Betsy DeVos made at least $225M in office while denying relief to defrauded college students: report

On Tuesday, Axios reported that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made hundreds of millions of dollars while in office — and that the full extent of her earnings during that period are impossible to assess fully.

“Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reported earning at least $225 million in outside income during her tenure in the Trump administration, according to a report by the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,” reported Rebecca Falconer. “CREW said the full amount in outside earnings from dividends, interest and rents during her time in the post could be ‘potentially well over $414 million,’ based on its analysis of three of DeVos’ financial disclosures conducted by CREW.”

“DeVos’ family owns the marketing firm Amway and she was the richest member of former President Trump’s Cabinet. She pledged to donate her salary to charity during her time in the administration,” continued the report. “‘She maintained a stake in Neurocore, a brain performance company targeting children, and failed to recuse from matters related to the company despite the potential for conflicts of interest,’ CREW said.”

DeVos’ tenure in the Department of Education was also marked by a stubborn refusal to fully forgive the debts of college students defrauded by shuttered for-profit institutions. The Biden administration has reversed this policy, fully forgiving the loans of 72,000 people totaling $1 billion.

“Say ‘no’ nicely”: Toxic workplace culture demands Black women shrink themselves and never speak up

Imagine being forced to wear a permanent mask, altering your voice and muffling your culture, so that you can perform weekly from 9-5, Monday through Friday. This performance allows you to eat, compete and meet the social requirements of your employer. That is the reality for many Black people in America. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B Du Bois wrote, “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Black men have had to learn to master this veil, however, Black women are forced to do the same while also navigating sexism and America’s obsession with their shape, hair and alleged attitude.

Black women in the workforce always have two jobs –– what they are employed to do and surviving all of the extra tasks that come with false stereotypes. Too often they don’t get the praise they deserve. Author Jennifer Farmer illustrates the harsh reality of “working twice as hard to be perceived as half as skilled,” in her new book “First and Only: A Black Woman’s Guide to Thriving at Work and in Life,” and she and I got the chance to discuss it this week on “Salon Talks.”

Farmer, founder of Spotlight PR who has worked with clients like Killer Mike, Nina Turner and Jesse Williams, spent her career dealing with the many ills Black women have to endure in corporate America. She faced everything from obvious racism to superiors attempting to silence her, or telling her to be, “more nice,” in the way they’d never address a man.

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Farmer here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about what she’s learned from her experiences, how she copes with it and what everyone from Black men to non-Black women can do to better support their colleagues.

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

The timing of your book, “First and Only” is so perfect because there’s so much to unpack. When I was reading it, I felt it should have been written a long time ago as someone who hears lots of stories about what Black women go through in the workplace. For example, my mom just literally looking like the world has been beat out of her at the end of the week. She even had to sue the hospital she worked at because they were racist toward her and she actually won that settlement. It’s something that has been going on in our communities for a long time. What made you decide to put it out now?

I was in a situation where I was receiving a ton of negative feedback, and it was very depressing and I kept thinking, “Okay, something is wrong with me.” I know that I grew up thinking that I was supposed to be assertive, but that is not what most workplaces want. So how do I become a smaller version of myself? I found myself trying to be smaller and smaller and smaller. When I shifted the focus from myself to other Black women, I realized that many of us were fighting this temptation to shrink ourselves in order to be palatable to people who don’t like our very existence.

When I started working on the book, I started it as a journal because I was just trying to sort through what I was feeling. I shared it with a friend of mine, a strategist, and also she became the very first editor who looked at the work and she started telling me stories of what she experienced. It seemed like every person I talked to, they had a story that affirmed what I was saying in the book. I said, wait a minute, this is not just the Jennifer experience. It’s not just the handful of Black women. This is what we all experienced in terms of thinking through how we show up in spaces that can be ambivalent about our success.

Could you talk about some of that negative feedback you were getting just to give our viewers an example?

I was told that I was aggressive. I was told that I was too assertive. I was told, and this is probably my favorite one, that I needed to say “no” nicely. I was in a situation where I did not have the resources to do what my employer was asking me to do. I found myself saying no, and my boss sat me down. And he said, “Okay, I think you just need to say no, nicely. Just be nicer when you say no.”

Something he would never say to a man.

Right, right. And then at one point he told me that the feedback that I was receiving, it was racialized and gendered, but that I still needed to act on it. I started going around to the people that I was working with, trying to ask them if I hurt their feelings. And it was very humiliating, it was very humiliating. Then you think about the politics of this toxic positivity, and at the time I had so much going on in my personal life, but I was still trying to show up and paint a smile on. “Yep. I can do that. Yep. I can do that.” It doesn’t matter how much time it took me or at what personal costs.

I had people comment on my hair. I had a boss say, “Well, is that all your hair?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “Well, everyone knows it’s not your hair.” And I said, “Right, but you’re the only person who feels comfortable asking me in public, in front of others, about how I style my hair. That has nothing to do with what I’m doing.”

The crazy thing about that is almost every year, I read a story about a young Black woman being suspended because she has braids or being suspended because she’s wearing her natural hair. This is still happening. Most schools are closed now or are just starting to reopen, but when school was open in 2020 and 2019, these stories were still popping up. When is the nation going to get past this obsession with the Black woman’s hair?

And it’s not just the Black woman’s hair. It is the Black woman, it’s our physical appearance, it’s how we present, it’s our hair. There is an obsession with the Black woman, but there’s also a disdain for the Black woman. For a lot of us, when it comes to our hair, we’ve made calculated decisions about why we style our hair a certain way. And we calculate, what are we going to gain? What are we going to lose? D, I’m only recently starting to wear my hair natural because years ago I couldn’t deal with the fallout of being natural. I felt I needed to have my hair as straight as possible so that I could be comfortable or appear in a way that was non-threatening to the white people around me.

It’s hard for me to even to grasp some ideas on how people respond because I’m from Baltimore, which is such a Black city that you don’t really meet a lot of white people as peers until you are old enough to get a job or go away to college and deal with that. Can you take us through some of the things that Black women entering the workforce, surviving in a workplace go through?

So back to the hair. There are images that are populated in popular culture. Only recently, I’d say in the last five years, do you see models who have natural hair. If you look at videos, most of the videos from hip-hop and R&B. How many sisters have you seen with natural hair? When you go into the workplace, many of the Black women who I’ve talked to have had the experience of being told, “Oh, you’re too angry,” or “You made so-and-so cry,” or “You’re too direct.” You need to add some fluff, before you give feedback, add something positive at the beginning, something positive at the end. And then just be very, very nice about how you give it.

There’s also this whole notion of people perceiving you as a pet, and then people perceiving you as a threat. If you are too competent and if you’ve had a ton of experience and you walk into some places and go about your work as though you know what you’re doing, that could be off-putting to some people. There’d be times where I would pretend I did not know, again in order to make others comfortable. When that’s not happening, there’s the pet, “Oh, your hair is so nice. Can I touch it?” Or, “What’d you do this weekend? Oh, why did you do that? Why are you eating that?” And I’ve heard, particularly from women are Southeast Asian or other parts of the world, talk about the comments people make about their food and how insensitive it is.

The other thing is I wanted to talk specifically to Black women because there are ways that non-Black women who are not doing their own anti-racism work can perpetuate harm to Black women. I wanted to call that out and speak specifically to a group that there aren’t enough leadership books and content focusing exclusively on.

Do you feel your peers are doing enough work to usher in the next generation of young Black women who are going to have to go through this?

Well, I want to be very clear that Black women are doing what we need to do. It is the institutions that we walk into that must do their work. My aunts would tell me, “Okay, here’s what you can expect. When you go into this meeting, this is what you do.” I had other sister friends pull me aside and say, “Okay, well, here’s what you need to do,” or “Who are your allies?” So I don’t think that the onus is exclusively on Black women. We’ve put a lot of work in ourselves, we’re among the most educated groups. I think that the people who want to be allies, I think the organizations, the people who hire Black women it’s time for them to do their work as well.

This is a historical problem that we face, and I think you touch on it well. People need to understand how Black women were brought to this country and what they were expected to do. Not only birth the nation of people that built the country, but work right alongside with them and never given a space to complain or never given the space to be angry or never given the space to even have that trauma addressed. To that point, I loved how you broke down anger. Black women have a right to be angry.

Anger is huge, and the reason it’s huge is because Black women have been taught from the time that we were little girls, you cannot be angry. You cannot show emotion. They’re going to call you an angry Black woman, so you better be careful how you show up. They’re going to mistreat your kids in school, but you can’t go up there and be angry. You have to be calm. And so for some of this, what that can lead us to doing is to suppressing how we feel. When you suppress something for so long, you go numb and something will happen and you have to check in with yourself to say, “Wait a minute, how do I feel?” Or you feel, “I don’t have the latitude to get angry. I just have to keep producing.” And so for Black women, we’ve been denied anger as a legitimate emotion.

Anger will let you know when something is wrong. It will let you know when a boundary has been violated. When you go through life trying to escape that label, it will cause you to keep quiet when you really should speak. It will cause you to apologize profusely. When I meet women and they can live and they can own all of their emotions, I pay attention to how society portrays them. They may not use the term angry. They could say, “Oh, she’s difficult.” Or, “You’re not going to get anywhere. Don’t waste your time.” Or they will nod as though they are interested in what she was saying with no intention of actually carrying it out.

I think a lot about Monique, the comedian, and I think about when she talked about being blackballed and when she talked about not being willing to work for free. That is so basic for all of us. When she initially came out, she was not well-received. People made fun of her, people thought, “Oh, the audacity,” that she would expect to get what Amy Schumer makes or what some of the Black male comedians make. They did not treat her well. A lot of people had to go back and apologize or at least reconsider their position and I heard her talk and what she said is, “They wanted me to be comfortable with what they were giving me because I’m a Black woman. And because I’m a bigger Black woman.”

We’re always making calculations about how we raise things. If we are sexually assaulted and we go to police, we have to be composed. I remember when my son was little, I was in a custody battle with his father. His father desperately wanted to raise him and I wanted to raise him. I remember going into that court and my aunt saying, “Now, listen, they are already primed to see an angry Black woman. You can show no emotion.” That was one of the most traumatic and painful experiences that I’ve had and I don’t think I shed a tear in the courtroom. I kept everything in, I suppressed it. What we know about suppressing emotions is the body keeps score, so while I was not expressing the emotion of anger while I was not crying, when I really needed to be crying, it was impacting my body in other ways, it was impacting my mental health in other ways. What I say to people is, if you don’t get anything out of this book, I want you to get the fact that you have got to give Black women space to express the full range of their emotions and anger is a part of that.

How can Black women forced to deal with that anger, start their journey of healing?

I’m a big proponent of therapy. I’m a big proponent of counseling and when it comes to therapy and counseling. I have been so immensely blessed by Black woman therapists, where there were no cultural barriers; they got it, they got me. I think focusing on yourself in terms of healing and therapy is critically important. I think developing a spiritual practice that works for you and really, really assessing the messages that we’ve gotten around religion too. And thinking about, “Okay, well, what is liberating for me? What is going to keep me healthy?”

It could mean that I’m going for a long walk. It could mean that I’m joining a supportive prayer group, it could mean that I’m meditating. Without doing those things, I don’t think I would be here to have this conversation. What I say in the book is that in all of our doing, in all of our fighting for other people’s liberation, we have to fight for our own liberation and sometimes that is daily work.

How should Black men be stepping up to make sure we can walk side-by-side in fighting that fight?

One of the most important things that Black men can do is to do their own work. When I have met Black men and they have been focused to taking care of themselves, getting in touch with their emotions, healing from past trauma, they are better poised to be a support for Black women. Doing their own work and focusing on their healing will immensely benefit us. I also think that men who are fathers, and even if you are not a biological father, but you are in a position to support someone’s child, that is critically important. I would prioritize fatherhood and mentorship. You obviously want some level of career success so that you can provide, but I feel in the Black community, sometimes we put so much emphasis on providing financially and not enough emphasis on emotional development so that you could provide for a child, a nephew, a niece, a mentees for their emotional development.

As men, we are taught that as long as we’re coming through with the money, then everything is fine when we need to understand that, that’s the only part of the battle because we have to be emotionally available too or it’s never going to be as good as it can be. Your book is also coming out at the time when we have a history-making first and only, Vice President Kamala Harris. How do you think she’s going to be critiqued and watched and what is that going to look like?

There are going to be a ton of expectations for her, of what she should do and when she should do it. As we apply pressure on people, we can’t single her out. We know that she’s in a powerful role, but we have to give her the cover to do what we’re asking her to do, but we also have to hold them all accountable. I think that she is going to face a unique path, a tough path, and a lot of it, she will not be able to talk about. Even if she writes a tell-all book four years from now, there are things that she will never be able to disclose. There will be people who think that she’s not moving fast enough, there will be people who think that she can do more

I think what she has to remember to do is keep a tight-knit circle of Black women. And I said Black women specifically. A tight circle of Black women with all the expectations that so many stakeholders will have, that she holds on to what she wanted to do, and that she’s able to bring some of that forward. The final thing that I will say is the goal is not to be the first and only. That’s not the goal, that’s a testament of where we are. Anything that she can do and others can do to ensure that it’s not just us to open up spaces for other Black women, that’s the goal.

Absolutely. Tell everybody where they can find “First and Only: A Black Woman’s Guide to Thriving at Work and in Life”

You can buy it from the publisher Broadleaf Books, you can buy it from Target, you can get it from Walmart, or you can get it from any Christian bookseller. And I say Christian, because I talk a lot about having a spiritual practice. And anywhere that sells books.

Urban dwellers have more luck finding vaccines in rural, redder counties

Jen McGrew lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, but she didn’t get vaccinated there. Instead, she traveled to Ogden, Utah — about 33.5 miles north of her home — for her first shot of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.

McGrew, who was already traveling to Ogden daily to visit her mother in the hospital, didn’t have a formal appointment — she just got lucky.

“I stepped off the elevator on the ground floor one afternoon and saw the wrap up of that day’s clinic,” she told Salon via email. “I stopped to ask if there were any leftovers or ‘walk-in’ shots remaining, and within five minutes I was in front of an attendant who got my paperwork started.”

Her second shot is scheduled there for the end of this month.

Ogden, a ski town, is the county seat for Weber County, which with a population of 231,000 is less than one-fourth the size of Salt Lake City’s eponymous home county. But the town of Ogden is much more conservative than Salt Lake City, which, in spite of Utah’s reputation, leans very much to the left.

McGrew’s story highlights a peculiar trend playing out nationwide: one in which urban city-dwellers, struggling to find vaccines in their home cities, have found success getting vaccinated in neighboring counties that are more conservative and, in some cases, more rural.

That aligns with polling that shows that those who identify as Republicans are far less likely to get vaccinated. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from this month found that 30 percent of people surveyed stated that, if offered the COVID-19 vaccine, they would not take it. Of those who stated they would reject the vaccine, 49 percent were Republican men, as opposed to 6 percent of Democrat-identifying men. Moreover, 14 percent of Democrat women said they wouldn’t receive the vaccine if offered, compared to 34 percent of Republican women.

Since vaccines are distributed to counties based on population, that suggests that more right-leaning regions should have more of a surplus of vaccines than more liberal regions. And indeed, that seems to be borne out by which states are opening up vaccinations to all adult residents.

On Tuesday, Texas announced that all residents over the age of 16 will be eligible for coronavirus vaccinations next week. Currently, all adults over the age of 16 are eligible to get a vaccine in red states like Alaska and Mississippi. Utah will expand eligibility this week, and Tennessee announced last week that all residents 16 and older will be eligible for vaccinations starting on April 5.

On a more granular level, red counties within both blue and red states across the country appear to have a greater supply of vaccine, suggesting that vaccines are going unused and untaken in those areas. For example, a rural Missouri town on the border of Iowa was left with 1,500 unused doses after a mass vaccination drive.

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In February, The Colorado Sun reported that rural counties were vaccinating people faster than urban ones; one southwest Colorado county had already run out of people to vaccinate. While this isn’t true of all rural areas — some have reportedly had messy vaccine roll-outs due to a lack of resources — it does appear to be a trend in some regions.

Experts, like those weighing in on the trend in Colorado, have chalked this up to population differences. Yet vaccine hesitancy may also play a role. As has been reported time and again, rural Americans appear to be less interested in the COVID-19 vaccine — even though many rural states have been hard-hit by the pandemic. In North Dakota, about 1 in 500 residents died from the coronavirus. Yet now, public health officials say the state’s biggest hurdle to get its population vaccinated is vaccine hesitancy.

“I think it’s just going to take a bit of time for some people to make that decision to get vaccinated, but we just have a lot of work correcting misinformation that’s out there,” Immunization Program Director Molly Howell said at a press conference earlier this month.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center who is based in Pennsylvania, said he’s seeing this trend play out in his home state, too. Adalja says that he has observed rural counties vaccinating people from surrounding counties with more densely-populated cities. As a doctor, he has even advised his patients to seek out vaccines in rural places in some cases.

“Some counties will even say we’re vaccinating people from all counties, not just our home county, because there may have been differences in allocations or maybe differences in vaccine uptake, differences in expiry dates,” Adalja said. “So they’re all sort of moving at their own pace. I encourage people to be tenacious about this.”

Adalja said he’s heard of people going out of state to get vaccinated. While he said he believes the trend moves both ways — people going from rural to urban, then urban to rural — when asked why some rural counties appear to have a surplus of vaccines, he said it’s “multifactorial.”

“I don’t know that vaccine hesitancy is playing a major role in every place . . . it might be in certain places, but it’s probably idiosyncratic to the county,” Adalja mused. “It might have to do with how much a state allocates to a given county and how they make that formula— for example, we know that some states allocated to nursing homes based on the number of beds they had rather than the number of occupied beds, so that could have created a surplus in certain counties, versus others.”

In the United States, nearly 2.5 million doses are being administered a day. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of March 23, 2021, 128,217,029 doses have been administered and 164,300,795 doses have been distributed across the country. While various states and counties have differing eligibility requirements, Adalja said he doesn’t think it’s a “bad” thing when it comes to crossing state and county lines to get inoculated.

“It’s not a bad thing, because in the end we want vaccines in people’s arms, and it’s less important what side of the county line they live on, rather than just making sure they’re actually getting vaccinated,” Adalja.

Instead, the need for people to travel great distances speaks to the rockiness of the roll-out thus far.

“Unfortunately, our vaccine rollout wasn’t wasn’t perfect, and still is not perfect, but it’s getting better,” Adalja said. “And that’s just a reflection that people can’t go to in their own municipality and get vaccinated.”

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell throws a tantrum after Fox News won’t let him on air: “Are they in on it?”

On Tuesday, speaking to far-right talk radio host Eric Metaxas, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell tore into Fox News for refusing to let him on air to peddle his voter fraud conspiracy theories — and demanded to know if they are “in on it.”

Mike Lindell and Fox News are both the subject of defamation lawsuits by voting companies against claims they promoted about election fraud — and Lindell seemed to be under the impression that these suits meant there was no additional legal jeopardy Fox had for inviting him on.

“I want to say one thing here, there’s things that don’t make sense everybody,” said Lindell. “Let’s just talk about Fox. You’re already sued. It’s too late to close the gate, the cows are out of the barn. Why can’t people go on there and say their free speech then? You’re already sued, Fox! What are you have, what, are you gonna get double-sued? What’s the matter with you? And I will say that straight-out, it makes me, I’m so, you know — what are they, in on it? I don’t get it. Is it a fake lawsuit?”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell goes all in on attacking Fox News. “What’s the matter with you…what, are you in on it” Lindell said. pic.twitter.com/pXjMrTFekR

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) March 23, 2021

Two mass shootings within a week: America’s gruesome “bingo card” total keeps growing

America is struggling through a season of death. At least 540,000 people have succumbed to COVID-19, and we have suffered two mass shootings in seven days. Last Tuesday, in a possible or likely hate crime, a white man, shot and killed eight people in the Atlanta area, six of them women of East Asian descent. On Monday, another 21-year-old man, reportedly a Syrian immigrant who had lived most of his life in the United States allegedly shot and killed at least 10 people at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. One of the victims was a Boulder police officer.

Those were not the only examples of large-scale gun carnage in America during that same seven-day period: There were also mass shootings in Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Stockton, California, and Gresham, Oregon.

These incidents are a few examples of many that illustrate the ways that America is truly an “exceptional” nation — in its astronomically high levels of gun violence and mass shootings.

The U.S. has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among wealthy nations. The number of deaths from gun violence would be even higher if not for dramatic recent advances in trauma and emergency medicine.

The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country in the world — even more than Yemen, a nation torn apart for years by a bloody civil war. In fact, there are more guns in the United States than there are people. Gun violence is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $200 billion dollars a year, according to a 2019 report.

It is especially worth noting that just 3 percent of gun owners possess half the total number of guns in America. Some of these “super-owners” have dozens of guns. They are overwhelmingly white and male.

In her book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes America’s obsession with guns:

The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.

While gun “advocates” have created superhero narratives, such as the fantasy about “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun,” the reality is that a gun owner is much more likely to shoot a family member, a neighbor, a friend or themselves — by accident or suicide — than a criminal assailant. “Defensive gun use” statistics are inaccurate and wildly exaggerated.

Like soldiers in wartime, many Americans have developed a type of gallows humor to manage the routine horrors of a culture where gun violence and mass shootings are fixtures of day-to-day life. One such example of these macabre sensibilities is the “mass shooting bingo card” that circulates online after a high-profile mass shooting such as those over the past week in Boulder and Atlanta.

The mass shooting bingo card has squares labeled with categories such as “mental health,” “lone wolf,” “thoughts and prayers,” “violent video games,” “now is not the time to talk politics” and “radical Islamic terrorism.”

In a larger context, the mass shooting bingo card is a representation or metaphor of how race, class, gender, religion and other identities filter the American public’s understanding of gun violence and how to assign blame and responsibility for it.

But the mass shooting bingo card is not understood and used the same way by different groups of people. For many nonwhite people and others, it becomes a way to point out the hypocrisy and contradictions around how guns, the color line and violence intersect in America, where certain groups of people are automatically deemed to be criminals and terrorists if they are involved in a mass shooting or other large-scale act of violence.

But those who are invested in white privilege and white (male) power, as well as masculinity, individualism and lack of group accountability — for whom guns (and a de facto monopoly on violence) are understood as a type of birthright, never to be restricted — use the logic of the mass shooting bingo card to support the status quo.

Applied in that way, the mass shooting bingo card deems that a white person (especially a member of the white right) who commits an act of mass violence is just “having a bad day” — as a sheriff’s captain in Georgia described the alleged shooter there — is someone worthy of empathy, to be deemed “mentally ill” and therefore not responsible for his actions. In other words, this person is given a pass designed to avoid a challenging conversation about the relationship between whiteness, gender, guns, crime, terror, politics and violence.

Tucker Carlson made great use of the mass shooting bingo card in a recent op-ed at Fox News, writing this about the alleged Atlanta shooter:

Robert Long seems deranged, but his obsessive and violent behavior seems sadly familiar if you follow the news closely. An increasing number of Americans struggle with mental illness. It would be worth knowing much more about Robert Long’s life, if only to try to prevent the next mass shooting.

Evidence has not been presented that Long is mentally ill, and it’s infuriating how conservatives keep pinning the blame for mass shootings on people who live with mental illness, most of whom aren’t violent killers.

Would conservatives and others apply the same logic about “mental illness” to Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the alleged gunman in Boulder? In all probability the answer is no, but the exercise is instructive.

That story is still developing, but it has been reported that Alissa showed signs of being mentally unwell, and may have suffered from hallucinations, paranoia, rage issues and other problems.

The Daily Beast has reported that the alleged shooter’s brother describes him as mentally ill:

Ali Aliwi Alissa, 34, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview that his brother was paranoid, adding that in high school he would talk about “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” he said.

He said he was sure the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”

“The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social,” the brother said.

Because the (white) American popular imagination is likely to view Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa as an Arab or Muslim first and foremost, he will almost automatically be categorized as a “terrorist,” regardless of whatever information about his motivations may come to light. Of course it is conceivable that multiple overlapping things may be true: Alissa may be mentally unwell, and may also have political or ideological motivations.

Ultimately, the most important common denominator on the mass shooting bingo card are the guns themselves. A majority of Americans, including gun owners and even some NRA members, support reasonable gun control laws such as mandatory waiting periods for handgun purchases, a national gun database, and restrictions on certain types of firearms and ammunition.

As a true “special interest” in the worst and most damning sense of the term, the NRA, the gun lobby and the Republican Party adamantly oppose such measures for reasons that are personal, cultural, financial and political.

We have reason to hope that the COVID pandemic’s season of death will soon be over. But the body count from America’s gun culture will continue to grow largely unabated. Why? Because a small but vocal and highly influential minority of Americans want it that way. They wave the flag, brandish the Bible, wallow in Fox News and other right-wing propaganda and stock up on guns, all too willing to sacrifice their children — and ours — to a false god.

MAGA world civil war? Not quite — but pro-Trump figures are squabbling

With Donald Trump’s presidency now in the past, competing factions are emerging among TrumpWorld characters who are now in open conflict with each other. From MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s beef with Fox News to former Parler CEO John Matze’s clashing with his former employer, longtime allies in the MAGA movement, are now turning against each other.

On Tuesday alone, several such feuds were on display. The day began with the news that formerly Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell, who once made grand, if entirely unsupported, claims about Dominion Voting Systems, alleging it had plotted to steal votes from Trump and deliver them to Joe Biden, had more or less backed down from her legal fight. Powell asked a judge to dismiss Dominion’s $1.3 billion lawsuit against her and various other defendants, with her attorneys arguing in a letter to the judge that “no reasonable person” should have believed Powell’s wild claims about the election.

“Reasonable people understand that the ‘language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact,'” Powell’s motion to dismiss read. “It is likewise a ‘well-recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.'”

Powell’s legal strategy is strikingly similar to the legal argument previously deployed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson used in court, who suggested that what he says on the air shouldn’t be taken seriously because he’s expressing an opinion — on a channel that claims to deliver news.

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, weighing in on his right-wing podcast, “WarRoom Pandemic,” appeared to turn against Powell, while celebrating Lindell, asserting that the pillow tycoon wouldn’t seek to dismiss the lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has filed against him, as Powell did.

“If you look at the public announcement today about the ‘Kraken,’ that ain’t going to be Mike Lindell, he is coming hot and hard on this thing,” Bannon stated Tuesday morning. “He’s not backing off one inch!”

By lunchtime on Tuesday, Lindell himself had emerged, going on a full-on tear against Fox News, the cable network on which MyPillow runs advertisements around the clock.

“I want to say one thing here — here’s things that don’t make sense. Let’s just talk about Fox!” Lindell exclaimed on a small right-wing YouTube channel. “You’re already sued! It’s too late to close the gate, the cows are already out of the barn!”

Despite running the company that is among Fox News’ largest advertisers, Lindell hinted that Fox News might be “in on” the Dominion lawsuit filed against him.

“Why can’t people go on there and say their free speech, then?” Lindell demanded. “You’re already sued, Fox. What do you have — are you going to get double sued? What’s the matter with you? What are they, in on it? I don’t get it. Is it a fake lawsuit?” Lindell concluded, bemoaning the channel’s lack of “election fraud” coverage.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell goes all in on attacking Fox News. “What’s the matter with you…what, are you in on it” Lindell said. pic.twitter.com/pXjMrTFekR

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) March 23, 2021

A Fox News spokesperson didn’t respond to a Salon request for comment on Lindell’s monologue.

Yet the burgeoning rifts between right-wing folks on the internet didn’t stop there. Former Parler CEO John Matze ended the day by claiming in a lawsuit that the alternative social media site he helped to create had been “hijacked” by Rebekah Mercer, the conservative billionaire, and right-wing mega-donor. Matze is now suing Parler for firing him and stripping away his 40% ownership stake in the company, seeking “both compensatory and punitive damages pursuant to his claims.”

Parler’s communications office didn’t return a Salon request for comment.

Exclusive: Big Oil pushed school officials to make “dishonest” claims on Biden climate policy

Oil and gas industry advocates were involved in an “unusual” effort by five top state education officials to stoke economic fears about President Joe Biden’s climate policy, according to internal emails reviewed by Salon.

The American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade organization representing the oil and gas industry, and its allies have gone on the offensive against Biden’s early executive orders, which included a temporary but indefinite moratorium on new gas and oil leases on federal land. API has framed the order as a “ban,” which is misleading at best, since it applies only to new leases. New drilling permits are still being awarded under existing leases, and the industry is sitting on millions of acres of leased but unused land.

Internal emails show that the API’s allies were involved in crafting a self-described “unusual” letter signed by five Western state school superintendents to Biden, which was later published as an op-ed. The letter raised concerns that the moratorium would cost thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that could impact education funding, relying heavily on misleading data from an API report written before Biden was even elected.

The emails show that the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a former division of API that has grown into a standalone organization, sent data to one of the superintendents and later thanked her for the “fantastic” op-ed. API later promoted the superintendents’ talking points on social media, though it did not mention that it supported the Trump administration’s cuts in oil royalties that had made up a much larger share of industry revenue distributed to states that helps fund education.

The letter immediately set off alarm bells among industry experts.

“That letter was clearly drafted for them and they were just asked to sign it,” Mark Squillace, a former Interior Department official who is now a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School, concluded in an interview with Salon. “I don’t know what they actually know about oil and gas revenues, but the idea that hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be lost by the states is just ridiculous. It’s absurd.”

Squillace added that he has never previously seen the oil industry work with elected state education officials to push “misleading” claims.

“Obviously, the education sector is going to be more sympathetic” to the public than the oil and gas industry, he said, “so it was clearly an interesting tactic. But it’s fairly dishonest, or at least misleading, for them to be putting out that kind of information and broadly suggesting that a leasing moratorium is somehow going to cost the state all this money. The leasing moratorium is not going to do that. It’s going to have a nominal impact.”

The emails were obtained through a public records request by the progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund, which on Wednesday launched “Polluters Exposed,” a joint initiative aimed at holding API and its allies “accountable for decades of spreading misinformation” about climate and pollution.

“Oil and gas executives love to talk about working with the Biden administration to address climate change, but these documents show behind closed doors they are actively working to undermine that very effort,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. “Polluters Exposed will shine a light on Big Oil and show the American people how industry lines its pockets by spreading misinformation and corrupting policymakers.”

The groups accused the oil industry’s top advocates of helping “orchestrate a scheme to use public schools as a Trojan horse” to attack the administration’s climate policy.

“They have zero shame. API and their allies should stop using our teachers and schools to halt progress on climate action. Our children will pay the price for these lies,” Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power Education Fund, said in a statement. “The days of the American Petroleum Institute and its allies lying with impunity are over. Americans deserve the truth and we are going to give it to them.”

An API spokesperson denied any involvement with the letter.

“These individuals are entitled to their own opinion, and highlight many valid points about the real, serious impact a long-term federal leasing and development ban would have on education in their communities. Their concerns about school funding should be taken seriously,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Salon, adding that New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, and the state’s two Democratic senators, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, have expressed “similar concerns,” though they had largely expressed concerns that energy firms would move to states with more private land available, like Texas.

“Our industry believes it’s important all the facts and potential effects be considered when crafting policy,” the spokesperson added. “The NDPC is not a part of API, but they, the superintendents, and others are free to cite the publicly posted information on our website.”

API has vowed to deliver “solutions that reduce the risks of climate change” and even plans to endorse a carbon pricing plan to help meet the Paris climate accord’s targets, even though it fiercely opposed such legislation for the past decade, according to a draft statement obtained by The Wall Street Journal. API president and CEO Mike Sommers told the Washington Examiner that he is “optimistic” and “hopeful” that the group will have a “seat at the table to discuss these big issues” with the administration. But days after Biden took office, Sommers attacked the lease moratorium, framing it as a “federal leasing and development ban” even though the order did not apply to existing operations and Biden has repeatedly made a point of vowing not to ban drilling. Sommers warned that such a “ban” could result in significant cuts to state funding that supports schools.

That same week, Kristen Hamman, director of regulatory and public affairs at the North Dakota Petroleum Institute, sent North Dakota State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler an email sharing data claiming that an oil and gas lease ban would cost her state thousands of jobs, $600 million in tax revenue, and $750 million in personal income over the next four years.

“Ron wanted me to send you some ND stats on oil impacts,” Hamman wrote, referring to Ron Ness, the group’s president, who was copied on the email.

“Thank you, Kristen!” Baesler replied. “This is very helpful.”

The following month, the “unusual” letter to Biden signed by Baesler, along with Wyoming State Superintendent Jillian Balow, Montana State Superintendent Elsie Arntzen, Utah Superintendent Sydnee Dickson and Alaska State Commissioner Michael Johnson, contained the exact figures shared by Hamman.

“In North Dakota, the lease moratorium would result in 13,000 lost jobs over four years, along with $600 million in lost tax revenue and a $750 million loss in personal income,” the letter said. “North Dakota’s oil and gas industry accounts for 24,000 direct jobs in the state.”

Ness followed up with Baesler a few days later.

“Thank you, this is fantastic,” he wrote.

Baesler told Salon the North Dakota data did not come from an API report but an analysis by a researcher at the University of Wyoming, and denied that she had coordinated with oil and gas industry advocates.

“State school chiefs in Western energy-producing states coordinated their efforts on this letter,” she said in an email. “We are rightly concerned about the Biden administration’s open hostility to domestic energy production, and its effects on energy income that our states rely upon for educating our young people. The president’s approach to our states’ resources is not only reflected in his executive orders affecting energy, but also his action to stop the Keystone XL pipeline project, which as envisioned would carry oil production from Alberta and western North Dakota to refineries to the east and south.”

Baesler cited reports predicting that the moratorium is “widely viewed as a precursor to a more permanent ban” and disputed that Biden’s order would not affect existing operations.

Representatives for Balow, the letter’s lead signatory, and Johnson also denied they had “coordinated” with representatives of the oil and gas industry. Dickson and Hamman did not respond to questions from Salon.

“Coordinate, no,” Linda Finnerty, a spokesperson for Balow, said in a statement to Salon. “We maintain relationships with industries of all types and routinely ask for information, clarification, and data.”

Finnerty pointed to a letter from Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon to the Interior Department disputing that the order did not affect existing operations. Gordon argued in his letter that the order had resulted in a slowdown of permitting for existing leases, despite denials from the department.

“‘Moratorium’ is a misnomer,” Finnerty insisted.

“The leasing “pause” – which appears to be indefinite – discourages the pursuit of continued energy independence for the United States,” Sharyl Allen, a spokesperson for Arntzen, said in a statement to Salon.

But Hannah Wiseman, a law professor and faculty fellow at Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, said the superintendents’ data was based on revenue that was unaffected by the moratorium.

“The superintendents are using the royalty numbers from oil and gas wells on lands that are already leased and producing and translating those numbers into job losses,” she said in an email. “But the moratorium on new leases does not order existing production to shut down; the royalties that states are already receiving to fund schools and other essential programs are not affected.”

The letter falsely described Biden’s temporary halt on new leases as “actions taken to ban oil and gas leases.”

“It is imperative that we bring to light the arbitrary and inequitable move to shut down oil and gas production on federal lands in our states that depend on revenues from various taxes, royalties, disbursements, and lease payments to fund our schools, community infrastructure, and public services,” the letter said.

The superintendents repeatedly cited data from the API study, echoing its claims that a ban would cost 13,300 jobs in Wyoming, 3,300 jobs and $30 million in revenue in Montana, 11,000 jobs and $72 million in revenue in Utah, and 3,500 jobs and $24 million in Alaska.

Industry experts said the data was highly misleading.

“The ‘costs’ mentioned in the letter, or in some other studies, assume not just a pause on new leases, but rather a long term cessation in oil and gas operations,” Brad Handler, a former Wall Street analyst covering oilfield services and drilling who now serves as a senior fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, said in an email.

“What the Biden administration has implemented is a temporary (albeit of undefined duration) pause on issuing new leases on public (federal) lands,” he continued. “The Department of Interior has been directed to conduct a review of leasing and management policies. … The executive action makes clear that permitting and extraction operation can continue on existing leases. Thus, broadly there is almost no impact on employment or state revenues in the near to medium term as a result of this action.”

API later promoted the superintendents’ talking points on Twitter, citing a quote from Balow claiming that Biden’s moratorium was a “lockdown of an industry our students in Wyoming really depend on.”

The API report, which was compiled last September, was based on a hypothetical “federal leasing and development ban.” But Biden’s executive order does nothing even close to that. It pauses new leases while requiring nearly a third of federal lands to be conserved over the next decade.

In fact, Reuters noted that the order only affects “leasing activities, and not permitting, raising the possibility that the government could resume providing drilling permits to those who picked up leases in a series of auctions held in the waning days of the Trump administration.”

The Interior Department approved 33 such permits in the week following Biden’s leasing pause, Bloomberg News reported. The oil and gas industry also has a stockpile of 7,700 unused leases, according to the Interior Department, leaving more than 13.9 million acres of public land available for drilling operations without any new leasing.

“Since President Biden’s Executive Order directing a review of the federal oil and gas program and pause on new leasing, API has been very clear that our concern is that this action is the first step towards a long-term federal leasing and development ban,” an API spokesperson told Salon. “Our analysis was released in September 2020, and was not in response to Biden’s EO. It found that should a long-term ban be implemented it would shift the U.S. to foreign energy sources, cost nearly one million American jobs, increase CO2 emissions and reduce revenue that funds education and key conservation programs.”

Squillace said the industry was manipulating and distorting the issue in order to attack the administration, even though Biden’s order will have little impact on revenues.

“This is a really bad time to be leasing federal oil and gas because the price has been historically low,” he said, adding that demand for new leases has been so low that most are now auctioned at the minimum bid price of $2 an acre. “That doesn’t suggest a robust market for oil and gas leases. This is just a big industry making it out to be a lot more than it is.”

Squillace said that if education officials were actually interested in boosting revenues for schools, they would support increasing the minimum bid prices as well as other revenue streams from oil and gas drilling operations.

Most of the money schools receive from public lands comes from royalties on oil and gas production, though states also get revenue from rents, bonuses and potential penalties, according to the Interior Department. Bonuses, which are payments associated with winning bids on lease sales, are the only revenue even theoretically impacted by Biden’s pause. Most revenue comes from royalties, which are calculated as a percentage of the sales value of any oil produced by the drilling operations. Although revenue from bonuses increased as the Trump administration awarded a large number of new leases, royalties make up the vast majority of revenue collected by states, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Trump administration last year drastically cut royalty rates, which had provided states a total of $2.9 billion in revenue in 2019. In Superintendent Dickson’s state of Utah, the Bureau of Land Management cut standard royalty rates of 12.5% to as low as 0.5%, according to E&E News. BLM said the move was temporary, but House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., called for an investigation into to determine how much the change would cost in revenue and whether the cuts were necessary and properly handled.

Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund argued in a news release that the oil industry’s “feigned worry about school budgets is hypocritical” given that the industry had enthusiastically supported the Trump administration’s move to slash oil and gas royalty rates, “costing states and schools untold millions during the height of a pandemic when they needed it most.”

Unlike the concern raised by superintendents, Trump’s order “involved a direct reduction in royalty revenues as opposed to a speculative one,” Wiseman told Salon.

“These oil and gas royalties are an integral component of many western states’ budgets, and suspending their collection would have a direct negative effect on states,” the Western Governors’ Association warned then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, in April of 2020.

“This is a ludicrous outcome that provides an extremely generous subsidy to the oil and gas industry while robbing taxpayers and states of valuable revenue,” Grijalva argued in his own letter to Bernhardt.

The Government Accountability Office concluded last October that BLM had botched the royalty cut, failed to determine whether the policy — which cost taxpayers around $4.5 million at the time — was actually necessary and said it may have resulted in cuts for oil wells that did not need it.

Despite data showing the overwhelming share of revenue coming from oil and gas operations is from royalties, Finnerty, the Wyoming superintendent’s spokesperson, argued that “royalties are only part of the revenue realized from oil and gas.”

“Leases, bonuses, and other forms of indirect revenue are also in play,” she said. “The overall economic impact of oil and gas activity is very significant.”

Allen said in a statement that “a comparatively small number of producing wells are subject to this lawful reduction, which, in this time of the Covid pandemic, will assist in preserving jobs, supporting families, communities and critical infrastructure, i.e. schools.”

Grant Robinson, a spokesperson for Johnson, acknowledged in an email that “bonuses from lease sales generate less revenue for the state than royalties” but noted that Trump’s policy was a temporary one — as is Biden’s new policy.

Baesler denied that Trump’s policy posed a greater threat than Biden’s but acknowledged that most of the state’s oil and gas revenues come from royalties. Still, she said, “the Biden administration’s anti-energy policies pose a much greater threat to education funding than any action taken by the Trump administration.”

Squillace rejected that argument and said it was ironic that education officials had not raised similar concerns when Trump reduced the royalty rate.

It was “so absurd,” he said, that states would complain about “this silly little moratorium when they said nothing about the royalty relief package Trump put into effect. I mean, it just boggles the mind.”

“We are complicit”: Only some churches are offering real reparations and repentance for slavery

Leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests, one of the most prominent orders in the Roman Catholic Church, have announced a plan to raise $100 million in reparations to benefit the descendants of the people it once enslaved, reports the New York Times.

“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said Father Timothy P. Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. “Our shameful history of Jesuit enslaving in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.”

The money raised by the order will be funnelled into a new foundation, the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, which was founded in partnership with a group of individuals whose enslaved ancestors were sold by the Jesuits in 1893 to finance the establishment of Georgetown University, America’s first Catholic institution of higher learning.

Joseph Stewart, a retired corporate executive whose ancestors were enslaved by the Jesuits, will serve as the president of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation. He told the New York Times that they are establishing “a pathway forward that has not been traveled before.”

“[The Jesuits] did not come running to us, but because we went to them with open arms and open hearts, they responded,” Stewart said. “They have embraced our vision.”

Kesicki’s order has already deposited $15 million into a trust created to support the foundation, with a goal that the rest of the $100 million will be raised within the next three to five years.

Reparations for slavery — contemporary financial restitution for the descendants of enslaved people — is a highly divisive topic in America. According to a 2020 Associated Press poll, 74% of Black respondents favored reparation payments, while 85% of white respondents opposed them. However, a number of Christian denominations, and even individual churches, are committing to reparations by way of financial investments and long-term programs that benefit Black Americans.

Several dioceses of the Episcopal Church — including those in Maryland, Texas and New York — launched reparations programs in 2019 and 2020, while others are preparing to do so, according to AP.

“Each diocese will make its own decisions how to do this work,” said New York Bishop Andrew Dietsche. “What is common across the whole church is the recognition that it’s time to address and reckon with the wrongs and evils of our past.”

The Diocese of Texas — whose first bishop, Alexander Gregg, was an enslaver — announced that it would allocate $13 million towards scholarships for students attending seminaries and historically Black colleges, as well as assistance for historic Black churches. In Georgia, the Diocese is committing 3% of its unrestricted endowments to help create a center for racial reconciliation.

In a statement, Rev. Scott Anson Benhase, the bishop of Georgia, said that every person’s life is an unspoken sermon that is constantly preaching to others and that what the diocese does “speaks volumes.”

“What we are beginning is not reparations,” he said. “No amount of money can do that. What we are doing is committing significant resources to the long, slow work of racial reconciliation and healing.”

The Diocese of New York unveiled a $1.1 million reparations initiative in November 2019 after admitting that the diocese played a “significant, and genuinely evil, part in slavery. As the Associated Press reported, the Diocese used enslaved people as “parish servants” and, on the eve of the Civil War, refused to approve a resolution condemning slavery.

“We have a great deal to answer for,” Dietsche said at the time. “We are complicit.”

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Council of Churches has launched a “truth and reparations” initiative that is, in part, modeled after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established in South Africa post-apartheid. The initiative is built on a three-pronged process, centered on “truth telling, education and reparations in Black and Indigenous communities.”

According to the MCC Board of Directors’ vision statement for the program, as part of the truth-telling process, “faith communities [will] provide a redemptive space for acknowledging past egregious intentional injustices and redressing past injustices and present inequities through specific acts of penance and contrition.” Specific topics covered will include: policing, land, and racial equity in health, education, wealth, employment and housing.

This will be paired with anti-racism training, as well as land and fiscal restitution.

“Minnesota has some of the highest racial disparities in the country—in health, wealth, housing, how police treat folks,” the MCC’s CEO, the Rev. Curtiss DeYoung, told the Associated Press. “Those disparities all come from a deep history of racism.”

DeYoung cited the police killing of George Floyd as being a “call to action” for the church.

“The first thing that we did, of course, like everyone else, was get into the streets and march . . . but there are deep, historic issues that require more than marching,” DeYoung said.

However, some Christian denominations have stayed silent on — or even condemned — the idea of reparations.

In 2019, leaders of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville rejected a call to give a portion of its estimated $95 million endowment to Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black college that was founded in 1879 by the State Convention of Colored Baptist Churches in Kentucky.

As The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary wrote in a 2018 report on the school’s history of racism, the seminary’s founding faculty — all four of them — “were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery.” Many of their successors on the faculty advocated segregation, the inferiority of Black Americans “and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery.”

“Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention,” the report said. “[M]any of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to [enslave people], and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans.”

Despite these acknowledgements, as the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, the seminary said “it could not give the money to Simmons College of Kentucky because of conflicting theologies.”

“We will always be open to partnerships that honor the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God,” seminary President Albert Mohler Jr. and trustee Chairman Matthew Schmucker wrote in a May 31 letter. “But such a partnership can come only with institutions that share our theological commitments.”

Rev. Joe Phelps, the co-chair of EmpowerWest, a coalition of clergy that gave the seminary the petition asking for reparations, said that the act would be an opportunity for “repentance and repair.”

“We’re calling on [Southern Seminary] to lead the nation and to do something more than window dress,” Phelps said at the time. “A repair is paying back people you’ve wronged.” Mohler responded, saying that the school did not believe “that financial reparations are the appropriate response.”

However, as Olga M. Segura wrote in her 2021 book “Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church,” last year’s protests over the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery catalyzed a reckoning within many Christian denominations about what the Biblical response to generations of racism should look like — and it’s not going to quietly subside.

She writes that Black Catholics — and Black Christians, more broadly — want to feel heard.

“They want a church that reflects and uplifts them toward liberation,” Segura wrote. “A church that cares about their spiritual and physical lives — a church that atones.”

Lindsey Graham begs fellow Republicans to change mind on earmarks since Trump supports them: report

On Tuesday, Axios reported that Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has been privately urging his Republican colleagues in the Senate to support the return of earmarks — the legislative process that lets individual members of Congress set aside funding for projects in their own district or state.

One of his big selling points? Former President Donald Trump supports them — so they should, too.

“Graham told colleagues last week ‘the top Republican in the country, meaning Trump, supports earmarks, and why shouldn’t we?'” reported Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene. “The South Carolinian invoked the former president and Republican leader-in-exile as the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee held a closed-door meeting to discuss the road ahead for government spending.”

Trump did indeed endorse the return of earmarks in 2018.

Graham also argued that Republicans will be at a competitive disadvantage with voters if Democrats earmark funds for their constituents while Republicans do not, saying, “Democrats do it; if we don’t do it, we’re stupid . . . We shouldn’t just be out of the game.”

Leaders of both parties agreed to an earmark ban a decade ago, concerned that the practice was driving waste and corruption. However, many lawmakers have now changed their minds, arguing that earmarks encourage bipartisanship and help lawmakers serve their districts and states more effectively.

Congress debates gun control in the wake of Boulder mass shooting, GOP senators downplay and deflect

Several Republicans in Congress found themselves in the position of having to defend essentially unfettered access to guns in the face of yet another mass shooting, the seventh in the U.S. in as many days.

One Republican senator on Tuesday morning compared mass shootings in the United States to “a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people” while downplaying the severity of the tragic events which have become an unfortunate reality. Louisiana’s John Kennedy shared the off-colored remark during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about reducing gun violence in America, which comes just one day after a deadly shooting in Boulder, Colorado left 10 people dead.

“I have listened to my colleagues’ comments with interest, and I join with Senator [Dianne] Feinstein in hoping we can do something about this,” Kennedy began. “But I do think we ought to keep this in perspective, what has happened in the last few days, what has happened in the last few years, is of course tragic.”

The senator then dove headfirst into his comparison, which missed the mark.

“And I’m not trying to equate these two, but we have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people. We ought to try to combat that too. But I think what many folks on my side of the aisle are saying is that the answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers,” Kennedy rifted.

“The answer is to concentrate on the problem,” he added.

Hours after America’s second mass shooting in a week, Sen. John Kennedy downplays the gun problem by noting that “we have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people. We ought to try to combat that too … the answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers.” pic.twitter.com/BvqhNvuWRJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2021

Following the senator’s remark during the hearing, criticism aimed at Kennedy over the metaphor rang out on social media, which was swift and relentless.

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell fired back: “Point taken. So let’s make a gun as difficult to get as a driver’s license.” Fellow MSNBC host, Mehdi Hasan, wrote: “Drunk driving is illegal. Driving a car requires a test and a license, and a bunch of other regulation. This analogy from Kennedy is not only offensive but doesn’t even make any sense or help his anti-gun control cause.”

Mother Jones’ Washington D.C. bureau chief David Corn also weighed in on the Kennedy example, stating: “These guys will die on any hill—no matter how absurd—to pander to gun fetishists.” Political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker mocked Kennedy’s commentary, tweeting: “any proposal that seeks to regulate the usage of guns to make it similar to vehicles gets absolutely obliterated by these people.”

Other Republicans continued to defend their unwillingness to reform America’s lax gun laws in the face of the seventh mass shooting in seven days.

Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn cited the Kenosha anti-police violence protests, where an armed gunman from another state is now being charged for shooting multiple protesters, as a positive example of why gun restrictions are bad.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) cites the Kenosha protests as an example of guns helping protect Americans.

(Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters with a rifle at these protests.) pic.twitter.com/rSStL4i3dA

— The Recount (@therecount) March 23, 2021

“Every time there’s an incident like this, the people who don’t want to protect 2nd Amendment use it as an excuse to further erode 2nd Amendment rights,” complained Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis, on Tuesday. “Their ultimate goal is to abolish our rights.”

Parler sued by co-founder who claims pro-Trump social platform was “hijacked” by Rebekah Mercer

Parler co-founder John Matze has sued the conservative social network for wrongfully ousting him from his role as chief executive and stripping his 40% ownership stake following the site’s shutdown in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection.

In a lawsuit filed in Nevada this week, Matze alleged that Jeffrey Wernick and Rebekah Mercer, two deep-pocketed investors of the company, forcibly removed him from the company by way of bullying and intimidation. Matze, who accused Parler’s investors and co-founders of seizing his personal property, is seeking “millions” of dollars, according to his complaint.

“John Matze, the founder of Parler and its former CEO, has commenced suit to vindicate his rights,” said Todd Bice, Matze’s lawyer. “He seeks both compensatory and punitive damages pursuant to his claims.”

Matze’s suit sheds light on the internal upheaval within Parler following the Capitol riot. When reports found that Parler served as a breeding ground for far-right conspiracy and white supremacist violence, several tech giants such as Google, Amazon Web Services, and Apple removed Perler from their online marketplaces.

Parler, claiming that Amazon conspired to undermine competition against Twitter, subsequently sued Amazon for removing the app from its platform. Amazon has said that Parler’s suit is meritless. In February, a judge sided with Amazon in a preliminary ruling, arguing that Parler breached its contract by hosting unfettered incendiary speech. According to NPR, Amazon’s lawyers wrote in a court filing that Parler had a backlog of some 26,000 reports of flagged material. Parler has since been reinstated with help from L.A.-based cloud-hosting firm SkySilk Inc.

In early February, Matze said that he sparred with Mercer over the limits of Parler’s commitment to free speech, which was at times tested by threats of domestic terror and violence. Matze alleged that he wanted the platform to crack down on pro-violent rhetoric, but he received pushback from the company’s leadership, in particular Mercer.

Parler has called Matze’s portrayal of the internal conflict “inaccurate and misleading.”

Leading up to the riot, Parler served as a moderation-free megaphone for many far-right organizers like Ali Alexanders and Alex Jones, both of whom spread election fraud conspiracy that fueled the insurgency on Capitol Hill, as reported by Salon in February. In fact, many Parler users had penetrated the Capitol and shared evidence of it on the platform.

Since Parler went offline, other alt-tech platforms like Gab, MeWe, and Telegram –– which offers encrypted messaging –– have become more popular for conservatives, many of whom now feel that Facebook and Twitter engage in systematic censorship of right-wing voices.

Zoom increased profit by 4,000% during the pandemic — but the company paid $0 in federal income tax

The U.S.-based online video chat platform Zoom has seen its profits skyrocket by 4000% during the Covid-19 pandemic thanks to the growing reliance on remote work and schooling, but an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the company didn’t pay a dime in federal corporate income taxes on its 2020 windfall.

The reason, according to ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner, lies mainly in Zoom’s “lavish use of executive stock options,” a common tactic of big corporations looking to skirt their federal tax obligations.

“Companies that compensate their leadership with stock options can write off, for tax purposes, huge expenses that far exceed their actual cost,” Gardner explained. “This is a strategy that has been leveraged effectively by virtually every tech giant in the last decade, from Apple to Facebook to Microsoft. Zoom’s success in using stock options to avoid taxes is neither surprising nor (currently) illegal.”

Zoom reported $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020, a massive leap from its 2019 pre-tax profits of $16 million. Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder and CEO, accurately described 2020 an as “unprecedented year” for the nine-year-old company in its latest earnings report.

2019 pre-tax profits: $16 million
2020 pre-tax profits: $660 million

2020 federal corporate income taxes: 0.

We've seen this corporate tax avoidance strategy before. https://t.co/C0J38NznwA

— Good Jobs First (@GoodJobsFirst) March 19, 2021

Gardner noted that use of the executive stock option loophole is not the only way Zoom managed to pay no federal corporate income tax on its pandemic profits.

“The company appears to have enjoyed tax benefits from accelerated depreciation and research and development tax credits,” he wrote. “Notably, the combination of three tax breaks appears to be the recipe that Amazon and Netflix have used with such success to reduce their federal tax bills during the Trump corporate tax era so far. Zoom’s corporate tax avoidance has helped create a short-term cash bonanza for the company: Zoom ended the fourth quarter of 2020 with $4.2 billion in cash and equivalents.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, took aim at the company’s tax avoidance on Twitter, pointing out that “if you paid $14.99 a month for a Zoom Pro membership, you paid more to Zoom than it paid in federal income taxes even as it made $660 million in profits last year—a 4,000 percent increase since 2019.”

“Yes,” Sanders said. “It’s time to end a rigged tax code that benefits the wealthy and powerful.”

On Monday morning, Sanders announced he will be presiding over a Senate Budget Committee hearing Thursday titled, “Ending a Rigged Tax Code: The Need to Make the Wealthiest People and Largest Corporations Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes.”

“From a moral, economic, and political perspective, our nation will not thrive when so few have so much and so many have so little,” the Vermont senator said. “We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene level of wealth inequality in America.”

The NRA way of life is ruining our nation

Right on the heels of last week’s horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.

That’s not because Americans oppose stricter gun control laws. In fact, around 90% of Americans polled consistently support background checks for all gun sales. But when House Democrats introduced a bill earlier this month making background checks universal, all but eight Republicans voted against it. And forget about even turning this bill into law. The filibuster’s continued existence makes it impossible to get it past Republican obstruction in the Senate.

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

Pollster Frank Luntz recently held a focus group of vaccine-hesitant Republicans, and one of the justifications offered for refusing to get the vaccine was chilling precisely because the defiance was conveyed so matter-of-factly: “We are not all in this together.”

The comment really cut to the heart of the cultivated stance of sociopathy that has fueled the GOP for decades now. There is much that conservatives think is owed to them, like the icons of their childhood such as Mr. Potato Head or Dr. Seuss to never change with the times, or for Ghostbusters to never be female, or to never have to press 1 for English nor ever see a Black athlete kneel instead of stand during the national anthem.

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But when it comes to what they owe others, their answer is all too often less than nothing.

Indeed, all we hear is that it’s an assault on their alleged “freedom” to allow their neighbors the ability to go about simple tasks of life without fear of being gunned down by some idiot who is still mad that Becky the cheerleader didn’t want to go to the homecoming dance with him.

Blame the NRA and the gun lobby in general.

For decades, the gun industry has been threatened by declining sales, due to the fact that they sell expensive gear that almost no one in the modern world has any real need to own. Rather than closing up shop or shifting to making stuff people actually could use, such as fidget spinners or iPhone accessories, the gun industry shaped its marketing around the sexist and racist impulses of the worst people in the nation. So while fewer people overall are buying guns, this shrinking minority end up building small arsenals, trying to stifle their own insecurities with ever more gun purchases. And the gun lobby, aided by a massive right-wing propaganda machine, has convinced them that anyone who questions the wisdom of gun mania is clearly coming for your “freedom”.

The right-wing belief that “freedom” depends on others having to die for pointless reasons now manifests in all sorts of ways. It can be seen in the resistance to even the most reasonable efforts to fight climate change because heaven forbid you have to get a slightly different kind of light bulb so that your grandchildren can enjoy living on a planet that isn’t beset by biblical levels of natural disasters. Or the temper tantrum over Obamacare, which was largely fueled by a willingness to let other people die rather than run even the smallest risk that your doctor’s appointment might have to be scheduled a week later. And lately, it has manifested in the right-wing whining over wearing masks in grocery stores or being asked to vaccinate, because the idea that others must die to spare them the slightest inconvenience is a bedrock belief of modern conservatism.

The frustrating thing is that, as that 90% support for background checks shows, even most Republican voters aren’t completely disdainful for the concepts of the common good or the notion that others have a right to live. Many of them wear masks without much complaint, recycle their trash, and stopped whining about seatbelt laws decades ago. But the Republican Party is controlled by its most extreme elements, in no small part because huge swaths of white America have decided that it’s better to let utterly sociopathic politicians be their leaders than to even consider voting for a Democrat. So, whatever their personal preferences on gun control or public health might be, Republican voters end up participating in a system where human life is treated as less valuable than some yahoo’s right to own as many boom boom machines as he feels is necessary to distract him from the lingering fear that he’ll never be a real man.

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It’s hard not to feel helpless in the face of seemingly no change in the face of one mass murder after another. In the aftermath of this Boulder shooting, it was swiftly revealed that the city had tried to ban the kind of assault rifle used to take 10 people’s lives, but that a district judge had sided with the NRA to shoot the regulation down.

The power cultivated by the NRA and their small but loud minority of supporters feels insurmountable at times. But it is not time to give up and just accept that regular mass murder is an unchangeable part of American life. The NRA has been thankfully hobbled by New York investigations into their massive corruption. While public opinion is still not where it needs to be on gun control, there is growing support for at least some regulations that could do some good. And, as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan shows, sometimes there are political shifts that allow previously unthinkable legislation to pass.

It will take hard work and organizing to continue pressuring both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, but the gun industry is not invincible. We can live in a country where it’s safe to buy a frozen pizza without getting shot in the head. We just have to keep pushing for it.

Clean wine, hard kombucha and the science of “better alcohol”

“Alcohol” and “healthy” aren’t two words we typically put together, but many companies have been making an effort to present products in a more wellness-forward light. From “clean wine” to hard kombucha and low-ABV cocktails, “better-for-you alcohol” has been trending over the past few years. Let’s get real though: Is there really any such thing as healthy alcohol?

Health benefits of alcohol

A number of studies show there may be health benefits for those imbibing in moderation.

For instance, according to Kelsey Lorencz, a registered dietician, the polyphenols found in wine have been found to inhibit cancer cell growth, improve cardiovascular health, and decrease inflammation in the body. In addition, registered dietician nutritionist Toby Amidor says research shows that procyanidins in red wine can help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, cataracts, and colon cancer, and the flavonoids in red wine have been found to stop the skin’s chemical reaction to excessive sun exposure.

And it’s not just wine: Beer has a unique antioxidant profile, and hard kombucha contains antioxidants, polyphenols, vitamins, minerals, and probiotics (good for your microbiome, among other things).

“According to an observational study in the “British Medical Journal,” drinking any type of alcohol in moderation is linked to a lower risk of heart disease,” Amidor says. “The reason for this could be that it is not just the components in specific types of alcohol (like red wine) but rather that alcohol itself may have some heart-protecting benefits.”

Are some alcohols healthier than others?

This answer is a little more complicated. For instance, while the makeup of hard kombucha means it’s a healthier option than other alcoholic beverages, especially ones high in sugar, it still contains alcohol and should be consumed in moderation. Certified health and wellness coach Megan Swan says that hard kombucha or any kombucha that is mass-produced is likely to have lower gut health benefits than you may be imagining, as it’s unlikely to have the same level of live bacteria as homemade kombucha.

What Is “Clean Wine?”

What about so-called “clean wines,” which promise everything from no added sugar to hangover-free drinking? Are they better than other types of wine? The first thing to know is that there’s really no such thing as “clean wine.” The phrase is an unregulated marketing term.

“As a natural-wine eCommerce owner, the ‘clean wine’ movement bugs me for a few reasons,” says Holly Berrigan of MYSA Natural Wine. “It promotes wine as a health product, when anything that has alcohol should never be promoted as such. It can be argued that natural wine is better for you, of course, because logically putting alcohol with chemicals and pesticides in your body is not as good as putting in alcohol made without additives. But it’s still alcohol.”

Organic wine is also thought to preserve natural nutrients and antioxidants, but so far, studies around those claims have proved inconclusive. And, as Berrigan points out, natural wines are about more than health; the larger goals are about environmentalism and sustainability.

“Most of the new ‘clean wine’ brands don’t tell where they came from or who made it, and that, to me, is just a marketing tactic, not actually caring about the wine and process,” Berrigan says.

What about ABV?

Low-ABV and nonalcoholic beverages have also become popular, and ABV certainly matters. According to the 2020–2025 dietary guidelines for Americans who drink alcohol, the recommendation is a maximum of one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men.

“One drink is defined as 12 ounces of regular beer (5% alcohol), 5 ounces of wine (12% alcohol), or 1 1/2 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (40% alcohol). If you choose to drink a higher percent of alcohol, you will be taking in a bigger portion, which counts as more than one drink,” says Amidor.

In general, the lower the ABV, the lower the negative effects of the alcohol on the body.

Drinking more healthfully

Whether you prefer cocktails, wine, beer, cider, or kombucha, you can still imbibe while being mindful of your overall well being. Swan says to choose quality over quantity, and ask questions about how the beverage was made. Look at the list of ingredients when available, as well as the sugar and alcohol percentages.

“When it comes to alcohol itself, it’s important to remember that too much, even if it has some health benefits, is going to be detrimental to your health,” says Lorencz.

Remember that whether it’s organic, natural, or “clean,” alcohol is still alcohol.

Louis DeJoy has big plans for the U.S. Postal Service — to make it even worse

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who oversees the U.S. Postal Service and gave millions of dollars to the Trump campaign before being tapped to lead the USPS, has already been widely pilloried for instituting changes to mail delivery and service last summer that slowed down service undercut efficiency nationwide.

Now the postmaster general — who was not directly hired by former President Trump, and cannot be fired by President Biden — wants to make additional wide-sweeping changes to the USPS, including “longer first-class delivery windows” and “reduced post office hours and higher postage prices,” according to The Washington Post.

DeJoy has apparently waged a steady assault against the Postal Service since his appointment and made a series of modifications to the enormous agency’s operations ahead of the 2020 election and last year’s holiday season last year, cutting jobs and service amid the coronavirus pandemic raged onward and increasing the workload of remaining employees.

“The Postal Service’s delivery scores have rebounded in recent weeks, to nearly 83.7 percent for first-class mail the week of March 12,” The Post’s Monday night report reads. “The agency attributed the improvement to more capacity in the air transportation network and the end of winter storms that delayed operations in much of the country.”

The Post’s report added that before DeJoy’s arrival on May 6, 2020, standards were much better than that: At the time, USPS had an impressive first-class mail on-time delivery rate of 90.6 percent.

“The metrics remain well short of the agency’s marks from before DeJoy’s arrival last June,” the Post continued. But mail delivery “hasn’t reached 90 percent in the eight months since.”

Even though DeJoy cannot be directly dismissed by Biden or by Congress, more than 50 Democratic House members, including Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., are now calling on Biden to limit DeJoy’s power — and possibly oust him — by appointing new members to the Postal Service Board of Governors. All the sitting governors were appointed by Trump.

That group of House Democrats has asked Biden “to fire the board’s six sitting members for cause — citing ‘gross mismanagement,’ ‘self-inflicted’ nationwide mail delays and ‘rampant conflicts of interest’ — and to allow a new slate of Biden nominees to consider DeJoy’s fitness for office,” the Post reported Monday night.

Yet as of now, it appears that DeJoy’s deconstruction of the USPS may get worse before it gets better, thanks to DeJoy’s proposed additional changes, which are scheduled to be made public on Tuesday, and may be carried out unilaterally, with no meaningful oversight. The postmaster general, the Post reported, “controls operating hours at post offices, and the board of governors appears to back DeJoy’s changes to delivery times.”

NRA bragged that it blocked Boulder AR-15 ban just days before deadly shooting killed 10 people

The National Rifle Association bragged that it helped block a ban on AR-15s and high-capacity magazines in Boulder, Colorado, just days before a gunman reportedly armed with the assault-style rifle killed 10 people at a Boulder grocery store.

Boulder police said that 10 people, including of their officers, were killed at a King Soopers grocery store on Monday. A wounded suspect who was taken into custody has not yet been publicly identified. A law enforcement source told CNN that the weapon used in the shooting was an AR-15-style rifle.

Hours after the shooting, the NRA tweeted a defense of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. pic.twitter.com/eFBP2PTTUu

— NRA (@NRA) March 23, 2021

The organization bragged about its role in blocking the city’s ban on AR-15s just six days before the shooting.

“A Colorado judge gave law-abiding gun owners something to celebrate,” the NRA tweeted on March 16. “In an [NRA Institute for Legislative Action]-supported case, he ruled that the city of Boulder’s ban on commonly-owned rifles (AR-15s) and 10+ round mags was preempted by state law and STRUCK THEM DOWN.”

ICYMI: A Colorado judge gave law-abiding gun owners something to celebrate.

In an @NRAILA-supported case, he ruled that the city of Boulder’s ban on commonly-owned rifles (AR-15s) and 10+ round mags was preempted by state law and STRUCK THEM DOWN. https://t.co/wmdhGG16pc

— NRA (@NRA) March 16, 2021

The Boulder City Council in 2018 unanimously passed a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida, according to the Denver Post, though it created a permit system to allow people who already owned such weapons to legally keep them. Two Boulder residents and gun-rights groups filed a lawsuit arguing that the ordinance violated a 2003 state law barring local governments from enacting any laws or rules that prohibit the “sale, purchase or possession of a firearm that a person may lawfully sell, purchase or possess under state or federal law.”

Boulder County District Court Judge Andrew Hartman struck down the law earlier this month, ruling that the “provisions are invalid” under the state law. The ruling may still be appealed to the state Supreme Court but a city spokesperson told the Post that the Boulder Police Department would not enforce the ordinance unless there is a court ruling overturning the judge’s decision.

The NRA’s lobbying arm touted the ruling as “very thoroughly and thoughtfully written,” arguing that will “make it even harder to overturn” if the city appeals.

Dawn Reinfeld, the co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Blue Rising, told The Washington Post that the “appalling” timing of the decision was hard to ignore.

“We tried to protect our city,” she said. “It’s so tragic to see the legislation struck down, and days later, to have our city experience exactly what we were trying to prevent.”

The Boulder shooting is the seventh mass shooting in as many days, CNN reported. Last week, a 21-year-old man was charged after a shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area spas that killed eight people, including six Asian women. The shooting raised questions about the suspect’s motivation after he denied that race was a factor in the killings and sparked debate over the ease with which he was able to purchase a gun on the day of the attack.

The Boulder shooting has renewed a debate over AR-15s, which became illegal under a 1994 federal assault weapons ban that expired without renewal in 2004. The AR-15 has become the “weapon of choice for mass shooters” after AR-15-style rifles were used in about a quarter of the deadliest 115 mass shootings since 1999, accounting for 40% of all deaths and 69% of all injuries from such attacks, according to Axios. Medical experts have pointed out that the rounds in an AR-15 are far more damaging than even regular handguns. When equipped with high-capacity magazines, they can also quickly fire far more rounds at a time.

Freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who has gained notoriety for staging interviews with rifles in the background, also drew criticism after she repeatedly defended AR-15 ownership. Boebert, who vowed to bring her gun to the U.S. Capitol, on Monday said her “prayers are with shoppers, employees, first responders & others affected by the shooting in Boulder.”

“May God be with us as we make sense of this senseless violence, and may we unify and not divide during this time,” Boebert tweeted, just weeks after releasing an attack ad against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., that ended with a gunshot sound.

“A week ago, the NRA celebrated an overturned ban on assault weapons in Colorado. Today, a man opened fire on civilians at a King Sooper’s in Boulder. And this congresswoman is trying to make sense of how this happened?!?” reporter Christina Radish tweeted in response. “Does she know how hollow that is?”

Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., whose Boulder district includes the shooting site, said in a statement on Monday that “while there is still a lot we do not yet know, one thing is very clear — tragic incidents of gun violence have plagued our country for far too long.”

The shooting came a day before the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on gun violence Tuesday. Democrats renewed calls for Congress to act ahead of the testimony.

“This Senate must and will move forward on legislation to help stop the epidemic of gun violence,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he was editing his opening statement for the hearing when he looked up and saw news of Monday’s shooting.

“How many more lives must be lost,” he questioned on Twitter, “before we enact the gun violence prevention our country so desperately needs?”

Reintroducing predators doesn’t always rebalance ecosystems

When wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, after they were initially exterminated, the environmental impacts took everyone by surprise. Overpopulated elk were kept on the move by these top predators, giving breathing room to willow and aspen trees to sprout. The willow provided raw materials for beavers to dam up rivers. Shaded by trees, the river became cool enough for fish to flourish once again.

Yellowstone’s wolf-reintroduction program was hailed as a rewilding triumph. According to the trophic cascade theory, top-level carnivores influence the behavior of other animals down the food chain, such as prey or smaller carnivores — just like a bully in town enforcing a perverse form of social order through a “landscape of fear.” The Yellowstone program showed that the simple act of introducing top predators could restore entire ecosystems through these trickle-down effects.

It’s tempting to ask, if predator-driven rewilding worked in Yellowstone, why not elsewhere?

Not so fast, says Jessica Comley, a zoologist at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Trophic cascades as a conservation strategy shouldn’t be applied hastily around the world without taking into account the local contexts.

“You need to do a little bit of background research into the area that you want to conserve before you jump into using trophic cascades as a management tool,” says Comley. “Using trophic cascades is the easy way out.”

In a study in the Journal for Nature Conservation, Comley and her colleagues report that trophic cascade-based conservation in African savannas may lead to unpredictable outcomes, due to the complex inter-species relationships among local biodiversity.

The African plains boast a diverse guild of large carnivores such as lions and spotted hyenas, as well as a variety of smaller carnivores such as jackals and wildcats. The wildlife is as rich as it is marked by animal-human conflict. Across the food chain, the magnificent creatures on the African continent are plagued by poaching, disappearing habitats, and vanishing food sources that inevitably set these animals on collision courses with the local farmers.

South African wildlife is faring slightly better than its neighbors. But many of its wildlife reserves are fenced off, limiting the range of animal movement and disrupting animal migration patterns. South Africa is also home to several vulnerable and endangered animals, such as the African cheetah and the African wild dog. Ongoing conservation efforts can’t afford to let up.

Comley’s team explored whether top-predator reintroduction would be a viable conservation strategy among South Africa’s predator communities. The trophic cascade theory predicts that the large carnivores in the African savanna such as the lions should exert their influence on smaller species wherever they prowl. To test this theory, they studied the impact of top predators on the spatial distribution of medium-sized predators, which are competitively inferior.

Comley’s team monitored the activities of wildlife in the Selati Game Reserve, South Africa. They set up a grid of 31 motion-activated cameras along heavily plied routes, covering the entire reserve and its outskirts. The researchers recorded the species as well as the time and location of each photograph taken.

Comley’s team correlated the appearances of each species to the others. They concluded that there was no clear top-down force exerted by the top-level carnivores. For example, the middle-level black-backed jackals shied away lions and spotted hyenas but popped up wherever leopards appeared. Counterintuitively, lions — the largest carnivores in Africa — didn’t deter the presence of side-striped jackals and other medium-sized carnivores. No individual top carnivore influenced the behavior of all medium-sized carnivores in the same way.

The researchers proposed several explanations for these observations. Perhaps some smaller carnivores skulk around the top predators to feed off their scraps. The reserve’s enclosed spaces may have forced competition between medium-size carnivores, such as the jackals, so their numbers might be dominated by their territorial rivalries rather than competition with top predators.

Moreover, the sheer diversity of carnivores in Selati makes comparisons with Yellowstone challenging, and their behavioral trends can’t be easily summarized by one theory.

“There are so many confounding factors,” says Comley. “It depends on which two species, or groups of species you’re looking at, and every region within the country is going to have a different composition of large carnivores.”

Kadambari Devarajan, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a 2020 National Geographic Explorer, says she broadly agrees with the finding that trophic cascade-based rewilding isn’t universally applicable. Although she says she thinks the study’s accuracy can be improved by accounting for species interactions all at once instead of one pair at a time, she says Comley’s results still hold. According to Devarajan, Yellowstone’s wolves have been over-touted in the media for its happy ending and optimistic message, so we shouldn’t completely buy into trophic cascade’s hype. Oftentimes, such simple strategies are often too good to be true when it comes to returning balance to complex ecosystems.

“We have to be really careful with what situations [trophic cascades] might work under,” says Kadambari.

We only need to look to find examples of predator-introduction-gone-wrong (although not all of them were motivated by trophic cascade theories). In the early 2000s, several African wild dog reintroductions in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province were rescinded as they hunted too many large and valuable prey. The wild dogs were simply too clever and efficient — even learning to use fence-lines to run down and corner their victims.

When it comes to conservation, Devarajan recommends implementing a concoction of tried-and-true tactics, such as restoring the animals’ natural habitats and educating the public on the importance of conservation. Comley’s suggestion is simpler: let sleeping dogs (and the other beasts on the African savannas) lie.

“I don’t think humans need to meddle too much,” she says.

Although “sexy”, trophic cascades shouldn’t be generalized as a conservation strategy, Comley advises. The fortuitous outcome to Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction program may be but an exception to the rule. Wolves may have changed rivers — at least in Yellowstone — but lions alone do not.

Fox News did not cover Boulder presser during primetime after 7th mass shooting in 7 days in the US

As CNN and MSNBC covered the first press briefing about a deadly shooting that unfolded at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store on Monday, Fox News opted not to air anything about the massacre, instead focusing on President Biden’s trouble walking up a set of stairs and complaining about the so-called “farce” of social distancing.

Ten people were killed on Monday afternoon when a gunman opened fire at King Soopers grocery store, according to authorities. Hundreds of police officers in the greater Denver area responded to the incident. SWAT officers, who escorted customers out of the premises, were also called to the scene. One of the first police officers to arrive on the scene, Eric Talley, 51, was killed, according to Police Chief Maris Herold.

BREAKING: A 21-year-old man has been charged with 10 counts of murder in the first degree after opening fire at a Boulder, Colo., supermarket and killing 10 people — including a police officer.

He has since been treated for a gunshot wound and is in stable condition. pic.twitter.com/EoAo5IqhE7

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) March 23, 2021

As CNN and MSNBC aired the Boulder police’s press conferences following the fatal incident, Fox News’ programming left the shooting almost entirely unreported. As first reported by CNN’s Oliver Darcy, during the press conference, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity played footage of Biden stumbling up the stairs of Air Force one last week. And even after it had been announced that ten people had lost their lives in the shooting, anchor Fox’s Laura Ingraham nevertheless held an interview about the “farce” of social distancing.

As more details of the shooting were revealed, Tucker Carlson ran trite stories like “THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR GIRLS’ SPORTS” and “MIAMI VICE: DRUNK PARTYGOERS TRASH RESTAURANTS.”

When Hannity eventually got around to covering the shooting during an interview with Dan Bongino, Rush Limbaugh’s successor, later Monday night, the host launched into a diatribe about why the shooting demonstrates the need for a strong police force, especially after the protests last summer.

“‘They’re not riots,’ we were told all summer to over 2,500 cops injured,” Hannity said. “But these are the cops that go put themselves in harm’s way. And in this case we lost one tonight.”

“There’s not a social worker on planet earth that would be dumb enough to that scenario,” echoed Bongino, alluding Black Lives Matter actiists who called out the tendency of police officers to escalate mental health crises. “It’s brave police officers that do that.”

The discrepancy in coverage sparked outrage online, with many commenting on Fox’s complete lapse in editorial judgment.

“Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham completely ignored what happened in Boulder today,” tweeted former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh.

“Fox showed its true colors Monday night,” chimed Oliver Darcy, a senior media reporter at CNN.

“This is how Fox & Friends covered the Boulder mass shooting this morning,” said Vox journalist Aaron Rupar, posting a video of Fox leading into the story by stressing that it was “on the minds of Colorado’s [college] basketball team as they fell to Florida state.”

This is how Fox & Friends covered the Boulder mass shooting this morning pic.twitter.com/4TtwTJayz9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2021

As CNN noted, Monday’s mass shooting was the seventh in just the last seven days.

A newly-launched spacecraft will clean up space junk orbiting Earth. Here’s how it works

Not only do we humans struggle to manage our trash on Earth — it’s a problem in outer space too.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the total mass of all the man-made space objects in Earth’s orbit is more than 9,200 metric tons. Statistical models estimate that there are 34,000 objects greater than 10 centimeters crowding our planet, 900,000 objects between 1 and 10 centimeters, and 128 million objects between smaller than 1 centimeter. As more satellites make their way into our orbit, the immense amount of space junk poses a serious issue for potential collisions or inhibiting the function of these satellites.

This is why a spacecraft named ELSA-d (which stands for End-of-Life Services) was launched on Monday morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Its mission is to test a way to clean up space debris. Specifically, ELSA-d will attach itself to future dead satellites and other space junk and then proceed to push them toward Earth so that they can burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, acting as a space janitor for man-made orbital debris.

Notably, the spacecraft is not designed to capture dead satellites already in orbit, but rather future ones that would be launched with compatible docking plates. The mission that started today is part of a test to see if the two satellites are up for the job.

According to the mission’s web page, ELSA-d consists of two space crafts: a servicer satellite and a client satellite. The servicer satellite will use its magnetic docking mechanism to target and rendezvous with the client satellite. A private Japanese company called Astroscale is behind the mission that will eventually target debris and push space junk toward Earth’s natural incinerator.

This is a very tedious catch-and-release dance to do in space, John Auburn, Astroscale’s managing director in the United Kingdom, explained to NBC News.

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“It’s enormously complex because you have to exactly match the motion of the spacecraft you’re docking with,” Auburn said. “When a spacecraft docks with the International Space Station, that’s a very controlled maneuver. But if you’re trying to dock with a failed satellite, it could be tumbling and you have to very slowly come together almost like you’re doing a dance.”

But if these satellites can stick the dance, it could be a viable solution to a growing problem in space.

“This is an issue like plastics in the ocean,” Auburn said. “We’ve been working for eight years to turn a difficult problem into a business.”

As Salon has previously reported, there is a growing conflict between the interest of the business world and science. More satellites, like the ones being launched by SpaceX, means more pollution and garbage in space. This not only could affect astronomy research from ground-based telescopes, but it could also increase the risk of collisions from other satellites, both commercial and scientific, in similar orbits.

Scientists fear that if enough satellites collide, it could cause a chain reaction as thousands of fast-moving shards envelope other satellites, creating a cascade of more shards and thus more collisions ad infinitum. That scenario is known as Kessler syndrome, so-named for the NASA scientist who theorized it. While the destruction of human satellites would affect commerce, research and communications, the worst-case scenario would involve the loss of human life if, say, the International Space Station or other future space stations were destroyed. The International Space Station has been struck by debris before, including 2016 when such a collision cracked a window.

Satellite collisions have happened before, but not to the extent that any caused a chain reaction. In February, 2009, two satellites collided — an active Iridium 33 satellite which was operated by U.S.-based Iridium Communications LLC, and Kosmos 2251, a decommissioned Russian satellite. There were reports of bright lights in the sky over Kentucky, and loud booms from satellite debris falling into the atmosphere. Two years prior, China destroyed one of its own satellites in low-Earth orbit as part of a test. Shortly thereafter in 2008, the United States tested a similar anti-satellite weapon by destroying a defunct satellite, a move widely interpreted as a chest-thumping rejoinder to China’s anti-satellite missile test in the ongoing cold war between the two nations. Both of these events created a fair amount of space debris in their wake.

Aaron Rosengren, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California–San Diego, told NBC News that cleaning up space junk will be critical for the future of other space missions.

“Even though space is big, the usable orbits where we keep our satellites are quite small,” Rosengren said. “If we have a higher and higher density of objects in these very narrow regions of space, that will lead to more collisions over time.”

Representation heals: How watching K-dramas lifted the weight of white supremacy and freed my tongue

Like everyone else on this planet, the pandemic changed me. My world shrunk to the inside of my house as I baked inordinate amounts of sourdough and obsessively washed my hands. And, in a twist I couldn’t have seen coming, I began speaking Korean properly for the first time in my life.

Learning a new language during the pandemic is not uncommon, but for me, learning my parents’ language was something I had largely ignored and rationalized as something I didn’t need. I was born in Australia and moved to America. English was the only language I needed to work and live.

My parents migrated to Sydney in the late ’70s, had me and my brother in the ’80s, and raised us in a one-sided multilingual household. My parents are both fluent in English and Korean, and whilst my brother and I understood Korean, we both always spoke English. Language was key to how deftly my parents assimilated into Australian society. Their fluency informed how easily we moved between our home life and our lives out in the world.

My father graduated from university, thanks to then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s free tertiary education (seriously America, make college free), and both my parents would go on to work for Australian companies, personifying the immigrant success story. We lived in a predominantly white suburb. We didn’t go to Korean church. Apart from a handful of Korean families with whom we socialized, my life was dominated by Australian culture – white Australian culture. Racism, I felt, was something that didn’t touch my life.

Sure, a boy in kindergarten had pulled the inevitable slant-eyes gesture with his grubby fingers while singing the Ching Chong China Man rhyme to me, but my six-year-old self haughtily dismissed his vitriol as pitiful ignorance because I wasn’t Chinese, I was Korean and that was completely different. Years later when a therapist told me my tendency was to intellectualize my emotions, this specific incident popped up. Adult me recognized I was actually scared at being singled out and had immediately self-soothed by rationalizing that I had somehow escaped being his intended target.

When I was in 4th or 5th grade, I remember being shoved in a staircase at school by my friend’s mum, Mrs Schmidt. This adult white woman stuck her finger into my chest and told me to stay away from her daughter. She didn’t want her kid to play with an Asian. We were alone in that stairwell and I was shaking. I nodded obediently, stopped talking to my friend, and finished out primary school like nothing ever happened. Racism is a loud gunshot, but it can also be a secret shame.

It also wasn’t my daily experience. We used to sing the 1987 hit song “I Am Australian” during school assembly and the utopian lyrics comforted me enormously about my identity as an Australian kid. I sang it with gusto every week: “We are one, but we are many/And from all the lands on earth we come/We’ll share a dream and sing with one voice/ I am, you are, we are Australian.” Man, did it speak to me.

It was only once I became an actor that my identity really became problematic for casting. I was employed in Australia more than once to play the victim who spoke broken English and barely contributed to a scene beyond nodding or crying. English is my first language, but my Korean face did not match my Australian voice in the stories written and the parts I could play. I felt muzzled.

In America, Asian actors are often strangled by ethnic restrictions placed on us. So many casting notices indicate that one must match the role, ethnically speaking, in order to audition. As an attempt at correcting such wrongs of the past as Blackface and yellowface casting, I’m sure it’s a well-meaning gesture. But I can’t help but notice my white American friends who get to play Russian, German, Irish, American, British etc. roles with impunity. The same decision makers also had no problem with casting me in roles like Shin the Gangster with the ubiquitous-for-Asian women “edgy” colored hair extensions. In drama school I was Lady Macbeth but in the industry I was Lotus the Massage Therapist.

Mostly though, I felt lucky to have work in an industry where work is unbelievably difficult to get. I didn’t have the time or power to question the work I was booking or the poor writing that relegated me to formulaic roles. After all, who would have the imagination to write a nuanced Korean Australian character for which I could read? I participated mindlessly in the cycle of stereotypical supporting roles that I saw available to me as an Asian actress. Internalized racism leads you to believe the structure cannot change. It knows how to corral you and keep you in place.

Representation matters. You hear it all the time from all the underrepresented groups pushing our culture toward inclusivity. I didn’t realize how starved I was for representation until I started watching Korean dramas in the summer of 2020. To watch show after show filled with faces like mine, telling stories where their Asianness was not a key character attribute or plot point transformed me. I had always been a minority in the story, and in the K-drama world anti-Asian racism doesn’t exist by virtue of my ethnicity being the majority. Therefore storytelling is unburdened and simply, free.

I started watching Korean series, aka K-dramas, because my friend Tom’s father declared one to be his favorite show. I was intrigued. A 70-something-year-old white man was out there bingeing a Korean series? I just had to watch. The next few days were a blur as I consumed 16 90-minute episodes of “Crash Landing On You” – in which Yoon Seri (Son Ye-jin), a South Korean CEO, accidentally paraglides over the 38th parallel into North Korea and must learn to survive in a totalitarian state whilst inconveniently falling in love with a captain of the Korean People’s Army.

This popular series on Netflix was my introduction to the severely addictive and wildly imaginative world of Korean television. It is a massive industry with a worldwide audience that has tripled in size since the early 2000s with Netflix recently announcing a half billion dollar investment in creating new Korean series and films. K-pop, K-beauty, K-drama, Oscar-winning Korean films, the Hallyu (South Korean pop culture) wave is never-ending.

After “Crash Landing on You,” it was “Memories of the Alhambra,” “Goblin,” “The King: Eternal Monarch,” “Cheese in the Trap,” “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay,” “Itaewon Class,” “Something in the Rain,” “When the Camellia Blooms,” “My Mister,” “Misaeng,” “Live,” “Stranger” – the list goes on. Each show curiously just one season of 16 episodes but chock-full of extraordinary storytelling and performances. No reboots or remakes, all original content and an admirable ability to resolve story arcs in a single season, K-dramas are a fascinating alternative to your average eight-season procedural.

I slowly lured friends into K-drama world, and to my surprise, each became as obsessed as I was. We subscribed to Rakuten Viki and scoured everything Netflix had to offer. We Facetimed with friends on the east coast about our favorite series and received texts about newly discovered shows we had to watch. My husband even fan-tweeted with Paulo Coelho over the critically acclaimed “My Mister.” It became a source of joy and conversation in a time of uncertainty and darkness. I was obsessed and completely shut out the noise of the final months of Trump bleating nonsense on the news or any English-speaking show really. I solely watched Korean shows, missing my parents back home in Australia and the sound of them speaking in Korean.

In August, I found a tutor online and began taking Korean classes. After my first lesson I was in despair at the state of my Korean skills. Like any beginner, I wondered if I would ever improve. Seven months later we chat in Korean, and I’m able to switch in and out quite comfortably. There’s a way to go with vocabulary and spelling, but I’m elated by my progress. It was all always there, and I can’t believe how much had lived in me unspoken.

I’ve started speaking to my parents in Korean, and it is a new, almost awkward, experience. We know each other best in English. I wonder how it feels for them to hear me finally speak their language. I feel sorry that it took me this long. “Han,” loosely translated as the Korean concept of sorrow or regret, is ever present. I remember my Mum telling me how strange it was for her, as a young mother, to hear her children call her Mum and not Omma. Now I facetime with her in Korean and we dream of going to Seoul together when the pandemic is over.

It’s a wild time to be a Korean Australian American. Last week kicked off joyous celebrations for Youn Yuh Jung, Steven Yeun and Lee Isaac Chung’s historic Oscar nominations for “Minari,” but just two days later, the Korean American community is in mourning following targeted mass shootings in Atlanta. The Asian American community has been rattled since Trump’s scapegoating “China virus” and “kung flu” slurs began. Spiteful but effective, Asian hate crimes have risen by 150% across America. It is a unique pain when the victims look like you, your parents, or your grandparents. The crucial need for BIPOC communities to ally, resist, advocate and protect has never been more apparent. Those who were silent or *Oprah hand gesture* silenced – are standing up with an urgency that may seem like we passed yield point merely last week, but we know has been fermenting for generations.

I have never felt more connected to our Asian community and proud of my Korean identity. We are nearing the end of the pandemic, and I find myself emerging whole with a ripe tongue and a new voice.

Tahini pesto is the absolute best pesto

If I gave you a jar of tahini, what would you do with it? There are 100 answers in “The Tahini Table“ by Amy Zitelman with Andrew Schloss. (Along with her sisters, Shelby and Jackie, Amy co-founded Soom, which makes tahini so delicious, I often eat it by the spoonful while blissfully staring into space.) The cookbook spans sweet and savory, from tahini pancakes to tahini-creamed greens. And sauces. Actually, an entire chapter on sauces. Below, I asked Amy what makes tahini so sauce-able — and snagged some recipes you’ll want to pour on everything. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

* * *

EMMA LAPERRUQUE: There are over two dozen recipes for sauces alone in this book. What inspired you to write that chapter? And how did you dream up the recipes?

AMY ZITELMAN: As a busy entrepreneur/mom, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve often added tahini to a store-bought sauce already in my refrigerator. But as I’ve become more health-conscious, and with my son getting older and liking to help in the kitchen, I’ve realized that homemade sauces are a perfect solution to a lot of my personal and familial needs. Henry loves to whisk—and ends up eating whatever we put the sauce on more often.

It was such a dream to work with Andrew (my co-author), and in our conversations, it quickly came out that I’m a sauce lover. I love pesto, make a lot of stir-frys, am always dipping, etc. He helped me articulate those flavor profiles into foolproof recipes. Plus, having sauces available makes it so much easier to make a meal fast — pour them over protein, veggies, or grains, and you are good to go!

EL: In almost all of those recipes, water is an ingredient. What’s the importance of water in a tahini sauce?

AZ: Water and tahini is a bit confusing. You have two reactions occurring: One, much of tahini is oil, which of course repels water. And two, the other important component in tahini is dry particles surrounded by that oil and fat. When a small amount of water (or other liquid) is added, those particles start to stick together, making the tahini very stiff and clumpy. As you increase the amount of water, the tahini continues to thicken — until you cross the threshold, and then it will loosen and thin out again. In short, water is what transforms tahini into a bright, creamy sauce.

EL: What are some of your favorite uses for the sauces we’re sharing with our readers?

AZ: My favorite way to use the Tahini Pesto is to simply put it on pasta! I love pasta, and having a healthy and fresh sauce makes it feel more well-rounded. Tahini Barbecue Sauce is perfect on chicken for the grill — it encourages the flames and gets the chicken a bit burnt on the outside. I love dipping pizza (every bite) into Tahini Ranch. And I toss big florets of roasted cauliflower with the Buffalo Tahini Sauce — a great alternative to chicken wings. Tahini Ranch as a dipping sauce is a bonus.

Related recipes:

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Racism, misogyny, guns and religion: Experts call Atlanta “an unmistakable American stew”

Last Tuesday, a 21-year-old white man named Robert Aaron Long apparently went on a shooting spree, killing seven women and one man at three spas in the Atlanta area. Six of the women are of Asian ancestry.

Like so much that goes wrong in America, this is a tragic story of gun culture, religion, race, sex, violence and politics.

On the surface, it certainly appears as if Long committed a hate crime targeting the Asian and Asian-American community. One Korean newspaper has reported that at one spa an eyewitness heard Long say he was going to “kill all the Asians”.

These killings are also part of a much larger pattern of violence against Asians and Asian Americans inspired by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the right-wing “news” media and their eliminationist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic and its origins in China.

Long told police that he wanted to “eliminate” the source of his sexual temptations and supposed sex addiction, impulses that were contrary to his so-called Christian values. As has been widely reported, he belongs to a right-wing Baptist church that has sought to indoctrinate congregants with hostility to non-whites as well as women.

For whatever reason, Long identified Asian women as the embodiment of his “sins.” His confession to police would seem to reflect a racist trope that Asian women are a compliant, submissive, seductive and highly desirable Other. In the American popular imagination, Asian women are also commonly associated with sex work. (Whether these specific women were involved in sex work is not clear.) Long’s alleged crimes illustrate the ways that white supremacy involves a complex mix of desire, loathing, obsession and hatred for the nonwhite Other.

Long has reportedly denied that race was a motive in his actions.

Following the American cultural script, when a white person — nearly always a man — engages in a mass shooting or other act of large-scale violence, police and opinion leaders often attempt to humanize the assailant, especially if the victims are not white.

In this instance, the Cherokee County sheriff’s police captain who acted as a spokesperson on the day of the murders told reporters and the public on Wednesday, speaking about Long: “Yesterday was a really bad day for him”.

Capt, Jay Baker promoted T-shirts online that featured racist “kung flu” jokes about the coronavirus. After his remarks about Long, Baker was removed from his responsibilities as spokesperson.

Long bought the gun that was apparently used in his murder spree earlier that same day.

Because of the Republican Party’s voter suppression campaign targeting Black voters, it is almost certainly easier to buy a gun in Georgia than to exercise one’s constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

In an effort to better understand the context and implications of the Atlanta murder spree and apparent hate crime, I asked several leading experts from a range of backgrounds for their thoughts on what this tragic event reveals about America in this historical moment.

Their comments have been edited for clarity and length.

Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist and internationally recognized expert on violence at the Yale School of Medicine. She is also the editor of the New York Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

Mental health professionals warned of Donald Trump’s psychological danger, among which is his tendency to project his own unacceptable actions onto others, as he did when he scapegoated Asians through derogatory phrases such as, “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” Just as his dehumanization of immigrants and desperate migrants led to unprecedented hate crimes and mass shootings, we are now seeing escalating violence against Asian-Americans, with about 3,800 complaints of harassment or violence being filed in less than 12 months.

The Trump presidency was a public health emergency from the start, and violence is a societal disorder. While individual motives may vary, of greater significance is the cultural shift that pushes vulnerable individuals into violence where previously they may not have been.

The Jan. 6 insurrection, the mass killing of Asian-Americans and the reign of white supremacist terrorism and intimidation are all interrelated and exacerbated due to a former president being so “successful” in avoiding repercussions for his actions. Unless there is vigorous curtailing and delegitimizing of Trump’s actions and influence, even this late, I fear that the groundwork for a violent culture that will give rise to epidemics of violence has already been laid, and the attacks in Georgia are only a prelude.

Robert P. Jones is CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. He is also a leading scholar on religion, politics and culture and the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” and “The End of White Christian America.”

One of the hardest things for white Christian churches to come to terms with is their own role in fostering, protecting and perpetuating white supremacy. But the testimony of history and the witness of contemporary public opinion data tell a disturbing story about white Christianity’s inability to separate itself from white supremacy, both in the past and the present. The Atlanta murderer was a baptized member of a Southern Baptist church. He played drums in the worship band, was active in the youth group and his father was a lay leader, according to media reports and the church’s social media pages that have now been deleted or made private. An Instagram profile that appears to be his has this tag line: “Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life.”

The Southern Baptists happen to be not only the largest white evangelical denomination but the largest single white Christian denomination of any kind in the country. They have been one of the chief forces providing moral and religious cover for white supremacy as it expressed itself in slavery, Jim Crow laws and segregation of both public spaces and sanctuaries, notorious practices such as convict leasing programs, and voter disenfranchisement.

The current dynamics in white Christianity — its unwavering support for Trump, its opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement — cannot be understood without understanding the above context. This also applies to understanding the role white evangelical churches played in shaping the worldview of people like the Atlanta murderer.

It is notable that the Atlanta murder’s home church belongs to a group called Founders Ministries, which explicitly claims that “white fragility is pro-racism,” calls critical race theory “godless and materialistic ideologies,” and equates women preaching with abuse.

This rejection of critical race theory is a recent defensive move by conservative white Christian churches to defend against calls to examine their own troubling histories on issues of race. The emphasis on distinct gender roles is part of that same larger Christian worldview that read a racial and gender hierarchy back into the Bible: white over non-white, men over women.

It also fuels a “purity culture” that portrays women as objects of temptation to men and often charges them to be responsible for regulating men’s sexual desires, teaching that men are biologically hardwired for arousal and women are simultaneously morally dangerous and morally responsible for behaving in ways that keep those male desires in check. Church has far too often been an exercise in harnessing the gospel message, however awkwardly, to pull the wagon of white male power.

Finally, we should take seriously conservative white Christian churches’ own claims about the power of Christian formation and discipleship. Their emphasis on the importance of attending church depends on the premise that what goes on inside the sanctuary has the power to shape congregants’ lives outside the sanctuary. The ultimate responsibility for these horrific murders lies with the murderer. But if we white Christians believe what we say about the power of churches to shape lives and actions, he did not commit these atrocities in a vacuum, but among a great cloud of witnesses who helped create a worldview in which these actions made sense.

Minh-Ha T. Pham is an associate professor in the graduate program in media studies at Pratt Institute. Her writing and analyses have been featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, the New York Times, and The New Republic. Her most recent book is “Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging.”

A white man set out to, in his own words [as reported by the Korean newspaper the Chosunilbo], “kill all Asians,” and then shot and killed six Asian-American women. It’s a horrific but not exceptional event. The immediate context is the spate of anti-Asian racist violence and scapegoating we’ve seen throughout this pandemic year.

But his actions also reflect a broader pattern of the racist sexualization of Asian women by military imperialist forces in Asia, including Korea, where at least some of his victims are from, by media industries that are only able to imagine Asian women as sexually compliant objects, and by domestic policies beginning with the Page Act of 1875 which specifically prohibited Chinese women from immigrating based on a widespread assumption that Chinese women were likely prostitutes or otherwise morally and sexually deviant. (The Page Act was the first time a group of people had been excluded from immigration based on their social identity.)

I believe that people are having a hard time seeing these murders as an act of racism because for many people, anti-Asian racism is a new idea. Many non-Asians are not aware that Asians experience racism or that different Asian groups often experience different kinds of anti-Asian racism (from xenophobia to linguistic racism to sexualized racism). So when something as jarring as this happens, Asian Americans — like all groups that experience racial violence — get put in the terrible position of having to work through their own feelings of fear and anger about the racialized attacks while being subjected to all the media and social media gaslighting that says the racialized terror we’re feeling doesn’t actually exist. And this gaslighting only perpetuates racialized violence. Right now, it feels never-ending.

Anthea Butler is a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her new book is “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.”

What this terrorist’s murder spree shows is how the confluence of evangelical religion, racism, sexism and gun worship came together to make an unmistakable American stew of frustration, anxiety and hatred. I wish I could feign surprise, but after listening to evangelical and conservative Christian preachers speak about sexuality and guns, I’m not surprised that this man decided to kill the women he thought were responsible for his “sexual sins,” rather than taking responsibility for his own sexuality and desires.

The “pornography made me do it defense” is an evangelical belief that pornography degrades the mind, that will be used by law enforcement and others to obscure the racial foundations of this crime. The reality is that this perpetrator should be charged not only with murder but hate crimes as well.

Chrissy Stroop is an ex-evangelical advocate, speaker and writer. She is co-editor of the essay anthology “Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church.” Stroop’s work also appears at Religion Dispatches where she is a senior correspondent.

It has been reported that Aaron Long would spend hours consuming porn, which led to his parents kicking him out of the house. While this may indicate a real problem with dysregulation and compulsion, there is still no agreement among mental health professionals that “porn addiction” or “sex addiction” is a valid diagnosis. Even if the medical establishment should eventually come to the consensus that such a diagnosis is valid, obviously it would not justify murder.

Most likely, Long’s sex drive was normal, but the repression and misogyny inculcated in him through socialization in evangelical purity culture warped his thinking about sex. I am not arguing that purity culture is more important to understanding the Georgia spa murders than systemic racism or sexism, but as many ex-evangelicals raised in purity culture immediately understood when we began to learn about Long’s religious life, it is a piece of the puzzle. Indeed, purity culture is grounded in the white supremacism that pervades white evangelical subculture. It has roots in American anti-blackness and the associated tropes that date back to before the Civil War and, before that, to European culture.

The American understanding of sexual “purity” is impossible to disentangle from its roots in fears of “miscegenation” and calls for white men to protect white women from black men — although the white men themselves were often a danger to the white women around them. We see the results of this in the abuse scandals currently racking the Southern Baptist church. Fetishization of Asians is also common in white evangelical subculture. In the Georgia murders, we see the confluence of multiple ideological streams that allowed Long to dehumanize his targets.

Jared Yates Sexton is a political commentator and analyst. He is the author of “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage.” His new book is “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People.”

The tragedy in Atlanta, not to mention a constellation of related and similar tragedies that we’ve experienced, is an encapsulation of a society that is eating itself and in constant, relentless denial. The threat of white supremacy, patriarchal oppression and the weaponized faith of the evangelical right, is an existential threat. Until we can see how they interact, inform one another and permeate society, these terrible tragedies are going to continue to happen and even grow in scope and frequency.

Bats, panthers, and the utterly plausible lab-leak hypothesis

It is generally best to reject out of hand any conspiracy theory that assumes more than three people have kept something secret. Which may be why a large fraction of the biomedical community rejects the suggestion that a lab leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) could have been the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the lab-leak hypothesis is not a typical conspiracy theory; the very circumstances of the event and its extraordinary location near the WIV give it prima facie support. Because the world of viruses, bats, and pandemic infection is intrinsically strange to most people, how about if I explain this with an analogy?

Let’s say, for instance that a Florida panther rampaged through the South Bronx, injuring many people. It would be immediately reasonable to wonder: How could that possibly happen? Florida panthers don’t live anywhere near the Bronx and aren’t normally so ferocious.

Concern might be further increased if local officials — who have authority over the zoo — attempted to hide or mischaracterize the initial rampage, or tried to claim that the rampage had occurred in a completely different country. Why would they do that if there was nothing to hide?

Obviously, zoo officials would be concerned that they would be blamed. If they were confident the Florida panther wasn’t theirs, the logical path forward would be to hold an immediate press conference and invite a blue-ribbon committee to come as soon as possible to thoroughly inspect the zoo. That committee might determine that all panthers were accounted for, and that no breeding program could account for additional cats.

If zoo officials did just the opposite — if they engaged in a ham-handed refusal to allow an immediate and independent investigation — the logical conclusion would be that it was even more likely the panther had come from that institution.

“But wait,” zoo officials could say. “While we do have Florida panthers here, the one that rampaged the city had a genetic makeup different from the ones we house.”

OK, that would be a persuasive argument.

That is, unless additional investigation revealed that the zoo had a breeding program intended to develop more fearsome Florida panthers. And that the genetic makeup of the panther in question was actually pretty similar to ones the zoo housed.

At that point, the zoo would likely have to relent and allow an outside group of investigators in for an inspection. However, it would not be reassuring if the zookeepers stipulated that the composition of the investigation team would be controlled by the same local officials who had initially tried to cover up the rampage. It would be even worse if the local officials delayed the inspection for almost a year — more than enough time to change all the locks and edit the breeding books.

With the situation spiraling out of control, the zoo might make a final public relations argument. “But wait,” they might say. “We just checked and this is not a completely different type of panther; it’s similar to those crossbred with Texas cougars. We didn’t breed it here. It must have bred naturally.” This would be a strong argument, were it not for the fact that the zoo had been sending collecting parties to Florida and Texas for years.

If it then turned out that a special delegation had visited the zoo two years before the panther rampage and reported concerns that there were inadequate safety provisions that could lead to a panther escape, at that point even skeptical people might be persuaded that this wasn’t just an all-smoke-no-fire situation.

Every analogy has its limits, of course, but this one is grounded in reality and an extraordinary set of coincidences. The WIV is around 10 miles from the site of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, whereas the natural coronavirus variants that most closely resemble SARS-CoV-2 come from a region in South West China more than 900 miles away. The WIV runs the world’s leading effort geared toward collecting wild coronaviruses from that region, and they are reported to have tinkered with the wild viruses to develop potent new strains. Two years before the onset of the pandemic, U.S. diplomatic scientists visited WIV and sent back strongly worded reports to the State Department warning of inadequate safety conditions. And when a delegation from the World Health Organization visited the institute earlier this year, Wuhan officials limited the team’s makeup and restricted their access.

Although it is possible that we will someday sort this out, it is unlikely. The only way to do that, now that the Institute itself may have been scrubbed, would be to escort all of the involved WIV officials and their families safely out of China so that they can be interviewed in a setting where they can speak freely. That’s not going to happen.

But there is one thing that I believe we can assert definitively: The statement by a WHO official that “it was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place” is wrong to a profound degree. It doesn’t take a human factors expert to understand that asking people to work with dangerous materials as part of their day-to-day routine for years at a time makes a safety lapse almost inevitable. Policies governing institutes like WIV should be designed with Murphy’s Law as an inescapable truth, not an afterthought.

All that said, it is still pretty likely that Covid-19 was a spillover event from nature, and we should be humbled that it didn’t kill nearly everyone. But we also shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of a lab leak as mere conspiracy theory. Clearly, our estimates of risk were catastrophically wrong, as we had been warned many times. We need to separate ourselves from the natural reservoirs of novel infectious diseases to the greatest extent possible.

* * *

Dr. Norman Paradis is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth College.

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

The right-wing is turning on Republican Gov. Kristi Noem

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was a favorite of attendees at the recent 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, and former President Donald Trump spoke highly of her during the debut episode of Fox News pundit Lisa Boothe’s new podcast. But the hard-right Republican governor is feeling the wrath of some social conservatives for her opposition to parts of a South Dakota bill that would ban transgender athletes from competing against the opposite sex in her state.

Joe Sneve, a reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, explains, “Noem’s issuance of a formal recommendation for style and form modifications to HB 1217 not only drew criticism from its authors in the (South Dakota) Legislature, who said the changes she wants don’t align with the policy they set out to create. And beyond that, GOP leaders like House Speaker Spencer Gosch have questioned whether the governor’s use of the style and form veto is legal considering she’s recommending what they say are substantive changes, not minor clerical errors.”

One social conservative who is railing against Noem is Inez Stepman, a self-described “anti-feminist” who is accusing her of having “bowed to corporate pressure”:

Gov Noem bowed to corporate pressure and her changes gut the protections for girls and women in the South Dakota bill. It’s as simple as that. https://t.co/xsxW9K4oL3

— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) March 22, 2021

Margot Cleveland, in an op-ed for The Federalist, argues that Noem is watering down the bill.

Noem argued on Twitter, however, that she supports the effort behind the bill — an effort many LGBTQ activists and their allies argue is a harmful attempt to marginalize trans youth over a made-up problem. Noem simply believes that, as written, the bill would have unintended consequences that she does not support.

But the right-wing is apparently growing so insular that it can’t even hear critiques from someone who is a clear ally. Noem is not an advocate or defender of trans rights by any reasonable definition; she just thinks the legislature’s bill was sloppily written. In the modern GOP, however, even the slightest disagreement or deviance from a hard-right line can be seen as evidence of treachery. The knee-jerk reaction is a symptom of a deep paranoia and an increasing demand for purity on conservative issues.