. 

I can’t get my aioli to emulsify. Is there a trick that I’m somehow just missing? — Lo 

There are a couple of tricks to getting aioli (or any yolk-based sauce) to thicken. But first, what is an emulsion? Put really simply, it’s a combination of water and fat. A culinary emulsion can take two different forms; fat dispersed into water and water dispersed into fat. Mayonnaise and aiolis are the former. 

In a stable emulsion, the droplets of one of the liquids become evenly dispersed within the other liquid, and the resulting combination is thicker than the two original liquids were. This is done using agitation from whisking or blending to create a uniform suspension. 

So, with that in mind, there are a few common reasons an aioli won’t come together: the eggs were too cold, the oil was too cold, the oil was added too quickly or the mixture simply hasn’t been whisked enough. Working backwards from that, here are some tips to try: 

  1. Bring your eggs to room temperature before you try to make your aioli. 
     
  2. People have mixed opinions on keeping oil in the refrigerator, but if you do — or even if you keep it in a very cool, dark place — let that come to room temperature, as well. 
     
  3. Most recipes call for adding the oil a drop or a drizzle at a time. I know that can make it an annoyingly slow process, but it’s absolutely essential to getting the right sauce texture. 
     
  4. If you find that you aren’t generating quite enough power whisking by hand, there’s no shame in turning to your blender, hand mixer or even a stand-mixer with a whisk attachment. 
     
  5. If you’re adding extras for flavor — lemon zest, herbs, adobo sauce — save those until the end of the process, or after your aioli has started to thicken. 

I want something for dipping that’s herbaceous, but I don’t like straight “green sauces” like pesto or chimichurri. Those are almost too green for me (I can’t figure out another word to describe it). What could I make? — Davis

When I saw this question, my first thought genuinely was aioli — hence why it’s making an appearance during Aioli Week ™. The fattiness provided by the emulsified yolk and oil cut some of that overwhelming verdancy present in some really herb-y sauces. 

Take a look at your local produce section or farmer’s market, and see what green herbs do look good to you. Spring is a time to hunt down chervil, chives, dill, mint and tarragon. Give these a pretty fine mince, and add to your aioli along with some lemon zest, and if you like, some crushed garlic or diced shallots. You’ll have a dip that has some of the seasonal flavors you may be craving, but veers more creamy than green. 

Serve it with crudites. Slather it on sandwiches. Use it as a dip for homemade potato chips (seriously!) and as a base for your next egg or chicken salad sandwich. (Pro-tip: Green goddess dressing is also surprisingly good in all of these situations.)

And if you’re opposed to even little bits of herbs suspended in your aioli for some reason, now would be a good time to check out flavored oils. I have a bottle of blood orange and chili-infused oil I cherish. There are beautiful tarragon, dill and basil-infused olive oils that would also be an amazing base for your next creation. 

Read more Saucy: 

6 tips to help you detect fake science news

I’m a professor of chemistry, have a Ph.D. and conduct my own scientific research, yet when consuming media, even I frequently need to ask myself: “Is this science or is it fiction?”

There are plenty of reasons a science story might not be sound. Quacks and charlatans take advantage of the complexity of science, some content providers can’t tell bad science from good and some politicians peddle fake science to support their positions.

If the science sounds too good to be true or too wacky to be real, or very conveniently supports a contentious cause, then you might want to check its veracity.

Here are six tips to help you detect fake science.

Tip 1: Seek the peer review seal of approval

Scientists rely on journal papers to share their scientific results. They let the world see what research has been done, and how.

Once researchers are confident of their results, they write up a manuscript and send it to a journal. Editors forward the submitted manuscripts to at least two external referees who have expertise in the topic. These reviewers can suggest the manuscript be rejected, published as is, or sent back to the scientists for more experiments. That process is called “peer review.”

Research published in peer-reviewed journals has undergone rigorous quality control by experts. Each year, about 2,800 peer-reviewed journals publish roughly 1.8 million scientific papers. The body of scientific knowledge is constantly evolving and updating, but you can trust that the science these journals describe is sound. Retraction policies help correct the record if mistakes are discovered post-publication.

Peer review takes months. To get the word out faster, scientists sometimes post research papers on what’s called a preprint server. These often have “RXiv” – pronounced “archive” – in their name: MedRXiv, BioRXiv and so on. These articles have not been peer-reviewed and so are not validated by other scientists. Preprints provide an opportunity for other scientists to evaluate and use the research as building blocks in their own work sooner.

How long has this work been on the preprint server? If it’s been months and it hasn’t yet been published in the peer-reviewed literature, be very skeptical. Are the scientists who submitted the preprint from a reputable institution? During the COVID-19 crisis, with researchers scrambling to understand a dangerous new virus and rushing to develop lifesaving treatments, preprint servers have been littered with immature and unproven science. Fastidious research standards have been sacrificed for speed.

A last warning: Be on the alert for research published in what are called predatory journals. They don’t peer-review manuscripts, and they charge authors a fee to publish. Papers from any of the thousands of known predatory journals should be treated with strong skepticism.

Tip 2: Look for your own blind spots

Beware of biases in your own thinking that might predispose you to fall for a particular piece of fake science news.

People give their own memories and experiences more credence than they deserve, making it hard to accept new ideas and theories. Psychologists call this quirk the availability bias. It’s a useful built-in shortcut when you need to make quick decisions and don’t have time to critically analyze lots of data, but it messes with your fact-checking skills.

In the fight for attention, sensational statements beat out unexciting, but more probable, facts. The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid occurrences is called the salience bias. It leads people to mistakenly believe overhyped findings and trust confident politicians in place of cautious scientists.

A confirmation bias can be at work as well. People tend to give credence to news that fits their existing beliefs. This tendency helps climate change denialists and anti-vaccine advocates believe in their causes in spite of the scientific consensus against them.

Purveyors of fake news know the weaknesses of human minds and try to take advantage of these natural biases. Training can help you recognize and overcome your own cognitive biases.

Tip 3: Correlation is not causation

Just because you can see a relationship between two things doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other.

Even if surveys find that people who live longer drink more red wine, it doesn’t mean a daily glug will extend your life span. It could just be that red-wine drinkers are wealthier and have better health care, for instance. Look out for this error in nutrition news.

Tip 4: Who were the study’s subjects?

If a study used human subjects, check to see whether it was placebo-controlled. That means some participants are randomly assigned to get the treatment – like a new vaccine – and others get a fake version that they believe is real, the placebo. That way researchers can tell whether any effect they see is from the drug being tested.

The best trials are also double blind: To remove any bias or preconceived ideas, neither the researchers nor the volunteers know who is getting the active medication or the placebo.

The size of the trial is important too. When more patients are enrolled, researchers can identify safety issues and beneficial effects sooner, and any differences between subgroups are more obvious. Clinical trials can have thousands of subjects, but some scientific studies involving people are much smaller; they should address how they’ve achieved the statistical confidence they claim to have.

Check that any health research was actually done on people. Just because a certain drug works in rats or mice does not mean it will work for you.

Tip 5: Science doesn’t need “sides”

Although a political debate requires two opposing sides, a scientific consensus does not. When the media interpret objectivity to mean equal time, it undermines science.

Tip 6: Clear, honest reporting might not be the goal

To get their audience’s attention, morning shows and talk shows need something exciting and new; accuracy may be less of a priority. Many science journalists are doing their best to accurately cover new research and discoveries, but plenty of science media are better classified as entertaining rather than educational. Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil and Dr. Drew should not be your go-to medical sources.

Beware of medical products and procedures that sound too good to be true. Be skeptical of testimonials. Think about the key players’ motivations and who stands to make a buck.

If you’re still suspicious of something in the media, make sure the news being reported reflects what the research actually found by reading the journal article itself.

Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut College

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

Conversation pits could make a comeback – here’s what’s sparking interest in the retro design

My boyfriend and I are in the process of renovating a house, a hulking brick structure that’s been vacant on and off since the Civil War. Underscoring most restoration projects, I imagine, is a certain sense of anticipation for newness and completion, but the pandemic heightened this one with some weightier hopes. 

Late last fall, for instance, we were laying a brick patio in the backyard and discussing what kind of outdoor furniture we should eventually buy. “Well, that set might make more sense if we had people over . . .” Having people over? What a concept! (This is said using my best impression of Natasha Lyonne in “Russian Doll.”)

All the social isolation made the idea of having other humans in our space, closer than six feet apart, deeply appealing. If there are features and furniture that help facilitate that, all the better. That’s one of the reasons that, when Twitter user @TheEnergeiaBoy sent the tweet “We must revive the inspired 1970s concept of the ‘conversation pit,” I was one of the almost 376,000 people who agreed — at least in theory. 

This isn’t the first time people have advocated for the return of the decidedly retro architectural feature, which incorporates built-in seating into a sunken section of flooring, but that tweet hit timelines in February, almost a full calendar year after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic. At this point, I’d  gladly hop into what was often basically a shag-carpeted nest for the pleasure of an unmasked, IRL cocktail and conversation.  

But could the conversation pit actually make a serious comeback in 2021? Or is simply the idea of it a Twitter-viral stand-in for the normal conversation-sized holes in our hearts? 

* * *

One of the most iconic conversation pits is located in Columbus, Indiana, about an hour from my front door. In 1952, J. Irwin Miller and his wife, Xenia, commissioned a trio of architects — Eero Saarinen, Daniel Urban Kiley and Alexander Girard — to design their private residence there.

At the center of the home was a stone-lined sunken lounge, fitted with cushions, topped with bright pillows and accessible by four steps with no railing. In a speech he gave in Munich several years later, Saarinen described what he described as the “problem of furniture with it’s inevitable ‘slum of legs'” and said that he looked for opportunities to “eliminate it completely.” The Miller House‘s conversation pit was an exercise in that, a feature that promoted intimate conversation without the interference of autonomous furniture. 

“I love that in that sprawling space, Mr. Saarinen was so incredibly intentional about creating an intimate nook for dialogue,” said Lucy Jones, a Lexington, Ky.-based preservationist and mid-century enthusiast. “For the folks who complain about mid-century design being too austere, a conversation pit is the  perfect solution. It maintains the clean lines of mid-century modernism with its geometry, but it’s also downright cozy.” 

As a result, the pit was a hit, and its popularity skyrocketed even in less bespoke homes across the United States from the late 1950s through the 1970s. As the Tuscaloosa Times reported in 1977, “The conversation pit is very popular, mostly among younger people, because it’s contemporary and very versatile.” 

The architectural feature made appearances in several “James Bond” movies. It served as the background for a bunch of 1960s liquor advertisements and, perhaps relatedly, quietly took on the nickname “f**k pit” in some circles  (let’s just say it’s no surprise that Don Draper’s Manhattan apartment in “Mad Men” had a sunken living room). 

As a reporter for TIME put it, rather sardonically, “while others went about frivolously at ground level, the more serious-minded could step down to form a sort of basement discussion group. Nontalkative families tucked pillows and blankets into it, called it a rest area. Some put the barbecue there, achieving a pit-within-a-pit effect. There seemed no end to the pit’s potential.” 

But, like wood-paneled walls and popcorn ceilings, conversation pits eventually lost their luster. 

“At cocktail parties, late-staying guests tended to fall in,” TIME reported in that same piece. “Those in the pit found themselves bombarded with bits of hors d’oeuvres from up above, looked out on a field of trouser cuffs, ankles and shoes. Ladies shied away from the edges, fearing up-skirt exposure. Bars or fencing of sorts had to be constructed to keep dogs and children from daily concussions.” 

The eventual solution? A few cubic-yards of concrete and a couple of floor boards. The pit’s legacy was briefly buried, only to be dug up again and again. Every few years, an article is published, heralding their renaissance. In 2017, Curbed wrote “Conversation pits make a comeback.” A year later, 

Apartment Therapy doubled-down on the idea with the piece “Trend Report — Conversation Pits Are Back.” And a year after that, Dwell magazine published a photo essay, “The Conversation Pit Makes a Big Comeback in These Fabulous Modern Spaces.” 

On the cover was a conversation pit, padded with stunning royal purple pillows in an otherwise sparse, white space. 

* * *

That cover-worthy pit was designed by Craig Steely, a California-based architect, who, when we spoke on the phone, described how that photo has gone viral again over the last calendar year.  

“It’s crazy how when we did that conversation pit, photos of it just exploded on the internet with memes,” Steely said. “People were putting Bernie Sanders in it. People were putting cars in it. It’s wild how it hit such a nerve.” 

He continued: “And the funniest thing is, we put that pit in to solve an architectural problem.” 

Steely designed the home for Pam and Paul Costa who moved from Milwaukee to the Silicon Valley area — via their employment at Apple — in 2018. It’s almost like a floating glass box, looking over a dense oak grove in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Steely didn’t want to disrupt the flow of the open-concept home. 

“So we had to ask, ‘How do you delineate space areas in a huge open volume that doesn’t feel like things are just floating in a void?'” he said. “So it made sense for us to start creating zones by changing the heights of things and lowering things.” 

According to Steely, the conversation pit itself is pretty large at 14×14 feet square. But he didn’t have to sell the Costas on the feature. 

“It just seemed like an appropriate situation in this kind of situation,” he said. “But I think, bottom-line, everyone was pretty excited about the idea of having a fully upholstered hole that you can just dive into. There’s something visceral about it that’s really exciting and fun, which I think is great.” 

Steely said that element of fun could be what is driving some of the talks of a conversation pit renaissance on social media. On Twitter, users are posting vintage images of pits, captioned with longing phrases like, “Wish I was having girl talk in the pit,” and  “When I die, can it at least be in a 70s conversation pit?” “Animal Crossing” and “Sims” players are making sunken rooms for their characters, and I saw at least one person planning an eventual marriage proposal in The Wing’s emerald green velvet conversation pit. 

“The conversation pit is the opposite of COVID, the quarantine six-foot distancing thing, because — you know, you’re in the pit,” Steely said. “You’re closer, you’re kind of on top of people talking.” 

Jones, who also helped design the viral hotel room inspired by the ’60s architecture in “The Queen’s Gambit,” agrees. “I  am a tremendous proponent of conversation pits and I think that now, while we’re focused on reconnecting with people, would be the perfect time for them to make a comeback.” 

She continued: “During the pandemic, I think that a lot of us have started reimagining how we want our social lives to look. I for one, realized that there’s no part of me that misses bar life. I do, however, miss my friends.” 

Will that actually translate into real-world requests from homeowners for contractors to start digging up holes in their living rooms? That remains to be seen. Lusting after conversation pits online may be one of those activities by which we marked the time during social isolation, like growing scallions on our window sills, whipping up dalgona coffee and baking heaps of banana bread. 

But, as Jones said in her argument for their return: “What better way is there to entertain at home than in an architectural space specifically designed for interpersonal connection?”

This 4-ingredient Parm needs no chicken or eggplant

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Psst, did you hear we’re coming out with a cookbook? We’re coming out with a cookbook!

* * *

If you’re embarking upon chicken Parmesan, you’re going to need many more ingredients than chicken and Parmesan. We’re talking mozzarella, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, onion, garlic, red pepper flakes, basil, parsley, flour, eggs, bread crumbs, and then some, depending on the recipe.

Who needs all that? Not us. Not today.

This Big Little Recipe doesn’t even need the chicken — because we’re using tempeh (aka tempe) instead. This Indonesian ingredient is never not in my fridge, partly for its sturdy shelf life, mostly for its meaty, mushroom-y flavor. Like tofu, tempeh starts with soy. But unlike tofu, the beans go on to be cooked, fermented, and pressed into a dense, chewy cake.

“In Indonesia, this versatile ingredient is used in many dishes,” writes Lara Lee in “Coconut & Sambal.” She shares how it can be steamed, stir-fried, grilled, poached, or fried. “The first use of tempeh was recorded in Java in the early 18th century, and today it is described as Indonesia’s gift to the world.”

Indeed, it’s a gift, and one I’ll never tire of unwrapping and turning into dinner. So let’s.

After slicing into iPhone-thin slabs, we’re going to add tempeh to a sizzling skillet, where it becomes as crispy and golden and glorious as fried chicken. The good news is this happens in the time it takes to listen to “Save Your Tears” by The Weeknd (don’t sleep on it! Even better than “Blinding Lights” if you ask me). The more good news is you don’t need any breading to get there, not even a dusting of flour.

Chicken or eggplant Parm recipes often involve a dredging station — say, flour on one plate, eggs and milk on another, and seasoned bread crumbs on another. (Look no further than my own breaded eggplant recipe, which calls for a laundry list of ingredients, no offense to me.) But self-sufficient tempeh has everything covered. With just a slick of olive oil, it sizzles up effortlessly, yielding a cutlet-like crunch without any of the fuss.

The rest of the recipe is equally minimalist: tomato sauce that needs little more than tomatoes, just a lot of olive oil and a generous amount of salt. Don’t give into the temptation to reduce either — they’re what make the sauce so slurpable.

And do seek out fresh mozzarella, the plumpest, marshmallow-iest you can find. It turns this humble stack into something delightfully gooey and oozey and indulgent, exactly the sort of thing I long for on a worn-down Friday night, a dish that’s comforting and cozy and not even close to too much work.

* * *

Recipe: Tempeh Parm

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 40 minutes
Serves: 2

Ingredients:

  • 1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes
  • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for pan-frying
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
  • 8 ounces tempeh
  • 4 ounces fresh mozzarella
  • Parmesan, for grating

Directions:

  1. Add the tomatoes and their juices to a medium pot. Use your hands, a wooden spoon, or a pair of scissors to break down the tomatoes a bit. Add the olive oil and salt and set over medium heat. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced and flavorful, about 30 minutes. 
  2. While the tomato sauce is cooking, halve the tempeh crosswise. Now halve each of these pieces lengthwise, so you have four thin rectangles. Slice the mozzarella into four pieces. 
  3. Set a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add just enough olive oil to thinly coat the bottom. When that’s hot, add the tempeh. Cook for 1 1/2 to 3 minutes per side, until deeply golden brown and crusty.
  4. Transfer the tempeh slices back to the cutting board (or a plate). Position a rack in the upper quarter of the oven and turn on the broiler. Get out a small, broiler-proof baking dish. 
  5. Add a tempeh slice to the dish. Top in this order: a heaping spoonful of tomato sauce, mozz slice, shower of grated Parm, tempeh slice, heaping spoonful of tomato sauce, mozz slice. 
  6. Repeat the above step with the remaining ingredients to build another tempeh Parm stack, right next to the first one. (And if you’re more of a visual learner for these steps, I feel you — check out the recipe video.)
  7. Broil the tempeh Parm stacks for 2 1/2 to 5 minutes, checking frequently, until melty and browning in spots. As soon as it comes out of the oven, shower with more grated Parm. Serve with the extra marinara sauce for dunking if you’d like.

Women are being encouraged to go into STEM fields. Why aren’t we pushing for more men in HEED jobs?

I remember when I first realized just how big the problem was. I was talking to a group of healthcare professionals about the need for better communication and compassion in medicine. “That,” a male doctor in the room shot back at me, “is what nurses are for.” And though he didn’t say it out loud, the implication was hard to miss. That is what women are for, he seemed to say.

The past several years have brought a welcome and necessary push to bring girls and women in to male-dominated professions, notably STEM fields (an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics). As Scott Barry Kaufman wrote in Scientific American, “the National Science Foundation has invested 270 million dollars since 2001 to multiple initiatives supporting women in the sciences.” I’ve seen the effect of this push in the younger generation: my daughters went to Girls Who Code after school programs and earned Girl Scout merit badges in STEM skills.

Achieving gender parity in STEM fields is an admirable goal. Yet the converse isn’t true: that there’s been next-to-no effort to close the gender gap in so-called HEED jobs — healthcare, early education, and domestic work — where women are disproportionately represented. That’s an unrecognized deficiency that shortchanges everybody.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the field of postsecondary education is roughly 50/50 male and female, only about 1% of percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are men. Women make up 80% of our psychologists and nearly 90% of our child, family, and school social workers. And in the healthcare profession, 87.4% of registered nurses and 88% of nurse practitioners are women. 

There’s a bias and a skepticism against men in caring professions, one that’s not without some understandable foundations. In their 2018 University of British Columbia research article “Worth Less?: Why Men (and Women) Devalue Care-Oriented Careers,” authors Katharina Block, Alyssa Croft and Toni Schmader noted that “On the one hand, men devalue care-oriented occupations (e.g., teaching or nursing) as personal career paths. But in addition, those men and women who do choose healthcare, early education, and domestic roles are afforded both lower status and lower salaries… HEED occupations are not simply unpopular career choices among men, they are also generally devalued in society.” It’s a brutal cycle: devaluing jobs because they’re mostly done by women, and women being relegated to a specific class of jobs because they’re less valued. 

One big barrier to changing this imbalance is that male gender roles are more strictly enforced than female ones. A woman blazing a path in a traditionally masculine field may face a slew of unique challenges, but a best-case endgame has her in the role of a glass ceiling–breaker. There is no equivalent for a man in a “feminine” job. He may be paid more than his female colleagues — in fact he almost certainly will be — but his success will likely also come with outdated “Meet the Parents” jokes. 

In their research into the concept of “Precarious Manhood,” University of South Florida researchers Joseph A. Vandello and Jennifer K. Bosson outlined a three-pronged conundrum: “Manhood is widely viewed as an elusive, achieved status, or one that must be earned (in contrast to womanhood, which is an ascribed, or assigned, status),” they write. “Second, once achieved, manhood status is tenuous and impermanent; that is, it can be lost or taken away. Third, manhood is confirmed primarily by others and thus requires public demonstrations of proof.” In other words, a man who goes into “women’s work” has several hard earned bro points deducted from his identity, or worse, is presumed to be a creepy weirdo. 

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The solution to these biases isn’t shutting boys and men out from these professions, but encouraging more of them to enter them. The benefits aren’t just in potentially elevating the economic and social status of the work, or even in giving males who are curious about caring professions the space to pursue them. It’s about trust.

Imagine what could be possible when we reinvent mental health care with more male participation. “Clinical efficacy in behavioral health comes down to the connection between a therapist and their client,” says Jake Cooper, Co-Founder & CEO of Florida behavioral health group Grow Therapy. “We often see better connections, and accordingly improved outcomes, when a client is able to relate to their provider due to a shared identity, be it gender, ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic.” He adds, “Mental health is not gender specific. Men are often reluctant to seek care due to the stigmatization around admitting vulnerability, and those who have the courage to are discouraged by the limited selection of male providers available.” 

Nearly a decade ago, psychologist Tyger Latham bemoaned the same problem in Psychology Today. “Men often present with specific clinical issues that relate directly to their masculinity,” he wrote. Yet, “As many therapists have argued — including many female therapists — the profession is quickly losing its appeal to a large group of potential clients — most of them men — who may not initially feel comfortable working with a female therapist.”

The same problems, and potential solutions, apply to nursing. “Boys, in particular, can find it hard to relate to women at times,” Donna Fitzsimons, head of the school of nursing and midwifery at Queen’s University Belfast, told The Guardian in 2017. “Sometimes a male nurse can really bring out a side of a child that helps to lift their mood and allows them to feel more comfortable in a hospital setting.” And speaking to the New York Times in 2018, nursing student Adam White observed, “This narrative that men can’t provide care in the way that women can is part of that broad cultural narrative that misunderstands what nursing’s about. We need to talk with young people about caring as a gender-neutral idea, but also as something that’s rooted in skills, in expertise.”

There’s nothing inherently womanly about so-called women’s work. The fields of nursing and teaching, for example, were once all but exclusively male-dominated. And the absurd and unhelpful contemporary notion that jobs that require years of training and education somehow define their practitioners as surrogate mother figures holds everybody back. “It begins with redefining masculinity,” says Dr. Kenyon Godwin (D.C.) owner and operator of the Active Family Wellness Centers in Texas. “Culture shapes it in sports, white collar and blue collar work, but it does not give much room for male caregivers and professions that require compassion and nurturing.” And if caring is, as that doctor once told me, what nurses are for, then doesn’t it make sense that jobs like nursing should be for everybody?

Nearly 3 in 4 New Yorkers favor taxing the rich to austerity: poll

Nearly 3 out of 4 voters in New York would prefer taxes on the rich and corporations over new budget austerity that would see vital public services and programs slashed, according to a poll released Friday.

The survey, conducted by Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling and analysis group, found that while the recently passed  “American Rescue Plan”—which provided far-reaching and direct federal assistance and aid to individiduals, local communities, and social programs—is one of the most popular pieces of legislation among the U.S. public in “modern memory,” New Yorkers on a state level “recognize that in this time of need, the wealthy should pay more in taxes and the state should support those who need help the most.”

Overall, the poll showed that 73% percent of New Yorkers would like to patch the state’s projected revenue shortfall in the state by taxing the rich—not further austerity measures like cutting public services, especially during the ongoing pandemic. Along ideological lines, the poll showed that 66% of Republicans, 64% of Independents, and 81% of Democrats “favor a wealth tax over cuts to health care, education, and other public services.”

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The survey, according to a Data for Progress explainer, specifically “tested the popularity of initiatives that provide state-funded housing assistance to homeless New Yorkers, and state-funded treatment to those suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD).” What it found was that New Yorkers across the state—and from across the political divide of Democratic, Independent, and Republican voters—prefer raising taxes on the wealthy over cutting those essential services.

In a separate section of the survey devoted to possible ways that increased taxes on the wealthy could be used to patch the state budget, respondents were shown specific proposals of how increased taxes on inherited estates, billionaire wealth, and large corporatations could be levied and how much revenue they might raise. In response, 83% of Democrats, 61% of Independents, and even 53% of Republican voters supported such measures overall.

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The poll surveyed 669 likely New York voters from March 13 to March 21 and has a margin of error ±4 percentage points.

How late night adjusted – and became weirder and more creative – after a pandemic year

Kristen Bartlett vividly remembers early March of 2020, when “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” became one the first topical variety shows to film without a studio audience. Back then nobody was sure how quickly the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 would spread, but cases were popping up in the city and across the country.

Then and quite suddenly, the situation switched from concerning to dire. “Our offices were one of the places in New York that had a cluster of COVID cases, which is crazy,” the “Full Frontal” co-head writer said. The show’s offices were ordered to be evacuated while they were in rewrites for that week’s show, so they raced to shoot one final episode in-studio, grabbed all the equipment they could and headed home.

Rob Crabbe, an executive producer for “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” remembers the tipping point being the NBA shutting down and a quiet, anxious text chain between the showrunners with various late night shows trying to figure out how their networks would respond.

In that nervous stretch of time, which coincided with a day of back-to-back tapings, he remembers appreciating what he describes as the “slight luxury in being the 12:30 show in Los Angeles,” since the three-hour window between the West Coast and East Coast would give his production time to see how New York shows would react.

Initially he thought “Late Late” would simply stay on the air without an audience, as “Full Frontal” and other shows had done. “And then it all happened so immediately,” Crabbe said. Corden, bandleader Reggie Watts and the rest of the crew got through that day knowing they wouldn’t see an audience again for some time.

“I don’t think we fully appreciated that we wouldn’t be back together again for six months,” he said. 

In the earliest days of the pandemic, “The Late Late Show” came to viewers from a set-up in Corden’s garage as that show and every other figured out how they would navigate the uncharted territory of live late night comedy without soundstages or sets.

One year later the COVID-19 pandemic still holds the world in its clutches, but CBS’ “The Late Late Show” and TBS’ “Full Frontal” have returned to their respective studios, as have NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”  Their moods are lively but the hosts, correspondents and guest actors are playing to empty seats.

Meanwhile Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” and Showtime’s “Desus & Mero”  went home and remain sheltered in place. Noah’s series altered its title to embrace our collective lot – it’s been “The Daily Social Distancing Show” since last spring.

Each program has settled into rhythms that are familiar to their viewers by now. Many follow the classic late night format. Opening with a welcome before diving into a monologue, barreling through gags before interviewing guests whether in person – six feet or more apart – or via video conference.  

But the sensation that they’re playing to empty theater seats, or none at all, is palpable. Prior to the pandemic we all took the live studio audience for granted. Now that they’re gone, perhaps we have a new appreciation of the live crowd’s role as a character in these shows. Circumstances forced that character to go on hiatus, changing the tenor of the late night and talk variety landscape.

“It is very different to tell a joke to a live audience than it is to tell a joke with no audience,” said “Daily Show” supervising producer Zhubin Parang. “Telling jokes to an audience requires a different rhythm because you have to wait for laughter. It’s slower paced. It’s the difference between, like, theater and a movie.”

This is not a fresh revelation, mind you. The call and response between performers and live audiences is comedy’s fuel, driving hosts and writers alike. A live crowd’s laughter bridges the distance between the studio production and viewers at home.  Without that, nearly every show has transformed into a new creature – not a fundamentally disparate from what was but certainly changed.

Noah’s writers met the challenge of a socially distant production by taking more risks than they might with an live audience looking on, explains “Daily Show” executive producer and showrunner Jen Flanz. “Trevor will ad-lib a bunch more and try things, because it’s just us watching him on Zoom at a shoot, and then it’s us in our edit. It’s such a controlled environment, whereas when you’re in front of the studio audience, you pretty much need to know which jokes are going to work.”

“Full Frontal” co-head writer Mike Drucker echoes this, pointing out that the lack of an audience has given writers the opportunity to be a bit weirder. “We’ve tried things that we’re not sure are audience pleasers but are funny to us,” he said, “and we also cut back on things that might be like moments where the audience applauds. We try to just make it straight through now.”

This explains the appearances of odd characters that made the leap from writers room in-jokes to broadcast, like Bee’s fictional attraction to a mailman or a weird character Bartlett named “Very Pregnant Grandma.”

“If it makes Sam laugh, and that’s good enough for us,” she said.

Other hosts and writers close the gap left by the audience’s absence with satire. On “Late Night” Meyers speaks to the crowd as he always has except when he asks how they – we – are doing, he longer pauses for hooting and applause that isn’t there. He slip and slides right past his hello and into the monologue with a “How-is-everybody-doing-tonight-that-is-great-to-hear-let’s-get-to-the-news.”

Quarantine-era “Conan” has kitted out Los Angeles’ The Largo Theater with cut-outs of people as Conan O’Brien deadpans his way through each show on a lonesome stage with Andy Richter situated nearby.

Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, hosts of “The Late Show” and “Last Week Tonight,” respectively, aren’t even pretending to address empty rows. They’re staring straight through the fourth wall and into our living rooms.

In contrast, the eponymous hosts of “Desus & Mero” mainly speak to each other, even back when they were in-studio. This made head writer and executive producer Mike Pielocik more worried that the move to remote would throw off the chemistry between hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero than he was concerned about losing the audience.

“We were all pleasantly surprised that it didn’t; the dynamic between the guys didn’t feel different at all,” he said, partly crediting the fact that their studio audience has always been small relative to other shows.

“Our show has always had a weird relationship with the studio audience,” he added. “We loved having them there, and I really miss that kind of feedback, and everything. But I don’t think it was ever critical to our show’s success or even like working really.”

Pielocik quickly added that when “Desus & Mero” can have a live audience, they will. “It’s not that they’re gone forever. But it’s been really funny to see how much of our show in particular works almost just as well without a live audience in the studio.”

From a viewer’s perspective the same might be said of “The Daily Social Distancing Show” and “Full Frontal.” Each responded to the loss of their audiences by changing their shows’ pacing, experimenting with format or taking more chances with their humor.

“Full Frontal” returned to the air on March 25, 2020 with a show filmed in Bee’s woodsy backyard. In the months that followed the producers played with animated segments, invited on music guests and broke their usual format in ways they hadn’t before.

Since “The Late Late Show” has returned to the studio in August – and the audience still has not – Crabbe said that the writing had to become much more conversational. “Our show was always a 360-degree show where we were always using the audience,” he said. “But now our crew and our band are our audience. They’re the ones there with James to give reactions.”

Crabbe adds that this has changed the writing style to leave opportunities for James and Reggie to engage with the writers and the crew. “We’re all in there, six feet apart, wearing masks, but engaged,” he said. “And so it’s really been a nice way to involve the crew, and they’ve leaned into it as well.”

With vaccination drives haphazardly rolling out across the country we may be heading towards a time in the not-too-distant future when the public will be welcomed back into each show’s theater. But among the writers interviewed here there’s a sense that some aspects of these distanced productions will remain part of that new normal.

Crabbe, for instance, foresees “The Late Late Show” retaining the conversational tone it has developed over the past year: “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to doing the sort of traditional style of monologue, because we’ve kind of grown into this,” he said.

Drucker and Bartlett predict “Full Frontal” will continue to embrace the flexibility the current version of the show has opened up for them. Pielocik foresees incorporating more adventurous animations into “Desus & Mero” and getting the hosts outdoors a lot more. Parang and Flanz believe we’ll be seeing Noah continue his one-man show asides where he plays various characters within the same segment. It will require more editing on the back end, they said, but they don’t want to lose that gag.

All agree that nothing can replace the satisfying uplift a live audience provides. “It’s such a different energy, the upbeat feeling of in the studio of, ‘We did it, the audience is happy, they’re laughing.’ You hear them on the way out and it’s awesome . . . just feeling like you made something together.”

Parang seconded that. “The audience is who we’re doing this for.”

Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who spoke at rally preceding Capitol Riot, calls Capitol Rioters “fools”

On Saturday, AL.com quoted Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) as calling the rioters who invaded the U.S. Capitol in January “fools.”

“They did more to hurt the Republican Party and our efforts for honest and accurate elections than anybody could have, even those who would’ve followed a script written by the Democratic Party,” said Brooks. He added that because of their violent attack, which left five people dead, Congress is unable to have a true debate on “voter fraud and election theft.”

Brooks’ criticism stands in stark contrast to January 6, when he himself was one of the speakers at the pro-Trump “Save America” rally that immediately preceded, and fed into, the invasion of the Capitol.

There is no evidence Brooks was aware of or explicitly encouraging the violence; however, he was one of the members of Congress who raised a baseless objection to the Electoral College tally, and at the speech, he legitimized their actions, saying “Today is the day that American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

Brooks, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, is running for the Senate seat being vacated by longtime Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby.