The evil within us: How Christian fascist ideology led to the Atlanta killings

Robert Aaron Long, 21, charged with murdering eight victims, six of whom were Asian women, at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, told police that he carried out the killings to eliminate the temptations that fed his sexual addiction. His church, Crabapple First Baptist Church, in Milton, Georgia, which opposes sex outside of marriage, issued a statement condemning the shootings as “unacceptable and contrary to the gospel.”

The church, however, also immediately took down its web site and removed videos, including one that was captured by The Washington Post before it was deleted where the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jerry Dockery, told the congregation that Christ’s second coming was imminent. And when Christ returned, Dockery said, he would wage a ruthless and violent war on nonbelievers and infidels, those controlled by Satan.

“There is one word devoted to their demise,” the pastor said. “Swept away! Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver — just that quickly — God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read where everyone — everyone that rejects Christ — will join Satan, the Beast and the false prophet in hell.”

I heard a lot of these types of sermons by fundamentalist preachers during the two years I crisscrossed the country for my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended Bible studies, prayer groups, conventions, tapings of Christian television shows, rallies held by Patriot Pastors, talks by leaders such as James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Tony Perkins and creationist seminars. I visited the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, took an “Evangelism Explosion” course, joined congregations at numerous megachurches for Sunday worship and participated in right-to-life retreats. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing scores of believers.

The simplistic message was always the same. The world was divided into us and them, the blessed and the damned, agents of God and agents of Satan, good and evil. Millions of largely white Americans, hermetically sealed within the ideology of the Christian right, yearn to destroy the Satanic forces they blame for the debacle of their lives, the broken homes, domestic and sexual abuse, struggling single parent households, lack of opportunities, crippling debt, poverty, evictions, bankruptcies, loss of sustainable incomes and the decay of their communities. Satanic forces, they believe, control the financial systems, the media, public education and the three branches of government. They believed this long before Donald Trump, who astutely tapped into this deep malaise and magic thinking, mounted his 2016 campaign for president.

The killings in Atlanta were not an anomaly by a deranged gunman. The hatred for people of other ethnicities and faiths, the hatred for women of color, who are condemned by the Christian right as temptresses in league with Satan, was fertilized in the rampant misogyny, hyper-masculinity and racism that lie at the center of the belief system of the Christian right, as well as define the core beliefs of American imperialism. The white race, especially in the United States, is celebrated as God’s chosen agent. Imperialism and war are divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, is shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American nationalism are intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. In short, the worst aspects of American society are sacralized by this heretical form of Christianity.

Believers are told that Satanic forces, promoting a liberal creed of “secular humanism,” lure people to self-destruction through drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography and massage brothels. Long, who had frequented two of the massage parlors he attacked, was arrested on his way to Florida to attack a business connected with the pornography industry. He had attempted to block porn sites on his computer and sought help for his fascination with porn from Christian counselors.

The secular humanists, along with creating a society designed to tempt people into sin, are blamed for immigration programs that fuel demographic shifts to turn whites into a minority. The secular humanists are charged with elevating those of other races and beliefs — including Muslims, whose religion is branded as Satanic — along with those whose gender identities challenge the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman and patriarchy. The secular humanists are believed to be behind an array of institutions including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, the State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), elite universities and media platforms such as CNN and The New York Times.

In D. James Kennedy’s book “The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack on Christianity and What You Need to Know to Combat It,” he writes that although the United States was once a “Christian nation,” that is no longer the case because today “the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and other secular humanists has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage. In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously successful in taking over the ‘public square.’ Public education, the media, the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong to them.”

That incendiary rhetoric creates an atmosphere of being under siege. It imparts a sense of comradeship, the feeling that although the world outside the walls of the church or the home is dangerous and hostile, there is a select community of brothers and sisters. Believers only owe a moral obligation to other Christians. The world is divided between comrades and enemies, neighbors and strangers. The commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” is perverted to “Love your fellow Christians as yourself.” Nonbelievers have no place on the moral map.

When Christ returns, believers are told, He will lead the elect in one final apocalyptic battle against the people and groups blamed for their dislocation and despair. The secular world, the one that almost destroyed them and their families, will be eradicated. The flaws in human society and in human beings will be erased. They will have what most never had: a stable home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and personal security and success and an abolition of uncertainty, disorder and doubt. Their fragmented, troubled lives will become whole. Evil will be physically vanquished. There will be no more impurity because the impure will no longer exist.

This externalization of evil, however, is not limited to the Christian right. It lies at the core of American imperialism, American exceptionalism and American racism. White supremacy, which dehumanizes the other at home and abroad, is also fueled by the fantasy that there are superior human beings who are white and lesser human beings who are not. Long did not need the Christian fascism of his church to justify to himself the killings; the racial hierarchies within American society had already dehumanized his victims. His church simply cloaked it in religious language. The jargon varies. The dark sentiments are the same.

The ideology of the Christian right, like all totalitarian creeds, is, at its core, an ideology of hatred. It rejects what Augustine calls the grace of love, or volo ut sis (“I want you to be”). It replaces it with an ideology that condemns all those outside the magic circle. There is, in relationships based on love, an affirmation of the mystery of the other, an affirmation of unexplained and unfathomable differences. These relationships not only recognize that others have a right to be, as Augustine wrote, but the sacredness of difference. This sacredness of difference is an anathema to Christian fundamentalists, as it is to imperialists, to all racists. It is dangerous to the hegemony of the triumphalist ideology. It calls into question the infallibility of the doctrine, the essential appeal of all ideologies. It suggests that there are alternative ways to live and believe. The moment there is a hint of uncertainty the ideological edifice crumbles. The truth is irrelevant as long as the ideology is consistent, doubt is heretical and the vision of the world, however absurd, absolute and unassailable. These ideologies are not meant to be rational. They are meant to fill emotional voids.

Evil for the Christian fundamentalists is not something within them. It is an external force to be destroyed. It may require indiscriminate acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world this violence is morally justified. Those who advance the holy crusade alone know the truth. They alone have been anointed by God or, in the language of American imperialism, Western civilization, to do battle with evil. They alone have the right to impose their “values” on others by force. Once evil is external, once the human race is divided into the righteous and the damned, repression and even murder become a sacred duty.

Immanuel Kant defined “radical evil” as the drive, often carried out under a righteous façade, to surrender to absolute self-love. Those gripped by radical evil always externalize evil. They lose touch with their own humanity. They are blind to their own innate depravity. In the name of Western civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, in the name of America, in the name of the free market, in the name of Jesus, they seek the subjugation and annihilation of others. Radical evil, Hannah Arendt wrote, makes whole groups of human beings superfluous. They become, rhetorically, living corpses before often becoming actual corpses.

This binary world view is anti-thought. That is part of its attraction. It gives to those who are alienated and lost emotional certitude. It is buttressed by hollow clichés, patriotic slogans and Bible passages, what psychologists call symbol agnostics. True believers are capable only of imitation. They shut down, by choice, critical reflection and genuine understanding. They surrender all moral autonomy. The impoverished language is regurgitated not because it makes sense, but because it justifies the messianic and intoxicating right to lead humankind to paradise. These pseudo-heroes, however, know only one form of sacrifice, the sacrifice of others.

Human evil is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery. It is a bitter, constant paradox. We carry the capacity for evil within us. I learned this unsettling truth as a war correspondent. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin. Evil is also seductive. It offers us unlimited, often lethal, power to turn those around us into objects to destroy or debase to gratify our most perverted desires or both. This evil waits to consume us. All it requires to flourish is for us to turn away, to pretend it is not there, to do nothing. Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for evil’s sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is the story of America, from its foundation on the twin evils of slavery and genocide to its inherent racism, predatory capitalism and savage wars of conquest. The more we ignore this evil, the worse it gets.

The awareness of human corruptibility and human limitations, as understood by Augustine, Kant, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, has been humankind’s most potent check on evil. Levi wrote that “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic.” This self-knowledge forces us to accept that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is ever free from the taint of self-interest. It reminds us that we are condemned to always battle our baser instincts. It recognizes that compassion, as Rousseau wrote, is alone the quality from which “all the social virtues flow.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” We may not be guilty of the murders in Atlanta, but we are responsible. We must answer for them. We must accept the truth about ourselves, however unpleasant. We must unmask the lie of our pretended innocence. Long’s murderous spree was quintessentially American. That is what makes it, along with all other hate crimes, along with our endless imperial wars, police terror, callous abandonment of the poor and the vulnerable, so frightening. This evil will not be tamed until it is named and confronted.

Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin urgently need to hold a summit meeting — and soon

Last week’s outbreak of rhetorical hostilities between the White House and the Kremlin has heightened the urgent need for a summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. The spate of mutual denunciations is catnip for mass media and fuel for hardliners in both countries. But for the world at large, under the doomsday shadow of nuclear arsenals brandished by the United States and Russia, the latest developments are terribly ominous.

Whatever you think of Biden’s assertion during an ABC News interview that Russia’s President Putin is “a killer” — and whether or not you think the label might apply to Biden, given his pro-war record — the existential imperative of U.S.-Russian relations is to avert a nuclear war. Biden’s claim during the same interview that Putin does not have “a soul” indicates that much of the new president’s foreign-policy thinking is stuck in a Cold War rut.

No doubt many Americans have welcomed Biden’s holier-than-thou stance toward Putin. But an overarching reality is routinely hidden in plain sight: Everyone’s survival on this planet hinges on Washington-Moscow conflicts not spinning out of control.

Let’s face it: Biden is playing to the domestic anti-Russia gallery in the U.S. media and “defense” establishment, while making a dangerous mockery of his own claims to be a champion of diplomatic approaches to foreign affairs.

“Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” Biden said when he spoke at the State Department in early February. Those who have been heartened by such statements during the first two months of Biden’s presidency should insist that he live up to that vow by meeting with the head of the Russian government.

But it’s now clear that much more is needed from Biden than just willingness to sit down with Putin. Biden also needs a major attitude adjustment. He would greatly benefit from pondering what happened in a small New Jersey town for a few days in the early summer of 1967.

Keep in mind that at the time, the Soviet Union was in the iron grip of Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Alexei Kosygin, who saw to it that freedom of the press or the right to publicly dissent did not exist inside their nation. Compared to those days, Russia under Vladimir Putin in 2021 has far more freedom in terms of media, politics and society as a whole.

The Soviet repression and violation of human rights didn’t stop President Lyndon B. Johnson from trying to reduce the chances of the world blowing up. He engaged in real summitry with Kosygin. Their extended talks on the campus of Glassboro State College gave rise to what became known as “the Spirit of Glassboro.”

That spirit signified only a limited breakthrough. It did not prevent the next year’s Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the continuing horrific American escalation of the war in Vietnam. Yet it was genuine diplomatic dialogue — at the highest levels of government — and it decreased the chances of nuclear annihilation.

In the process, LBJ wouldn’t have dreamed of proclaiming his Soviet counterpart “a killer” or declaring him to be without a soul. After more than a dozen hours of direct talks, Johnson stood next to Kosygin and, in effect, made a plea for safeguarding human survival. “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said.

Fifty-four years later, with mutual hostility now at fever pitch in Washington and Moscow, such understanding is essential. But President Biden is not showing that he has the wisdom to seek it.

A former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, wrote last month that “the vital interests of both countries are endangered when their governments treat the other as a threat, or worse, an enemy, rather than as a potential and necessary partner.” He noted that the shared challenges include dealing with threats posed by “nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming and ever more destructive technologies if used in warfare.”

Matlock, who served as the top American envoy in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, added: “Presidents Biden and Putin now have the opportunity to find ways to cooperate in dealing with global threats, and encouraging others to do so as well. That would constitute a new operating system, suited to the threats of the present and future rather than replaying follies of the past.”

No matter how much we might wish to forget or deny it, we are tied together, as a matter of survival, by a fraying thread of relations between the United States and Russia.

For those in the U.S. government, media and general public who don’t want a Biden-Putin summit to happen, I have a simple question: “Do you want to reduce the chances of nuclear war?” Assuming the answer is yes, any opposition to such a summit is illogical at best.

If the leaders of the two countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads can’t have a summit meeting and talk with each other, we’re in trouble. Real trouble.

Oh the humanity! “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” wasn’t necessary, but it brought what Whedon lacked

Director’s cuts are primarily for a film’s superfans or people curious to see what magic was abandoned on the cutting room floor. Few of them are considered necessary; fewer still fundamentally transform the story as it was originally told in theaters.

Then, against any sensible predictions, “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” challenged all this by emerging from the shadows following years of social media-generated fan demand to release “the Snyder Cut.” Although critical response has been mixed so far, the sum is more positive than the response to 2017’s version, which bombed with audiences and at the box office.

Snyder’s cut includes three days’ worth of fresh content shot in October 2020 along with a yacht-load of visual effects rejiggering, such as a design overhaul on the movie’s villain Steppenwolf. Other changes substantially transform the narrative, such as the revelation that Steppenwolf isn’t acting alone, but to serve Darkseid – who actually appears in this edition along with another Justice League member, the Martian Manhunter.

Does all this make “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” necessary viewing? Not really, unless you’re a sucker for redemption stories and vindication arcs. You know, two of the reasons people love comic books.

This time, though, the heroic journey isn’t one undertaken by anyone with flight, super strength or a cave full of technological wonders and devices that go boom. It is Snyder’s, undertaken through Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman – but of vaster significance – also through the daughters of Themyscira and best of all, through Ray Fisher’s Cyborg.

“Zack Snyder’s Justice League” also happens to be four hours long, making it slightly shorter than 1963’s “Cleopatra,” and about an hour longer than 1982’s “Gandhi.” These two films are considered to be cinematic giants; this is not. Then again, when you consider that “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” have a combined runtime exceeding five hours . . . this “Justice League” is still too long.

On the other hand, Snyder’s version confidently imagines the worlds beyond where DC and Warner Bros. could have taken “Justice League” – that is, if he hadn’t stepped away and left his concept in the hands of a director with a bruised ego and an abusive personality. Snyder didn’t do this lightly; he was mourning his daughter Autumn’s death by suicide.

Thus Warner Bros. took the epic that Snyder envisioned and passed it along to “Avengers” director Joss Whedon, who sliced and diced it into a DC Universe version of an MCU carnival team-up.

Whedon reconfigured the film significantly to focus on the franchise’s tanks, i.e. Ben Affleck’s Batman, Henry Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, and to introduce Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, who went on to headline his own film in 2018.

Basically if a character was already a brand powerhouse, and a man – specifically a Superman or a Batman – Whedon beefed up the “Justice League” script around him, which didn’t leave much room for Fisher’s Cyborg or Ezra Miller’s Flash to develop as characters.

Gadot’s Diana Prince was turned into an object for Affleck’s Bruce Wayne to flirt with and Steppenwolf to taunt by claiming ownership over her. Cyborg became an angry robo-kid. The Flash turned chicken prior to their first big battle, one of many running jokey-jokes that made Whedon’s version flop so spectacularly.

Although Whedon’s fingerprints were all over the 2017 version, people blamed Snyder for its failures citing his grim resurrection of Superman in 2013’s “Man of Steel” and 2016’s “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

Persuading those folks to devote a quarter of their waking hours to watching Snyder’s do-over may be impossible, and the same might be said of anyone who finds Snyder’s style in general to be cold and overwrought. That describes yours truly. If I hadn’t been obligated to watch the Snyder Cut I probably wouldn’t have.

Now that I’ve seen it I can honestly say I’m glad I did.

“Zack Snyder’s Justice League” shows Snyder’s evolution from a director known for emphasizing style over substance to a man who understands why we love superhero myths, whether they live in the DC Universe or Marvel’s.

The simplest reason is that they’re grand, colorful and explosive, everything we want in action movies. Comic arcs connect via cliffhangers, the very commodity that makes studios desirous to keep making them.

Snyder’s take affirms this with a suspenseful ending that sees beyond anything previously done in a DC live-action property, expanding the canvas beyond Gotham, Metropolis or even the world as we know it. (His proposed sequel looks dark, no two ways about it. And I’d love to see it.)

Mainly, though, these stories appeal to the parts of ourselves as we wish we could be – our ideal versions of bravery, strength and nobility. When people play the old game of choosing between having the power of flight and invisibility, the explanations our selection yields reveal something about who we are. Snyder’s adamant focus on the humanity of his “Justice League” heroes speaks to this, especially in the characters about which people know the least.

Batman’s legend has been told by many directors and played by a large panel of actors; Superman’s story is part of American lore. Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman” preceded “Justice League” to movie theaters in 2017 and became the 10th-highest grossing film of that year.

But little is known about Cyborg and as Snyder indicated in a recent interview, he wanted his “Justice League” to be that character’s origin story, to make him as central to the mythos as his more famous counterparts.

And he does this by centralizing Ray’s mourning over losing his mother in the same accident that claimed his organic flesh while railing against his scientist father’s decision to transform him into a machine. Every member of the Justice League is a product of parent-child conflict and abandonment issues, but Ray’s enhancements further isolate him in a society that already views Black men as suspicious.

Snyder leans more forcefully on the Frankenstein’s monster parallels here than any implications that associated with Ray’s Blackness. In doing this, he doesn’t expand Fisher’s role and Cyborg’s story at the expense of any other figure, which is as crucial as all the smaller addendums and changes. Wonder Woman’s solo fight sequence is bolder and deadlier in his version, but so is the determination of her sisters on Themyscira. Their efforts are significantly heightened, and the toll of their loss more acutely drawn.

Snyder takes all of the characters who aren’t Batman or Superman and empowers them with similar significance and importance acknowledging that they all end up at the same table. He amplifies the might of secondary figures – Amazons, yes, but also Lois Lane and Martha Kent. Characters that live to enjoy the Whedon version’s happy ending die in this one, but their deaths have reason and meaning that have little to do with motivating others into action.

Additionally Snyder appears to have taken critiques about Metropolis’ over-the-top wanton destruction in “Man of Steel” to heart. In his “Justice League” the climactic battle topples buildings and includes plenty of explosions and crashes, all taking place in a ghost town with no residents.

In contrast, Whedon disempowers several of his main heroes and inserts potential innocent victims into his film to give them some little people to save. He cheapens the outcome of several confrontations by shortening them and downplaying their tragedy. Worse, he inserts dialogue in which Steppenwolf implies he will claim the Amazons as worshippers – that he would re-enslave them, essentially. In short, if Whedon’s various betrayals ticked you off before, noticing the ways that his misogyny ruined 2017 “Justice League” may make you detest him all the more.

Knowing what we know now about Whedon, whether through Fisher’s publicized allegations of his abusive behavior during the first “Justice League” reshoots or the deluge of “Buffy”-related allegations that effectively besmirched that show’s legacy, the smaller details Snyder inserts are their own statement.

You may notice them in small rewrites, such as having Wonder Woman respond to Steppenwolf’s aggressive, “This one is mine,” with “I belong to no one.” Or his replacing the White Stripes’ aggressive “Icky Thump” with Nick Cave’s pensive hymn “There Is a Kingdom” as Aquaman’s introductory anthem. One is a balls-to-the-wall tune that reeks of overcompensation; the other is a lonely meditation on devotion, which is the essence of Arthur Curry’s struggle as a misanthrope caught between two worlds.

Why, it is as if Snyder’s version was edited to present his film as he meant it to be and say something about the man who mucked it up in the first place.

It’s not that – at least, I can’t imagine Snyder confirming that interpretation. He doesn’t need to. His “Justice League” do-over speaks loudly and for itself . . . and for now, on its own. Snyder recently told Deadline that Warner Bros considers the 2017 edition to the official version; his cut is considered to be an “outworld non-canon version.”

Studios respond to success and demand, and that “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” exists is already a victory for the fans and an argument that superhero movies can also be powerful treatises on humanity too. If we get a sequel out of it, booyah . . . and for the record, a two-hour runtime is more than enough to fulfill that mission.

“Zack Snyder’s Justice League” is streaming on HBO Max.

Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell denies guilt by arguing “no reasonable person” would believe her

Former Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell has filed her response to the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems by using more defamation from the conspiracy theories she was spreading in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

According to the court filing documents tweeted by BuzzFeed reporter Zoe Tillman, Powell presented a whole new defense for false allegations that Dominion was part of an election-rigging scheme linked to long-dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. According to Powell, “no reasonable person would conclude” those “were truly statements of fact”

Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Powell and a slew of far-right lawyers spent most of the months following the election spreading lies like the conspiracies about electronic voting equipment from Dominion.

Powell said in her defense that it’s impossible to hold her liable for the conspiracy theories she spread because her “opinions and legal theories” were completely unreliable. She even went so far as to compare herself to reporters who are allowed 1A protection by citing sources that can be false.

https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1374103466038157315/photo/1

According to a screen capture from Tillman, Powell went on to say “she disputes that her info was ‘false.'”

The filling drew a flood of responses from legal experts and others who tell angry Trump supporters one thing while arguing something different in court.

See their comments below:

TFW your defense to defamation is essentially that even people snorting coke, shotgunning beers and dropping acid would know your statements weren’t meant to be taken as factual ….

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) March 22, 2021

Powell is a disgrace who should be disbarred for her unethical conduct. https://t.co/iKq5FHyZeB

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) March 22, 2021

This shows Sidney Powell views supporters of the former President and @GOP legislators as unreasonable, that only stupid people would have believed her election fraud statements. Problem is, many Republican legislators continue to wrongly believe the election was stolen. https://t.co/t6OcGn5eUX

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 22, 2021

Trump snaps at Fox News host after being called “ex-president”: “You called me, I didn’t call you”

Former President Donald Trump on Monday snapped at a Fox News host who asked him why he was speaking out on border issues despite being out of office.

“Most president, ex-presidents like yourself do not weigh in at this level,” Fox News host Harris Faulkner told Trump at the conclusion of their interview. “Why did you feel like you needed to on this issue?”

“Well, you called me, I didn’t call you, in all fairness,” Trump complained.

“You wrote the statement last night,” Faulkner pushed back. “It was pretty strong.”

“I put out a statement,” Trump agreed. “The reason I weigh in is very simple. They’re destroying our country. Very simple. It can’t get simpler than that.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

When sick cows can’t be culled: India’s battle with brucellosis

In 2015, Vikas Gupta was ready for a change. Then the head of international marketing at a large corporation in Mumbai, the 42-year-old decided to give it all up, return to his home state of Haryana in northwest India, and become a dairy farmer.

To ease his transition into a field that he knew nothing about, Gupta began speaking to hundreds of veterinarians, animal health researchers, and cattle farmers across the country. As he did, he noticed one thing kept cropping up in his conversations.

“I came to know very early in the trade that there are a few issues that as a country we face,” says Gupta, who is now one of the directors of Doozy Farms, home to several hundred cows. “Brucellosis is one of those and it is big.”

A highly contagious and chronic disease, brucellosis is caused by bacteria and mainly affects livestock such as cattle, sheep, and goats. When infected, an animal can suffer from late-term abortions, poor fertility, and reduced milk production. The disease is very damaging for farmers and causes huge losses, says Jiwan Gupta, a veterinarian in Punjab. Overall, these livestock losses may have cost India about $3.4 billion, according to a 2015 analysis published in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine.

Unfortunately, the South Asian nation isn’t alone in its plight. The World Health Organization considers brucellosis an important neglected zoonotic disease — or one that spreads from animals to humans — in parts of developing Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Wealthier countries in the West have largely eradicated it, although hotspots still exist, such as among the bison and elk populations in Yellowstone National Park.

As with most zoonotic diseases, the key to brucellosis prevention lies with improving animal health. Countries that have the disease under control usually adopt a two-pronged approach: mass vaccination, followed by slaughtering cattle that still test positive afterward. But this approach doesn’t work in India. Cows are considered sacred in the Hindu religion, which is practiced by 80 percent of Indians. Most states in India forbid their slaughter.

“You can’t slaughter cows in India, so that’s a big hurdle,” says Nammalwar Sriranganathan, a professor of bacteriology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. “You cannot do what the West does.”

Currently, farmers may take their sick cows to shelters called gaushalas, run by nongovernmental organizations, but they are “already full to capacity,” says Navneet Dhand, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Sydney. That’s partly because India has such a large cattle population — some 200 million cows, according to the country’s latest livestock census. Worldwide, one in every three to five cows is in the Indian subcontinent, Sriranganathan estimates. And many of them live on rural mom-and-pop farms rather than large organized ones. Controlling brucellosis infections in so many animals, he adds, is “very difficult.”

But given the severity and scale of the situation, Indian authorities are determined to try. Already underway is a new animal vaccination program that aims to eradicate brucellosis in the country by 2025. While some of those involved are optimistic of hitting that target, others aren’t so sure.

“That is very, very ambitious,” says Dhand. “Just vaccination is not going to be enough, so other things have to be adopted to complement vaccination. Vaccination will have to be part of any program, but it shouldn’t be the only thing.”

* * *

Dhand has spent the past six years or so coming up with solutions to solve the tricky problem of controlling brucellosis without culling cattle. Although he immigrated to Australia over a decade ago, Dhand maintains close ties to Punjab, where he grew up and first worked as a vet.

In 2014, his institution partnered with Punjab’s Guru Angad Dev Veterinary and Animal Sciences University to work towards a shared vision “of developing a control program” for brucellosis.

But as Dhand and his collaborators began their work, they were met with strong skepticism on the ground. “People didn’t believe we could actually make some impact on daily life” because the disease is one that India has been grappling with for a very long time, he says.

He says he is determined to prove them wrong. Dhand’s team has conducted several studies on brucellosis in India — including one measuring disease prevalence among veterinary staff, one examining its economic impact, and another weighing up the costs and benefits of control measures. (People can be affected too, although it is rare and usually not life-threatening.)

One recent study from the team, published in December 2020, comes in the wake of discussions with close to 120 stakeholders, including veterinarians, farmers, and milk vendors, over which control strategies would be feasible in the local context. The findings are presented as a set of recommendations for a disease control program. When asked which measure will have the most impact, Dhand tells Undark that “vaccination is the key” in the absence of slaughter.

To that end, the National Animal Disease Control Program (NADCP) launched by the Indian government in September 2019 is a good start. While vaccination programs previously existed in the country, they have been small-scale and sporadic. The new program, which also targets foot and mouth disease and has a total budget of approximately $1.8 billion, will see the country-wide vaccination of all bovine calves, says Ajay Upadhyay, a veterinary epidemiologist at Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology in Uttarakhand, in northern India.

Upadhyay says his university, which owns roughly a thousand cattle, has already received some vaccines through the NADCP. “It’s a very ambitious program,” he says. “But it should succeed.”

Other experts aren’t so sure. The program uses the Brucella abortus S19 vaccine, which must be kept below about 46 degrees Fahrenheit. “Maintenance of cold chain is critical, right from production to the point of use,” says Ram Pratim Deka, a brucellosis researcher at the International Livestock Research Institute in Guwahati, in northeast India. But adequate refrigeration isn’t always available along the supply chains, particularly in remote areas. And power outages are frequent occurrences during the summer.

Additionally, S19 works well only if calves have been on a nutritious diet at least one month prior to vaccination, says Gupta, the veterinarian from Punjab. This means meals comprising a careful balance of protein and fodder, supplemented with vitamins and minerals such as iodine, copper, and zinc. But oftentimes, calves are given feed intended for adult cows, which does not have enough of these nutrients for the younger animals, he says. “If proper diet is not there, immunity will never be developed.”

Gupta also questions the strategy of immunizing only calves. Adult animals don’t usually receive the S19 vaccine because it can sometimes cause abortions. But Gupta has vaccinated close to 6,000 adult cows in the last five years or so without seeing any side effects. “I am doing it because there is no other alternative,” he says.

“It is a very crude vaccine; it is not a modern vaccine,” admits Dhand. “But to be honest, it is quite effective and we only need to vaccinate once for lifelong immunity.”

But vaccination alone isn’t enough to contain the disease. Instead, think of a successful control strategy as a bicycle, he says. “You have two tires — one is vaccination, the other is test-and-cull, right? Now if you remove test-and-cull as one wheel, so that you are left with only one wheel, which is vaccinations, the bicycle will not run,” he says. “So if you remove that test-and-cull, you need to replace it with something else.”

* * *

To find a new way to keep brucellosis control running, Dhand and his team recommend improving the biosecurity of farms. In discussions with key stakeholders, they discovered that vets can visit up to dozens of households in a single day. As they move between houses, the vets wash their hands but do little else hygiene-wise.

They often don’t change clothes, wear shoe covers, or clean vehicle tires between visits, Dhand found. All this facilitates the spread of disease. And while vets are conscious of how important personal protective equipment is, they don’t always have access to it, he says.

Another approach that would help tackle brucellosis is to raise awareness of it among farmers. “Educate them about what is the disease, how it is transmitted, what can you do about it, how would you control it,” says Dhand.

For example, cattle sheds should be regularly disinfected and farmers shouldn’t use their bare hands to apply medication after abortions, according to Upadhyay. Other animals should also be kept away from one that is giving birth, lest they come into contact with any infected fluids.

It’s also important to counsel farmers about how the vaccine works, he adds. Milk production can fall by up to 20 percent in the first two weeks after inoculation, which is why “some of these animal owners, they avoid vaccination.” But if farmers are aware of the short-term side effects, they might be more open to vaccinating their cattle.

And instead of a test-and-cull approach, India could consider testing and segregating instead, other experts say. Gupta practices isolating sick cows at Doozy Farms but he admits he’s “not sure if every farm in India can do it.”

The majority of the country’s farms are tiny backyard operations, unlike Doozy, which has roughly 300 cattle across two sites that span a total of 27 acres. Segregation is difficult in smallholder farming situations, Deka says, because people “rear only few animals and they do not have extra cattle sheds for rearing affected animals.”

Plus, few farmers can afford to rear a sick, unproductive cow. In Punjab, a cow might be worth about 80,000 rupees ($1,100) or more, says Dhand. By comparison, a new teacher might earn roughly $400 a month; a small business owner might make closer to $700 or $800.

In many cases, a cow is something a farmer might sell to help fund their child’s wedding or some other event, Dhand says. “So it’s very expensive for them to lose one animal.”

To ease the situation, the government could compensate affected farmers for their loss, or provide more of the off-site gaushalas for sick animals, say experts Dhand and Upadhyay.

So while its new mass vaccination program is a good step forward, the Indian government will need to do more if it plans to eradicate brucellosis from the country, Dhand says. Based on models he has run, he expects any program focused mainly on vaccination would take 10 to 20 years to decrease the prevalence of the disease down to about 2 to 3 percent.

Dhand cautions: “It is a long, long time away.”

* * *

Sandy Ong is a freelance science journalist based in Singapore. She covers stories about science, technology, health, and the environment in Asia and beyond.

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

Meghan McCain apologizes after she gets called out for anti-Asian statements by John Oliver

In the wake of a shooting rampage in Atlanta that left eight people dead – six of whom were of Asian descent – many Americans have been forced to confront the undeniable anti-Asian narratives that have practically been ingrained in out culture. However, the most recent iterations of this long-held racism and vitriol have been intensified by the false narratives surrounding the origins and spread of the coronavirus. With pundits and political figures like former President Donald Trump referring to COVID-19 with Sinophobic monikers like the “China virus” “kung-flu” or “wuhan virus,” there is a clear correlation between the uptick in hate crimes towards Asian Americans with the proliferation of these racist phrases.

And many popular figures have come forward to condemn these attacks and recent events for what they are: hate crimes that stem from ignorance and prejudice; in other words, unwarranted assaults that are caused by just about anything but a “bad day.” Among those decrying this disturbing trend, has been conservative talk show host Meghan McCain, who shared various statements on her social media profiles condemning the attacks against Asian Americans.

pic.twitter.com/jv6EIdildG
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) March 17, 2021

Curiously enough, McCain did in fact give her thoughts on the idea of enforcing a “politically correct” narrative about the virus last year at the beginning of the pandemic.

TRUMP CALLS COVID-19 “CHINESE VIRUS”: After sparking criticism for using the term, the president defended himself saying he “had to call it where it came from” — the co-hosts react. https://t.co/5ED5cehetN pic.twitter.com/az5HXhHmyH

— The View (@TheView) March 18, 2020

John Oliver pointed out this hypocrisy in his show Sunday by rolling a clip of McCain about one year ago sharing her thoughts on the matter. In it, she says, “I don’t have a problem with people calling it whatever they want. It’s a deadly virus that did originate in Wuhan.” Oliver was then quick to point out the glaring contradiction between someone dismissing this harmful language and then denouncing it without an iota of self-awareness or critical thought in between.

After the callout, which highlighted the fact that, of course, a wealthy white woman like McCain would be fine with something like this, she issued an apology:

I condemn the reprehensible violence and vitriol that has been targeted towards the Asian-American community. There is no doubt Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric fueled many of these attacks and I apologize for any past comments that aided that agenda.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) March 22, 2021

As Oliver noted as he closed the focus on McCain, there’s no issue with displaying some sympathy towards a community, but “there has to be an understanding that saying, ‘I don’t have a problem with calling it the China virus’ is very much giving space for hate to grow.”

Fox News host feeds fake news straight to Trump on-air, immediately forced to walk it back

During a live interview with Donald Trump Monday morning, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner made a rather outlandish error, telling the former president that Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had resigned, to which Trump declared a “victory.” But there’s one catch: Mayorkas never resigned.

“I want to get to this because it just happened now,” the Fox News anchor began. “I want to double-check this with our producers. The DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has resigned, Mr. President.”

Bizarre: Harris Faulkner falsely reports live on air that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has resigned, then immediately walks it back pic.twitter.com/19FxjehxzU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 22, 2021

Without skipping a beat, Trump indulged in the truly fake news generated by the Fox News anchor. “I’m not surprised. Good. That’s a big victory for our country,” he replied.

Faulkner, looking bewildered, was forced to almost immediately correct the record on air.

“Hold on. Let me stop, let me stop. Let me listen to my team one more time. Forgive me,” Faulkner said, issuing a retraction of her own reporting. “Forgive me. That has not happened, but and I apologize.”

Following the botched interview, a Fox News spokesperson told Salon that the mistake was made due to “a virtual working environment” but did not add any further explanation or details. “The error stemmed from an audio issue in a virtual working environment. We corrected the mistake and continued on with the interview,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

During that same interview Monday morning, Faulkner found herself in another awkward situation after asking Trump why he is so outspoken about President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

lol pic.twitter.com/2lsi0x1pzt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 22, 2021

“Most ex-presidents like yourself don’t weigh in at this level. Why did you feel you needed to on this issue?” the host asked Trump.

The former president then replied, “Well, you called me. I didn’t call you in all fairness.”

Gunman holds up caravan of National Guardsmen transporting COVID-19 vaccines

An Arizona man was arrested after police say he corraled a convoy of National Guardsmen transporting COVID-19 vaccines to Matador, Texas, on Monday morning.

Larry Harris, a 66-year-old man from Wilcox, Arizona, was armed when he tailed three National Guard vehicles from a gas station in Lubbock to approximately two miles east of Idalou, authorities said, according to WAFB9. Idalou Police said that Harris made multiple attempts to run the caravan off the road, at times veering into oncoming traffic. Once the vans stopped, he pointed a gun at one unarmed Guardsman and demanded to search all of the vehicles, insisting that he was a detective. The Guardsmen eventually filed out of their vehicles.

Police later found Harris to be in possession of a loaded pistol, as well as two loaded magazines. No bullets were fired in the standoff and Harris was immediately taken into custody. According to WAFB, Harris was charged with “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful restraint of 11 National Guard Soldiers, unlawful carrying of a weapon, impersonating a Public Servant, and interference with Texas Military Forces.”

Harris told police that he believed a woman and a child were being held hostage in the van.

“Mr. Harris appeared to be mentally disturbed,” said Idalou Police Chief Eric Williams. “This was a very dangerous situation since the suspect was standing in the midst of the unarmed Guardsman with a loaded weapon when the Idalou Officers arrived on scene. We are grateful that the officers were able to take him into custody without any of the Guardsmen, the officers or the suspect getting hurt.”

The Idalou Police and Lubbock County Sheriff are still investigating the incident.

Trump ramps up his war against Brad Raffensperger, endorsing primary challenger

Former President Donald Trump endorsed an ardently pro-Trump primary challenger to take on Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to carry out Trump’s demand in January to magically find nearly 12,000 votes to swing the state’s 2020 election results in his favor.

Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Jody Hice, who sought to overturn the 2020 election results and is a staunch Trump loyalist, came shortly after Hice announced Sunday that he would run against Raffensperger in the 2022 Republican primary.

“Wow, just heard the good news. One of our most outstanding Congressmen, Jody Hice, has announced he is running for Secretary of State in the Great State of Georgia,” reads a statement from Trump via his “Save America” PAC, obtained by Salon.

“Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” the twice-impeached former president added. “I have 100% confidence in Jody to fight for Free, Fair, and Secure Elections in Georgia, in line with our beloved U.S. Constitution. Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”

The battle lines between Trump and Raffensperger, highlighted further by Trump’s endorsement of Hice, run deep after the secretary of state’s resistance to the baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud promoted by the former president ever since the November election. One of Trump’s most notorious voter fraud claims was that Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes had been stolen from him.

Raffensperger and Trump’s rift intensified further in January when the then-president finally got Raffensperger on the phone — after reportedly placing numerous calls to his office — and demanded he “find” upwards of 11,000 votes to flip the election in his favor.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call, first reported by The Washington Post. “We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this. And it’s going to be costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it,” he added.

Raffensperger and Hice are both Republicans, but have opposing views when it comes to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which immediately followed Trump’s speech at a rally nearby

Before the riot began, Hice posted a picture to Instagram with a caption that read: “This is our 1776 moment.” On the contrary, Raffensperger has consistently denounced the Jan. 6 attack, calling it an “affront to the people that founded this nation.”

“It was surreal. We’ve never seen anything like that in 150 years, maybe even longer, probably 200 years. It was really an affront to the people that founded this nation,” Raffensperger told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Jan. 10. “People need to go back and read their history books. You know, we had some great founders. I know they weren’t perfect men, but they were great people. They were some of the most learned people we had in our society. And that’s the high ideal that we all should kind of elevate ourselves to, to be noble people of high character, and patriotic, and love our country.”

This jalapeño popper-stuffed chicken recipe is an easy way to spice up boring chicken breasts

One of the most ideal ways to take boring boneless, skinless chicken breasts in a very fun direction, here they get filled with cream cheese and cheddar cheese for richness, fresh jalapeño for kick, and cilantro for brightness. Serve with rice, a stack of warm tortillas, or crusty bread to sop up the delicious pan juices. A pot of black or pinto beans would be nice, too, as would thick slices of avocado and tomatoes seasoned with lime and salt. Iceberg wedges with Jalapeño Vinaigrette and chopped cilantro, pictured here, are also a great accompaniment.

Before you get to cooking, get to know the author! According to Julia Turshen, “delicious food does not have to be complicated.” Watch the interview below, and check out the full Q&A here.

***

Recipe: Jalapeño Popper-Stuffed Chicken

Serves 4

Ingredients:

Four 6-ounce [170 g each] boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1⁄4 cup [60 g] cream cheese
1⁄2 cup [60 g] coarsely grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 fresh jalapeño, stemmed, seeded, and minced
3 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro (a little stem is fine)
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄2 teaspoon ground cumin
1⁄2 teaspoon pimentón (smoked spanish paprika)
1⁄2 cup [120 ml] water

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 425°F [220°C].

Place one of the chicken breasts in a large resealable plastic bag and use a meat pounder, rubber mallet, or the bottom of a small-but-heavy pot to pound the chicken so it’s 1⁄4 inch [1⁄2 cm] thick. Repeat the process with the remaining chicken breasts.

Place the cream cheese, cheddar cheese, jalapeño, cilantro, and 1⁄2 teaspoon salt in a small bowl and stir well to combine. Evenly divide the mixture among the pounded chicken breasts and use your fingertips or a rubber spatula to spread it to cover, as if you were buttering toast. Starting with one of the narrower ends of each chicken breast, roll each one up as if it were a miniature yoga mat. Secure each chicken breast with a toothpick or two. Place each chicken breast in a baking dish (or an ovenproof skillet), toothpicks down (seam sides down).

Place another 1⁄2 teaspoon salt in a small bowl with the olive oil, cumin, and pimentón and stir well to combine. Evenly divide the mixture among the chicken breasts and use your fingertips or a pastry brush to coat the exterior of each chicken breast. Pour the water around (not on top of) the chicken breasts.

Roast the chicken breasts until they’re nicely browned, firm to the touch, and register at least 165°F [74°C] on a digital thermometer, about 30 minutes. Let the chicken breasts rest for at least 10 minutes before removing the toothpicks. Slice the chicken breasts and serve hot with any extra juices from the baking dish poured on top.

More Julia Turshen:

Republicans have perfected the troll two-step: The art of being a jerk and then playing the victim

Donald Trump may be off at Mar-A-Lago throwing childish tantrums on his golf course, but his legacy lives on with Republicans, who are increasingly realizing that the best way to appeal to GOP voters is to ape his strategy of acting more like a shock jock than a politician.

Beyond just acting like crude bigots and jerks, the real goal is to rake in the cash in the aftermath of the outrageous behavior. The politician plays the victim of “cancel culture,” thereby sanctifying whatever gross thing they said or did with the holy water of “free speech,” which is merely coservative code for the “right” to be free of any pushback or criticism.

Call it the troll two-step. First, draw a huge amount of negative attention from progressives and the press by saying racist things or otherwise acting like a pig. Then, whine about how you’re being “canceled” — even though your critics have no power to actually silence you — and bathe in the sympathy (and often dollars) generated by the victim-tripping right wing crowd. The best part? You don’t even have to defend the indefensible thing you said or did, because you’ve now successfully changed the subject to a vapid debate over whether your “rights” are being violated.

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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who is up for re-election in the 2022 midterms, has been performing the troll two-step in recent days with ugly comments that are both racist and making excuses for the insurrectionists Trump sent to overrun the Capitol.

The whole thing started earlier this month when Johnson was interviewed on the right wing Joe Pags show, and claimed that he wasn’t afraid of the insurrectionists because “I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” It was a self-evidently ridiculous statement, since the crowd was attempting to overthrow a legal election and were so violent towards the police that one died from the attack, two others committed suicide shortly thereafter, and 140 were injured, some quite severely.

But Johnson wasn’t done, and instead threw some racism in for good measure, claiming that if “those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.” This, despite research showing that no one was hurt at 98% of Black Lives Matter protests, and when there was violence, the police often started it or made it worse.

Luckily for Johnson, he is spared from having to actually defend his own racist comments because the “cancel culture” nonsense means he can instead talk about his alleged victimization at the hands of imaginary leftist censors. After Johnson was predictably called out by progressives, including his Senate colleague Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., Johnson joyfully embraced his victimization narrative. “I Won’t Be Silenced by the Left,” blared the headline at the Wall Street Journal over an op-ed written by Johnson, in which he whines about progressives using “the worst possible accusations to silence anyone who challenges their left-wing agenda.”

Note, of course, that this alleged champion of free speech is complaining not about being imprisoned or censored in any way, which has not happened, but that other people are using their own free speech to criticize him. As usual, “cancel culture” complaints are not defenses of “free speech,” so much as they are conservatives asserting a unilateral right to say whatever they wish without criticism.

Johnson kept up his victim trip over the weekend, going on Fox Business Sunday to whine that liberals “reflexively play the race card primarily to silence their critics or silence anybody that they don’t want their viewpoint spread around.” Yet despite the power he attributed to “the race card,” his voice continued to be broadcast to a national audience, disproving his allegations of being “silenced.”

It’s important to note that in his original interview with Pags, Johnson prefaced his remarks with, “this could get me in trouble,” a comment he claims was made in dread but was clearly was more of a wish that came true. For right-wing grifters and politicians alike, being “in trouble” — i.e. getting liberal criticism — is the best possible thing. All the base cares about these days is “triggering the liberals,” and now Johnson’s credentials as a liberal-triggerer have been nicely burnished.

Johnson is only the most obnoxious recent example, but the sad truth is the troll two-step is turning into a primary — if not the primary — method that Republican politicians use to get attention, adoration, and most critically, campaign donations. Witness Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., playing the game regarding mask-wearing on Fox News last week:

Rand Paul tells Tucker Carlson he was running on a treadmill without a mask recently, prompting “some Karen” to complain about him pic.twitter.com/paXgt49wfd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 20, 2021

Step one: Do something deliberately offensive that is guaranteed to get a negative response. Step two: When the provocation works and someone reacts, play the victim to much acclaim and sympathy on right-wing media. Rinse, repeat. Bonus points for continuing to redefine “Karen” away from its original definition of “racist white woman” to a sexist term to shame women for setting boundaries, no matter how reasonable they may be.

The troll two-step is also shaping up to be the preferred method for starting a campaign, as demonstrated by Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state representative who is hoping to be the Republican’s nominee to replace Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who is retiring in 2022. Mandel went on Twitter last week and unleashed a bunch of racist vitriol about “the various types of illegals flooding across the border,” citing “Muslim Terrorists” and “Mexican Gangbangers,” When Twitter reacted predictably, by removing this blatant violation of their rules against hate speech, Mandel shifted seamlessly to playing the victim.

“Conservatives everywhere should be frightened by the ongoing censorship by Twitter, Facebook, Google and the liberal media,” he decried in a statement. Et voilà! Instant sympathy and victim status, without even having to raise a finger defending the original statement, which was equal parts racism and blatant lies.

The two-step works so well that the notorious Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — who has been making a fortune in donations with false claims of being “censored” — was able to skip the first step of provocation-and-response and move straight to the second step of playing the victim recently. When Twitter accidentally suspended her account for 12 hours last week before reinstating it with an apology for the error, Taylor Greene immediately moved to playing the victim, tweeting, “I was just told @Twitter suspended me for 12 hrs in “error,” on the same day Dems introduced a resolution to expel me from Congress. What a coincidence?” Even though she really should have been banned long ago for violating terms of service, the result of the fake cancellation: $210,000 in 24 hours of re-election fundraising for Greene.

This is why the troll two-step crystallizes how much “triggering the liberals” has become the central — and often only — tenet of modern conservatism.

Republicans know they can’t defend their policies or ideas, and they certainly can’t defend the various bigotries that animate their base voters. But what they can do is turn liberal-triggering into a sport, where it doesn’t really matter what is triggering the liberals, so much as the fact that the liberals are triggered. Nor does it matter that no one is actually being censored and that criticism is not censorship. All that matters to the right is playing the victim and whining to the cameras about “cancel culture,” a fake controversy that allows Republicans to avoid talking about policies and ideas, areas where they inevitably lose the debate.

It’s tempting to imagine there’s some way liberals could game this situation to defeat the troll two-step. After all, does liberal-triggering count if no liberals are triggered? Is this a situation where ignoring trolls makes them go away? Sure, sometimes that can work. Not all bait needs to be eaten after all! But ultimately, it’s also not good to let racist comments and outright attacks on public health go without any meaningful pushback, either.

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The better solution when dealing with trolls is to go meta.

Instead of merely criticizing the racist comment or boorish provocation, which invites the “cancel culture” whining, liberals can call out the game. Johnson isn’t just a racist, but a racist troll who is throwing out red meat to distract from his seditious support for an insurrectionist president. Paul, Mandel, and Taylor Greene are all openly trolling for money and attention. Calling out the game is the best way to avoid playing it. It allows liberals to avoid giving conservatives that “triggered” reaction they so desire and allows liberals to rise above. It also helps sidestep false accusations of censorship, by avoiding the back-and-forth over whether or not someone is “really” being silenced to focus on why they would lie about such a thing.

Don’t feed the trolls. Expose them. It’s the only way to get out of the vicious cycle of right-wing provocation and victim-tripping.

Top 1% fails to report over 20% of income using potentially “criminal” tactics: IRS analysis

The wealthiest 1% of Americans fail to report more than 20% of their income to the IRS, and some of those ultra-rich people use “sophisticated evasion technologies” and criminal tactics to avoid paying their full share, according to a new analysis by researchers at the IRS and economists.

The analysis estimated that the top 1% of households fail to report 21% of their income. Nearly a third of that is through sophisticated schemes that random IRS audits fail to detect. The trend is even starker among the top 0.1% of earners, whose unreported income may be twice as high as the IRS estimates.

The analysis was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which noted that some of the tactics would be categorized as “clear criminal tax evasion” while some fall into the “grayer areas of noncompliance.” These tactics include using offshore tax havens, Daniel Reck, a professor at the London School of Economics and the paper’s lead author, told the outlet. The analysis estimated that random IRS audits found taxpayers’ offshore accounts just 7% of the time. Though stricter reporting requirements have cracked down on such behavior, the tactic may actually be increasing through the use of partnerships and pass-through income entities that are more difficult for the IRS to track.

“There is more revenue than you might have thought at the very top,” Reck said. “What’s needed is a broader strategy that involves increased scrutiny of pass-through businesses [and] investments in the comprehensive audits that the IRS does in its global high-wealth program.”

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig referenced the research during a congressional hearing last week and echoed Reck’s call to boost funding for IRS, arguing that each additional dollar spent on enforcement could bring back up to $5 to $7 in additional revenue.

“It is not just a body count of how many people we have in enforcement,” he said. “We need to have specialized agents.”

Reck, along with Carnegie Mellon University economist Max Risch, UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and IRS researchers John Guyton and Patrick Langetieg, used internal IRS data to estimate the amount of income that is not reported to the tax agency compared to the IRS’ estimates. They estimated that underreported income among the top 1% is about three times more than the 7% rate among the bottom 50% of earners — and significantly above the level that random audits detect.

This problem may have gotten worse in recent years as the IRS budget has been steadily cut over the past decade. As a result of the budget cuts and the costs of auditing high-income individuals with complex tax returns, the agency now audits poor Americans who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit at the same rate as the top 1%, ProPublica reported in 2019.

A coalition of dozens of progressive groups called on the Biden administration to address this trend in February, arguing it was a matter of racial equity.

“Since 2011, audit rates for millionaires, who are disproportionately white, have dropped more than twice as much as for taxpayers claiming the EITC, who are disproportionately people of color,” the groups said in a letter to the administration and Congress. “Audit coverage is now the heaviest in many low-income majority-Black counties.”

Tax evasion also costs the country hundreds of billions in revenue.

Researchers at the University of Syracuse last year found that the number of audits of taxpayers earning over $1 million has dropped 72% over the past eight years, even though audits of millionaires in 2012 found $4.8 billion in unreported taxes. And while the IRS audited 93% of large corporations in 2012, finding $10 billion in unreported taxes, just one in three of the biggest 755 corporations in the U.S. were audited in 2020.

“From a policy perspective, our results highlight that there is substantial evasion at the top which requires administrative resources to detect and deter,” Reck’s analysis said. “We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% and that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually.”

In all, unreported income is estimated to cost more than $600 billion in revenue this year and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade, roughly half the projected federal deficit over that stretch, according to The New York Times.

Two progressive lawmakers have introduced bills to boost the IRS budget aimed at enforcement to make up some of this revenue.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., would set minimum audit levels of high-income individuals and corporations and modernize the agency’s dated technology. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced a similar but more aggressive bill, which would boost IRS enforcement funding by $70 billion while requiring the agency to audit 95% of large corporations, 50% of individuals earning more than $10 million per year, and 20% of those earning more than $1 million.

Khanna’s bill would also require third-party verification of business income over $400,000 the same way that wage income is reported to the IRS through W-2 forms, a plan backed by former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti.

An analysis by Rossotti, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Wharton School professor Natasha Sarin estimated that investing $100 billion in the IRS over the next decade would generate between $1.2 trillion and $1.4 trillion in additional revenue.

“After years of Republican budget cuts and skewed priorities, the IRS now audits those who make $20,000 at about the same rate as the top 1%, even though the vast majority of unpaid taxes are attributable to wealthy tax cheats,” Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement. “Rep. Khanna’s bill would go a long way towards making things right. It mandates minimum audit levels for the wealthy and large corporations and gives the IRS the funding it needs to help make sure that those at the top are paying their fair share of taxes.”

AstraZeneca vaccine is 79% effective against symptomatic COVID-19, company says

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 79% effective in preventing symptomatic infections, a rate of efficacy higher than observed in prior clinical trials, according to data from a new clinical trial conducted in the U.S.

The findings, announced Monday in a company news release, may boost confidence in the vaccine, which shook Americans this month when it was revealed that more than a dozen European countries suspended the vaccine over concerns about rare side effects. Regulators issued a safety review after a small number of vaccine patients developed blood clots and abnormal bleeding. Following the international scare, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded on Thursday that the company’s vaccine is “safe and effective.” The agency found that the shots were “not associated with an increase in the overall risk of thromboembolic events, or blood clots.”

The trial included 32,000 participants and offered a two-shot regimen at a four-week interval. Volunteers either received two placebo shots or two vaccine shots.

According to scientists that led the trial, the vaccine was also 100 percent effective against severe illness and hospitalization across all ages and ethnicities. An independent committee “found no increased risk of thrombosis or events characterized by thrombosis among the 21,583 participants receiving at least one dose of the vaccine.””

“The data look good. The numbers don’t lie,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“The results from the U.S. trial of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine give strong evidence that the vaccine is both safe and highly effective,” said British health secretary Matt Hancock on Monday. “Vaccines are our way out of this, so when you get the call, get the jab.”.

The trial showed particularly strong immunity for older people, who were not as well-represented in previous trials. About 20 percent of the volunteers were 65 years or older and about 60 percent of them had conditions, such as obesity or heart disease, that put them at a higher risk of contracting a severe case.

However, the fresh data may not have such a strong impact in the U.S, where the vaccine has yet to be authorized. If approved, AstraZeneca’s vaccine is unlikely to be available until May, when all adults eighteen and over are expected to be eligible for a vaccine from the three major pharmaceuticals that have already been authorized.

The company said on Monday that it would continue to review the new data and prepare for emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. It is currently authorized for use in over seventy countries, though a federal imprimatur from the FDA would likely shore up confidence in the company’s shots globally.

“This is the vaccine that will likely vaccinate the world,” tweeted Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “If you were rooting for global vaccination, this is a good morning.”

The U.S. has provided more than $1 billion to support the development of AstraZeneca’s vaccine and ordered 300 million doses. The company has promised to supply as much as 3 billion shots this year at cost.

Donald Trump can still be found criminally “culpable” for the Capitol riot, says lead prosecutor

The former top prosecutor of the Capitol insurrection said that Trump might be responsible for the insurgency on Jan. 6, stressing that federal investigators are currently “looking at everything.”

In a CBS interview on Sunday, Michael Sherwin, former interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia said that it’s undeniable that Trump “was the magnet that brought the people to D.C.”

“Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach? What I could tell you is this, based upon, again, what we see in the public record and what we see in public statements in court,” he explained. “We have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.'”

“That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the President is culpable for those actions.”

Asked whether there was a premeditated plan of breaching the Capitol, Sherwin said that he and his team were still investigating the extent to which the riot may have been pre-planned. Some rioters, Sherwin noted, have admitted to escalating the events on Jan. 6 beyond what they thought Trump had called for in his speech.

Sherwin’s interview comes as the prosecutor makes his departure from the Justice Department. Sherwin was originally asked to fill a vacancy leading the Washington U.S. attorney’s office, where was unexpectedly called upon to spearhead a sweeping investigation into the Capitol insurrection.

Sherwin noted in the interview that the most serious charge so far is obstruction. “That’s a 20-year felony,” he said. “They breached the Capitol with the intent, the goal to obstruct official proceedings, the counts, the Electoral College count.

While some defendants in the case have said the former president incited their violence on Capitol Hill, Trump has not been formally charged, nor has any other current public official. There is no indication that any probes have been opened into any public officials either.

Sherwin speculated that the future may hold sedition charges for many of the rioters.

“I personally believe the evidence is trending towards that, and probably meets those elements,” he said. “I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”

CNN reported that federal prosecutors have recommended sedition charges, but their recommendation is still under review. Some rioters also face conspiracy charges, which allege coordination and planning between participants of the unrest. Sherwin also said that his team might consider murder charges depending on the details surrounding the death of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer who died after the riot potentially due to injuries sustained while defending the building. Investigators have speculated that Sicknick may have died as a result of bear spray.

One difficulty in the investigation, Sherwin said, has been drawing the distinction between protestors and rioters. “We have to protect the First Amendment,” he explained. “The great majority of the people there were protesters. When do you cross that line? You cross the line when you cross a police line aggressively. You throw something at a cop. You hit a cop. You go into a restricted area, knowing you’re not supposed to be there. These are the plus factors that cross that line from a protester to a rioter.”

Over 300 people have been arrested in connection to the Capitol insurrection on charges which include entering a restricted area, obstruction of Congress, and assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon. Earlier this month, a Trump appointee who worked as a U.S. Department of State aide was arrested for “physically and verbally [engaging] with the officers holding the line.”

Trump has denied any responsibility for the events on Jan. 6.

Tonnato is the sauce to lead you from winter to spring

Every month, Melina Hammer, Food52’s very own Hudson Valley correspondent, is serving up all the bounty that upstate New York has to offer.

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Tonnato originally hails from Piedmont Italy, made possible with tuna caught from nearby coastal Liguria. The original sauce consisted of tuna, pounded with anchovies, capers, and olive oil to render it creamy.

In “Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well,” published in 1891, Pellegrino Artusi instructs you to combine a few ounces of oil-packed tuna with a couple anchovies: “Mash well with the blade of a knife, or better yet, pass through a sieve, adding a generous amount of olive oil, a little at a time.”

The modern convenience that is mayonnaise came on the scene in the 1970s, and tonnato hasn’t been the same since. Using mayonnaise is a modern shortcut, though not a purist’s approach.

On days when I have a packed schedule, I opt for the expedited method. The results are not quite as sumptuous, but the sauce still delivers a deeply lush character, and is extremely versatile. Which means I can readily pull it from the fridge for flavorful food on-the-go, no matter how little time I have to make a meal. When I entertain guests at our Catbird Cottage, I roll out the red carpet, make my own aioli, and proceed with blending the tonnato.

Oil-packed tuna is best for this sauce. Fish preserved in this way retains its juiciness and flavor, rather than leeching all that goodness into water. I also prefer a jar to a can because you can see what you’re getting, and it’s easier to strain. Check Monterey Bay Aquarium (here and here) for the most sustainable choices in an array of fish and seafood. When it comes to tuna, they recommend dolphin-safe, pole-and-line-caught albacore and yellowtail to limit the likelihood of bycatch, as well as to reduce the concentration of mercury.

Ingredients such as capers and anchovies add lots of umami. These salty-savory elements trigger that wonderful impulse we drool for. For some heat, you can get creative and add cayenne or Aleppo chile flakes.

Whatever your approach, tonnato is quick to come together — the real challenge is not eating it by the spoonful straight from the jar once it’s ready. Do chill it for at least 20 minutes to allow the texture to thicken and flavors meld.

The summer luxury of chilled vitello tonnato (saucy sliced veal) is the most well-known preparation you’ll find with this robust condiment. But don’t limit it to veal, or even meat.

When spring peas and tender lettuce greens arrive, I thin tonnato to make a dressing. When juicy, lush tomatoes are ready to harvest, I slather tonnato at the base of a plate and shingle thick slices on top, and add torn herbs to finish it off. I love when wild salmon is in season, and add tonnato to a roasted or grilled fillet.

Slather on toast, pile high with crunchy radishes and bright herbs. Or swirl to coat a plate before nestling with verdant, tender spring things, a delectable complement to the punchy sauce. I even stir a spoonful or two into grains and legumes, and salads too. In doing so, whatever I’m eating reaches new heights.

Related recipes:

Coverage of the migrant surge at the border shows how easily the media can be trolled by Republicans

It was inevitable that a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico would refocus the media away from the ongoing pandemic and the consequential economic fallout. Those are old stories and it appears that most people believe the nation is “rounding the turn,” as Trump used to weirdly say. The immigration story, however, while one that repeats itself every few years, most recently in 2019, offers up a deeply satisfying new narrative for the media: “Donald Trump was right.”

Never underestimate the overwhelming incentive for some in the press to seize on a storyline that allows them to prove that they are not the “liberal media” (or in today’s parlance “the fake news media.”) The situation at our southern border provides a perfect platform for them to show their even-handedness. Unfortunately, as with most such media moments, it’s not even-handed in the least.

First of all, it is true that the situation at the border is a humanitarian crisis. The most acute aspect of it at the moment is the record number of unaccompanied minors — somewhere around 15,000 and growing — who are now under U.S. government protection as they await a judicial resolution to their asylum claims. This is a reversal of the Trump administration’s cruel policy of forcing people to live in squalid refugee camps on the other side of the border. Needless to say, the Biden administration is scrambling to deal with this huge surge of children and teenagers. Obviously, they need proper shelter, medical care and expeditious resolution of their cases which, in most situations, means they are released into the care of family here in the U.S. or are placed with well-vetted sponsors. It is a challenge, to say the least. They are, by most accounts, moving as quickly as possible.

The main gripe from the news media is that the administration has refused to use the word “crisis” (they have since acquiesced to that demand) and they are not being transparent about how the children are being treated, raising suspicions even among immigrant advocates that they are hiding something. The administration says they are protecting the privacy of the children but it’s obviously better to show the scope of the challenge and, hopefully, show that they are meeting it quickly. Worrying about “optics” in a situation like this is counter-productive. But let’s be clear. The current hysteria is being ginned up by the shameless Republicans who are clutching their pearls over the alleged mistreatment of kids even as they are insisting that Trump’s cruel policies should be immediately reinstated as if they were highly successful. They were not. This current surge has been coming on for many months, as MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan pointed out in this interview:

Me: "Since the pandemic… border apprehensions have gone up month after month. Joe Biden did not inherit falling numbers."
GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw: "I don't know where you're getting figures from."
Me: "Those are CBP numbers."

Watch our exchange on @MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/4hw18tOQBK

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 22, 2021

To the extent the border was “closed” under Trump, it was due to the pandemic and only applied to the normal cross-border businesses which, for all of the hand-wringing by Republican politicians about the economy, never seemed to come on their radar. These towns and the people in them from both countries have been suffering from the border being closed but the migrant surge was growing all through 2020. And, as we know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. For a number of complicated reasons, there will from time to time be surges of migrants, often families or unaccompanied minors from Central America, to the border. From 2013 and 2018, between 300 and 450 thousand asylum applicants came to the border each year and generally speaking, there is more or less attention to the problem depending on where the crisis peaks in the election cycle. You may recall that in 2014 there was a surge of unaccompanied minors that caused a massive paroxysm on the right which led to the loss of one very powerful Republican House member as well as a disgusting display of racist rhetoric by the usual right-wing media suspects. In fact, that period was one of the leading factors in the rise of the demagogue Trump who rode to the White House spewing lurid fears about immigrant rapists. The “caravan” hysteria of 2018 was Trump’s main mid-term tactic. It did not pay off at the polls but did manage to inspire a mass murder.

Today, the GOP is shrieking that Biden has declared the border to be open (it is not) and that it’s his promise of a humane border policy that is driving people to apply for asylum. If that’s true it would seem to be important for the press to at least address the fact that 2019 had by far the highest number of apprehensions in over a decade. And it sure as hell wasn’t because of Trump’s generous immigration policies.

Journalist Heather Timmons of Reuters offered some context on Twitter that shows why so many people who have followed this issue for years are frustrated with the current coverage. It’s not that things aren’t bad at the moment, they are. But put in historical context, this specific crisis is par for the course. She notes that apprehension levels are lower than in the Trump administration, peaking at that a massive number in 2019, and much lower than during the 2000s, a period when there was quite a bit of active bipartisan cooperation on the subject but which, sadly, came to an end as the partisan acrimony accelerated at the end of the Obama administration.

The Republican party is now solely committed to politics via culture war, using media, state legislatures and the federal courts. And nothing gets their culture warriors’ juices flowing like racial unrest and immigration. Sure, rending their garments over Mr. Potatohead is lots of fun, but this is what goes directly into the right-wing lizard brain. They are the ones feeding this story which you can easily tell by such fatuous nonsense as the immigrant-hating extremist Stephen Miller declaring the Biden administration “morally monstrous.”

The media must cover the story, of course. But it doesn’t have to pull theatrical stunts as ABC did by sending its entire panel down to the border to absurdly seat them in front of the “wall” for its Sunday show. Neither does the Washington Post need to headline a big feature with the grossly provocative “‘No end in sight’: Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge” which ignores their own paper’s own reporting last fall about the surge already happening under the Trump administration. They should leave this sort of thing to Fox News, which knows how to make a profit at it.

The mainstream media can educate the public without ratcheting up the hysteria by calmly providing the historical context for this surge and all the ones that came before. If they fail to do this we’re going to see yet another surge of dangerous, right-wing anti-immigrant demagoguery injected into the mainstream of American politics at a moment when feelings are running very high and there is bloodlust in the air. They need to tone it down for the sake of the people who are going to pay the price if it gets out of hand.

Matzo brei is meant to be messed with

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

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Many associate matzo brei with Passover, aka Pesach, celebrating the Jewish Exodus from slavery into freedom. Which makes sense. Matzo brei’s main ingredient is indeed matzo, “our unleavened bread of affliction and redemption,” as Alana Newhouse puts it in “The 100 Most Jewish Foods.” But my grandma sees it differently.

To her, matzo brei isn’t just special-occasion food. It’s special, period, be it for breakfast or lunch or dinner, be it during Passover or many months past it, when matzo itself can be less than easy to find. She makes it all the time, “all the time!” she repeated. “It’s one of my favorite meals.” And me too.

Matzo brei has an ingredient list that seems too little to be true: matzo and egg, plus water, salt, and your fat of choice. Considering matzo’s reputation (cardboard is not an uncommon comparison) and water’s importance (in this case it’s very important), one might assume that the result is nothing to write home about.

But I’m writing home about it. Because when you get to know matzo brei, it becomes the sort of thing you could wake up to every day, like a loved one, and not tire of. The sort of few-ingredient, few-minute wonder that your not-Jewish husband could observe from afar, steal a bite from your plate, followed by another bite, how dare he, then start whipping up each morning while the coffee brews without even asking if he’s doing it right, which he is, but wouldn’t it be nice if he at least pretended to need your guidance?

Like any traditional dish, matzo brei’s details — the matzo to egg ratio, the soaking strategy, the cooking fat, just to name a few — defiantly differ by family. And even within my own family, every person has their own strong opinion.

My grandma crumbles a piece of matzo into a bowl, covers it in warm water, lets that hang out for a couple minutes, squeezes out the excess liquid, adds an egg, beats it up, pours everything into a skillet of sizzling olive oil, smooshes the batter into a thin layer, waits until it’s browned, flips, waits until the other side is browned, flips again if she feels like it, why not, then dumps it onto a plate, turns on “Law & Order,” and reaches for the salt.

My mom holds a piece of matzo under running water until it’s saturated, crumbles it into a bowl, adds an egg, beats it up, pours everything into a pan of foamy butter, flattens it into a pancake, waits until it’s browned, walks to the middle of the kitchen and, whoosh, sends the matzo brei soaring toward the ceiling, flipping midair like an Olympic swimmer, landing in a splash of butter, and my family would hoot and holler like we just witnessed a miracle, which we did.

Me though? I am my grandma, I am my mom, and I am not.

Per tradition, I stick with pancake-style versus scramble-style, and seek out those browned, crispy, almost-fried edges. But from there, I go off the rails. If I can find it, I opt for whole-wheat matzo, for its wheaty, malty, richer taste. After showering a piece under the faucet, I add a splash of water with the eggs for bonus fluff. And instead of one egg, I crack two, which my mom scoffed at as “egg brei, not matzo brei.” But it is delicious, like an omelet that wants to be a pancake, or a pancake that wants to be an omelet.

Most importantly though, I forget about the butter. While I answer an email or unload the dishwasher or let this naked baby serenade me, the butter leisurely makes its way from solid to melted to browned. Such a small step takes the matzo brei from sitting on the bench to stealing the ball and sprinting down the field and shooting and scoring and the whole crowd leaps out of its seat and screams. Can you hear it, too?

***

Recipe: Brown Butter Matzo Brei

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 2 minutes
Serves: 1

Ingredients:

1 matzo, preferably whole-wheat
1 pinch kosher salt
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Directions:

Rinse the matzo under cold running water for about 15 seconds per side until saturated. Use your hands to crumble it into a bowl. Add 2 teaspoons of water, plus the salt and eggs. Beat with a fork until the eggs are smooth. Set a 10-inch (or similar) nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the butter. Watch it closely — also a nice opportunity to stretch or focus on your breathing or drink a glass of water — until it just starts to turn golden brown and smells like toasting nuts. Pour in the matzo-egg mixture and spread it out as much as possible, encompassing all the brown butter, then leave it in the shape of a big pancake. Cook for about 1 minutes, until the top has only a few wet spots left and the bottom is golden, then flip with all the confidence in the world. Cook for another 30 seconds to 1 minute until bouncy to the touch. Slide onto a plate. Eat as is, or top with whatever the heck you want.

Laurence Tribe: It will be “hard” for Trump to “wiggle out” of possible criminal charges in Georgia

President Donald Trump is facing possible charges by the Fulton County District Attorney in Georgia after his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election by pressuring Georgia officials to change the election count.

Speaking to MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe explained that some of the possible charges for Trump are going to be difficult for him “to wiggle out of.”

“Well, you would have to put them in different buckets,” Tribe began. “The financial cases are very strong, but they won’t hold him accountable for his abuses as president. The ones that are really serious in that respect, are with the Fulton County prosecution, which is a prosecution for basically trying to steal the Georgia election, and the prosecutions that might occur under federal law. There are two key provisions of title 18 of U.S. code. One which you referenced earlier, U.S. codes 2384, that is conspiracy to commit sedition, a fancy way of talking about trying to prevent the government from functioning.”

Tribe explained that if convicted, Trump could go to prison for as much as 20 years for the crime.

“The more serious one, interestingly, is punishable by only 10 years, but permanent disqualification from ever holding any state or federal office,” Tribe continued. “That’s Title 18, U.S. code 2383. That’s the one where it seems to point to the president’s guilt because that applies to anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion. Now the facts as they are emerging, and I would count on an inquiry supervised ultimately by Merrick Garland as attorney general to see if the evidence really points there. Bit it looks like the evidence supports a conclusion that the president and people immediately around him directly gave aid and comfort to an insurrection against the United States to prevent the government from functioning and to prevent the installation of a new president through the counting of the electoral votes Jan. 6. Those are incredibly serious, far more serious than the financial crimes which really have nothing to do with the president’s office.”

Trump’s team has tried to muddy the waters, Hasan explained. In recent weeks, Trump has claimed that his comments were misreported by the Washington Post, but the reality is that it’s on tape and it’s clear. The conversation that was recorded with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is even more damning.

“It’s very hard to understand that conversation any other way when he says ‘you and your lawyer’ are going to be in basically criminal trouble if you don’t somehow, ‘find’ one more vote than the number by which I lost to Biden, according to your count,” Tribe explained. “So, finding one extra vote. That’s just code for ‘give me a victory that I didn’t win, or else you’re in trouble.’ That’s really strong-arming extortion, a violation of the election laws. We heard it happen in real-time and we heard it with our own ears in. So, it’s really hard to wiggle out of that.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

American crisis: The horrific Atlanta killings — and democracy still under threat

In the early morning hours last Wednesday, two news stories were adjacent to one another on the front page of CNN.

One was titled: “U.S. intel report: “Russia attempted to interfere in 2020 election to help Trump.””

The other: “8 dead in shootings at 3 spas in metro Atlanta.”

When read together, they announced: America needs help.”

That first CNN story concerned a new report just released by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, finding that Russian operatives “sought to inject misleading information” about Joe Biden into the 2020 campaign through officials close to Donald Trump:

The real bombshell it contains is not the confidence of the spy agencies that Russia hoped to subvert American democracy. It is that US intelligence experts effectively confirmed that for the second election in a row, Trump acolytes repeatedly used, knowingly or otherwise, misinformation produced by the spies of one of America’s most sworn foreign adversaries to try to win a US election.

Setting aside the issue of whether Trump or his campaign actively “colluded” with Russia, this report points toward “a damning reality: Moscow with its election meddling, Trump acolytes pushing false claims of voter fraud and his GOP supporters in the states now passing voter suppression laws share the same goal — the denigration of the U.S. democratic system.”

As reported at CNN and elsewhere, Russia’s election-interference strategy in 2016 and 2020 involved sophisticated influence campaigns, largely channeled through social media, that were designed to increase racial tensions (and create violent confrontation) on issues such as police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement and protests, and to amplify partisan hostility overall on wedge issues such as gun control.

Russian operatives have also been working with white supremacist terror organizations in both the U.S. and Europe to cause chaos with the goal of undermining multiracial and multiethnic pluralistic democracies.

The second story last Wednesday was about the horrific mass shooting in the Atlanta area, where a white man armed with a 9mm pistol allegedly shot and killed eight women — six of them Asian — at three different massage parlors. Robert Aaron Long, the accused shooter, is 21 years old and had purchased the weapon legally earlier that day. Long has reportedly denied any specific racist motivations, but the effect of these killings on the Asian-American community has been devastating. It appears possible or likely that Long was radicalized into violence by his right-wing Christian fundamentalist church.

The relationship between these two news stories is not linear and not a matter of direct cause and effect, but rather a shared energy of doom and frustration that so much is so very wrong in America. There is of course the pandemic, a broken economy and the lingering traumas of the Age of Trump and its aftermath.

Then there are the institutional, structural and cultural problems in our society, including racism and white supremacy, Christian nationalism and religious fundamentalism, sexism and misogyny, gun violence, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, gangster capitalism, and immense inequality and injustice. There are not merely polarizing differences of opinion about politics in our society, but an existential struggle over the nature of reality.

These problems and so many others exist outside of simple solutions and the ability of one person or leader to solve them. This is not a pure or empirical claim, but right now America feels in a perilous condition, as if with just the right tug on its knot of problems everything could somehow come tumbling apart. To borrow from William Butler Yeats and Chinua Achebe, things do indeed fall apart — and countries sometimes destroy themselves.

Given all the problems facing the United States it is now imperative that we begin a national conversation about the present and future of American civilization. What does it mean to be an American in the 21st century? What are our core values? How do we heal and then improve our political, cultural, economic, and societal institutions?

Because America is a multiracial democracy — or is at least trying to become one — part of that self-examination and national soul-searching should also include how racism and white supremacy, sexism and misogyny and other anti-social and anti-human values are leaving the country vulnerable to chaos and harm.

If the American people and their leaders do not engage in such a project of democratic renewal and national reckoning — and sooner rather than later — the epitaph for American democracy and the country’s leadership role in the world will likely read: “We did it to ourselves.”

Evangelical theology, the poison of white male supremacy and the Georgia spa killings

In the evangelical parachurch organization I was involved with in college, there was a running joke that would come up often when the men in the group were discussing marriage ideals: “Murder? Maybe. Divorce? Never.” None of us were genuinely cavalier about murder; and, to my knowledge, although some of us from this group have had marriages end in divorce, none have committed murder. Still. The idea that “sins” in the realm of sexual ethics might be on a par with murder, or might (like murder) merit a death penalty is, in my experience, far from unusual in conservative evangelical communities.

A beloved and influential minister I knew took the deeply biblical idea that God and the laws of God are good to the apparently “logical” conclusion that an ideal state would be governed by all of the moral laws documented in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. His views are not unusual; they are part and parcel of a strand of evangelical thought known under the label “theonomy.” It is part of the view that the death penalty for certain sexual “sins” — most notably, sexual relations between members of the same sex — is appropriate. I don’t know anybody, not even this minister, who would say that it makes sense for U.S. lawmakers actually to impose the death penalty for such acts. Still. The idea that death is not a grossly inappropriate punishment for sexual sin is uncomfortably close to mainstream.

There was another running joke in my college parachurch organization that surfaced in the context of a summer missions project I was involved with. We were in a beach town with the mission of randomly “sharing the gospel” with the presumptively unchurched party-goers who flocked in droves to the town for vacation. Young women in revealing attire were all around us, posing no end of agonizing “temptation” to the youthful libidos of the men in our group. As a way of humorously addressing this, a few in our group took to announcing in the direction of some of these women (but thankfully in ways that nobody outside the group would actually hear) “You are flesh; we are spirit! Rebuke that!”

I can’t imagine that anyone in our group was sophisticated enough to recognize the ways in which those words resonated with the long history in the Western philosophical canon of associating men with spirit, reason, rationality and virtue and associating women with temptation, sin, embodiment and wanton, uncontrollable bodily urges. The most important ancient Greek philosophers taught us that a virtuous person is one who is ruled by reason (and a virtuous state is one ruled by its reasoning parts); and these and nearby ideas have been tremendously influential on the history of Christian theological thinking about morality. And I’m sure that none of our group recognized the way in which these ideas directly support an ideology of male supremacy — the sex-analogue of white supremacy — which is the heart and soul of the “complementarian” conception of sex and gender roles taught in so many evangelical circles.

I also can’t imagine that anyone in our group of summer missionaries was aware of the way in which this running joke echoed and reinforced the ideological core of the long and stable tradition of victim-blaming commentary on Old Testament tales of sexual assault — documented, for example, in Joy Schroeder’s important work, “Dinah’s Lament.” Still. The idea that women are to be blamed — and to be “rebuked” in some way — for the sexual temptations and sins of men has long been one of the most common and persistent tropes in the sexual ethics taught not just in conservative evangelical communities but in a great many other religious communities and traditions as well.

Of course they are to be blamed and rebuked. They are flesh; we are spirit. All the more so if they are the “uncivilized” (read: nonwhite) racial Other, the less-than-human. Flesh is associated with sin and temptation; the less-than-human belongs to this world, not the next. The virtuous person is the person of reason, who transcends this world; the flesh clouds reason and draws us away from it. Rebuke that. Kill it if you have to. Just look at the Old Testament. Just look at the New. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Murder maybe; divorce never.

I am no psychologist; I cannot presume to understand exactly how the mind of a deeply religious young man like Robert Long might ultimately come to the conclusion that murder is a genuine solution to his struggle with sexual temptation. But I am someone who specializes in drawing conceptual connections — a philosopher by trade and training — and, at the level of conceptual connections that I’ve seen forged and reinforced in the kinds of evangelical communities in which I grew up, his actions have a tragic and chilling logic to them. They have a tragic and chilling logic just in light of the few anecdotes I have already shared; and I haven’t even begun to talk about racism and love for guns (and the gut-level comfort with killing people — under the right circumstances, of course — that such love entails).

Conservative American evangelicalism is steeped in the male-supremacist ideology of complementarianism — a worldview that, among other things, asserts male privilege, valorizes male aggression and identifies males as the ones most fit for leadership and authoritative teaching. That this represents a corruption of Christian ideals — and that many of its recent excesses are a faithful reflection of what one might call the evangelical “cult of masculinity” — has been amply documented in Kristin Kobes DuMez’s recent and bestselling “Jesus and John Wayne,” and receives further treatment in Beth Allison Barr’s forthcoming “The Making of Biblical Womanhood.” Some of the ways in which these same ideals of masculinity, the ones that prop up contemporary male supremacist ideologies, are deeply intertwined with white supremacist ideology are documented, among other places, in Gail Bederman’s “Manliness and Civilization.”

Traditional Christianity neither preaches nor condones acts like those perpetrated by the Robert Longs of this world; nor, for that matter, does conservative American evangelicalism. But — speaking as a Christian myself, and as one who loves the Bible as God’s Word and still often comfortably occupies evangelical spaces — it is both historically and philosophically naïve to ignore the conceptual links between the white male supremacist ideologies that have long permeated the evangelical tradition and a wide range of atrocities committed against women and people of color. Semper reformanda, as they say — the church must always be reforming — and here would be a good place to start.

Acclaimed chef Brandon Jew: How did San Francisco’s Chinatown succeed? Through the food

Brandon Jew is the executive chef and owner of the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s restaurant, which sits on hallowed ground in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The same space was once occupied by Hang Far Low, which Jew points out was “the city’s grandest restaurant for decades” after it opened its doors in the 1850s. More recently, it was the opulent Four Seas, whose guests were Chinese dignitaries, elected officials and A-list celebrities like Vince Vaughn.

In his new cookbook, “Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown,” which is co-written by Tienlon Ho, Jew takes readers on a journey that transcends the plate. In addition to teaching us his master technique and the recipes from his award-winning kitchen, Jew also shares the rich history and stories of the birthplace of Chinese American cuisine. When he reflects on how Chinatown succeeded, the answer is the food.

“It’s through the food,” Jew told me during our recent “Salon Talks” interview. “That bridged a lot of the racism, the stereotypes of the Chinese community, by having the most delicious food in the city here in Chinatown, and people started to break down a lot of those walls.”

The book, which pays homage to Chinatown’s past, present and future, offers a behind-the-scenes look at a neighborhood that changed how America eats. The immigrants who landed in Chinatown brought with them recipes that dated back generations, and they also created something uniquely American.

“I think there’s been a lot of, maybe, secrecy behind some of Chinese cooking,” Jew said. “And I’m hoping that the more people actually learn about Chinese cuisine, the more people will appreciate our culture and our food.”

When Jew recently appeared on “Salon Talks,” we talked about former President Richard Nixon’s love of Peking duck, how to navigate cooking with a wok at home and why soup is always part of a proper Chinese meal. To learn more, read or watch our conversation below.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tell me about how you feel right now in this moment amid the release of “Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown.”

There’s definitely a mix of emotions. I’m really proud of the book, how it’s come out. And the process is three years of having a big project on the side of running the restaurant. I can kind of recall the beginning of the book, not feeling quite ready to write the book. And actually leaning more on the idea that this is also a book about Chinatown and present-day Chinatown. As much as the inspirations have guided me along the beginning of the opening of Mister Jiu’s to the end of 2019, which happened to be really the beginning of the pandemic, in a way. So a lot of the photos, a lot of even just the size of the team that I had, it all kind of reminds me of what we’re trying to work back to.

But also, I guess some of the other emotions are nervousness. I think we try to really have a good mix of what we do here. As a restaurant, I think we try to make food that is not so easy to make at home. And that you’re going to be tasting flavors and experiencing things that you just can’t whip up yourself in one night, really. But we want the book to be practical, too. So making sure that we were including recipes that were achievable for someone to do on any given night, I think that was important.

But I also have some aspirational recipes — if you have a couple of days and you want to actually see how our duck [is made], how long it does take to produce and why those steps are important, then that’s also there. Because we wanted to make it also a book that was not just a very simple, kind of Chinese American [cookbook], but we want it to be really true to some of the technique that is a little more complicated.

Your restaurant, Mister Jiu’s, sits on what I would call hallowed ground. There’s decades of history there. The Four Seas was there for over 50 years, then you moved in. Can you tell us a little bit about the significance of that space and creating your restaurant in that space?

It feels like a real honor to be able to continue the legacies of restaurants that have been here before me. [Editor’s Note: Hang Far Low, the establishment before Four Seas, dated back to the 19th century.] I think that is something that does sit on my shoulders in a way that it makes me want to do them justice, make them proud of what we’re doing here. And I think I take a lot of inspiration from the kind of restaurants they were in their prime, too. I’d say like they were both cutting edge restaurants that were representing, I think, fine dining in Chinese cuisine. And we’re really great hosts for celebrations, traditional celebrations in Chinese culture. We’re in a space right now that was a banquet room that used to host weddings of 300 people. Some of the old postcards that I have, there’s like 12 massive lazy Susan tables in this entire space. It looked like a lot of fun. So having some of that energy of how it was, you kind of want to see that again here as an operator. So yes, I think the space has been very, very inspiring to me.

Your restaurant is Mister Jiu’s, which is spelled differently than your last name. But that might not even be your last name, as it turns out.

Yes, we had to write a little bit about that in the book. Because I think it’s not easy to understand why my last name is spelled J-E-W, while the restaurant’s spelled J-I-U. And then, like you said, neither of them are really my last name. And this all comes into play when talking about some of the loss in translation. We use that theme a little bit.

My last name was changed when my grandparents came to America. They got processed in Angel Island. And this happened to a lot of other immigrants as well, not just Chinese.

I had interviewed an architect at one point. He was Italian, his last name was Pesce, and it just got written as “Fish.” And so his last name was Fish. Changes were made based on probably the process and what would be easier for [immigration workers] to write. So I’m assuming, because of the amount of processing that was happening, my grandpa said his name was Jiu, and they wrote “J-E-W.”

My grandpa didn’t want to change the name after that. I don’t know if it was a fear of getting kicked out of America. I talked about my grandpa, Yeh Yeh, in the book. He was a man of few words. And so he didn’t really want to cause any disruption to his life or anyone else’s. He was fine with that kind of thing.

But I always questioned it. I always wondered why, how we got this name. And part of me, and I think I’m really the only one maybe that feels like this in my family, I really wanted to change it. I wanted to change it back to what I thought it should be. It should have been. And even before the restaurant opened, I was actually in pursuit of that. I think I understood that it was kind of upsetting my parents. So changing the name to J-I-U when the restaurant open was a way for me to say, in some words, that my last name is not really my last name. And I wanted to have something that was phonetically, actually, or literally spelled more correct.

Before you opened Mister Jiu’s, you were cooking Italian food and Mediterranean food. But you said you didn’t realize that you needed to open your restaurant until your grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. Can you tell me about how that connected the dots for you on your journey to becoming a chef?

Yes, that really impacted me at the time of my career. I was really deep in understanding Italian cuisine. Anytime you’re cooking something, I feel like you’re paying homage to a time and a place. [I was] really learning a lot about Italian customs with how their food is incorporated into their celebrations, or certain regions of Italy, how they made these kind of pairings, and flavor, from what really they had around them. I think I started to look at my own family and realize that I felt like I had a duty to really learn and understand my family’s food. And I think that came to a headway when my grandma was passing away, because I realized that I didn’t take enough of the opportunities to catalog as much as I could.

Mister Jiu’s, in a lot of ways, is me working my way back to the memories that I have of food with her. And with my family. And also traveling to China and living in Shanghai, a lot of what I’m searching back to is some of these taste memories, trying to find how to get that flavor back that’s almost like something that is on your palate that you can recall, but getting back there has taken some time to understand how to get there.

And so the book, there’s a lot of what I’ve come to learn. Also, I’ve been just fascinated with Chinese technique. And I think for a lot of home cooks, I want to have people understand it’s not difficult, but it does take time to learn. And I think the approach to ingredients is very similar to what I had grown to learn about California cuisine, which is that curating your ingredients is a big part of your final result. Understanding the products as well as you can, cooking them, asking questions about them and experimenting. There are some pairings that I feel stronger about sometimes . . . I’m just thinking of the Mandarin salad with chrysanthemum — the chrysanthemum is such, to me, an amazing aroma and texture. And I really love how it pairs with citrus particularly.

But that should not prevent people from making that recipe if you can’t get chrysanthemum. You can find things like chervil, you can even use watercress — that’s going to be a little spicier — but it’s about getting the best products you can and then understanding some of the technique and some of the flavors behind everything, and then just find where those things fit. And so I’ve enjoyed trying to figure out, even for myself, how do I get artichokes or avocados into Chinese cuisine and where can they fit in? I don’t have an answer for you quite yet. But we’ve used avocado in a cucumber salad before . . . I really loved the richness that brought.

And we use artichokes for its bitterness. The same way that I think a Chinese chef would use bitterness to initiate some of the beginning of the meal to get you salivating. And also to maybe combat some sweetness that might be in a dish, and balance it back to being savory. I’m hoping that this book becomes inspiring for people to understand some of the method, but also to experiment themselves, and to really just have fun in the kitchen. I mean, that’s what got me into cooking in the first place. Cooking should always be enjoyable. And at the end of the day, it’s your meal. So making it the best you can, you’re going to be rewarded for that, anyways. And that’s why, I mean — I’ve been big-boned my whole life, so I’ve loved eating. And I hope this inspires another generation of chefs to cook Chinese and to learn Chinese techniques.

Also, I think the mission of this book is to help promote Chinese American authors, too. There haven’t been a lot of chefs that have gotten the opportunity to write books or have taken on putting the recipes out there. I think there’s been a lot of, maybe, secrecy behind some of Chinese cooking. And I’m hoping that the more people actually learn about Chinese cuisine, the more people will appreciate our culture and our food.

When you parallel how Chinatown was successful, I mean, it’s through the food. That bridged a lot of the racism, the stereotypes of the Chinese community, by having the most delicious food in the city here in Chinatown, and people started to break down a lot of those walls. So this is also about some of the history of Chinatown, the struggle of Chinatown, but also the success of this neighborhood, as far as immigrant community-living in America, still able to have a lot of their customs and their culture, but also integrate American culture into the neighborhood as well and be successful here in America.

Speaking of Chinese American chefs, you talked about how your parents were once very much against you taking a career path as a chef. Can you speak a little bit about that? That may be surprising to some since you’re so successful now.

I went to college for biology. The sciences have always been really interesting to me. I think in some other way, I still get to really learn about what I’ve loved even as a kid, which is plants and animals and learning about life systems and all those kind of things. But yes, my parents, I think they thought I was maybe going pre-med or just maybe even a more academic kind of life way. I think that was partly because I was the first in my family to leave to go to college. And my parents, they didn’t go to college. So having the conversation with them that I was really wanting to pursue cooking and I love cooking, I think their hope was that it might be like a lot of things that I said I enjoyed doing and that it might just pass.

Some of the conversations I had with my grandparents, they really didn’t understand why I would want to cook. And I think the industry now is different, I think you can maybe explain what I’m trying to aspire to, being able to showcase Chinese cuisine and to be able to have my own restaurant. And they just didn’t see that. Some of the growth of our industry has given a lot of hope for younger people to understand that they can have a lot of aspiration in this industry to continue cooking, if they really enjoy it.

That’s also something that I’m hoping the book can also promote: giving aspiration to a younger generation that Chinese cooking is multi-faceted.

In your section about how you cook, you instruct people at home to follow the philosophy of their grandmother, which is cook by principles and not by rules. What does that mean?

My grandma, there was never a recipe out where she was following. She cooked by a lot of memory, she cooked by a lot of feel, and she tasted along the way. And I think that’s what I’m trying to promote is not being so locked into following a recipe that you can’t be flexible enough to learn how to make something be adjusted. Some of the principles that I’ve been referring to is having that flexibility, and also being comfortable without the guidelines of a recipe sometimes, to not let it bum you out. The great thing is, especially when you’re cooking at home, is you’re going to have two, maybe three meals a day. So if something didn’t turn out, you have another opportunity, either that same day to make some dinner, or tomorrow. And it’s about making adjustments, small ones, every day, learning about how to make them better. Our restaurant is better now than it was the first year. I mean, and it should be, because we’re understanding our recipes more and more, we’re making adjustments along the way.

And these recipes are the recipes of three years into running the restaurant, they’re not the beginning of where we started. So I’m hoping that this is also educational for anyone that is on a path of learning some of these dishes, that we can give our observations and our techniques that have helped us learn about how to make it successful.

And techniques like that include the wok, for example. To be able to cook at the wok at your restaurant, a chef works their way up the ladder. They have to pass through every other stage of the kitchen first. It’s a very unique tool. What is the difference between cooking in a wok in the restaurant kitchen and at home? And do you have any recommendations for getting started with a wok at home?

The first recommendation would be turn your fan on or open a window because it’s going to get a little smoky. Being comfortable cooking with high heat is part of cooking on the wok, and I think that’s the thing why the wok is traditionally, has been the last station that you get to, mainly because you have to be very relaxed cooking with very high heat. And making the right move and having the observations and things are just going so much faster.

I trained on more of a French top with sauté pans. You can move things around on French tops, if it’s hot or if you want it simmering. On a wok, you have one ring in front of you, and you adjust the temperature from high to very high to crazy high.

Yes, you can probably lower it down a little bit, but you’re not simmering on a wok. You’re thinking about how everything goes in. And that’s why it’s very much, I think, an exercise in knowing how to make the right cuts of vegetables. So they go into the wok at certain times. And then understanding the timing, making a sequence of what you’re going to do before, during and after the actual cooking process.

Having that mapped out is going to make you . . . You’ll have a better outcome, if you think about it before you start cooking.

But then also thinking, OK, I’m going to do this: I’m going to put the oil in, and then add the ginger. And then right after the ginger goes in, I’m going to put in the bok choy. After the bok choy goes in, if it’s big, I might put a little bit of water so it creates some steam in the wok and doesn’t get to char. After that steam goes in, I’m going to season it with the soy sauce, the sesame oil. And then move it around — because of how it’s shaped, all the heat’s on the very center of the bottom, and then kind of juts out to the side. So make sure you’re moving the ingredients in the wok as well.

You can map when beans go in, and then when you’re going to turn off the heat. Having your utensils ready for you close by. Cooking with the wok, the success is in game planning. That’s my advice for successful wok cooking.

We mentioned duck earlier in the conversation. Peking duck, as we call it here, didn’t really become a popular thing until President Nixon came around. And since we have a very politically minded audience here at Salon, I thought that would be an interesting story to share.

Yes, I think when you understand that a lot of these very complicated dishes have been designed for palace dining, for emperors, and there was, sometimes on purpose, a lot of intricacy. When you’ve had Peking duck, that technique is, to me, a culinary masterpiece. When you think about what those chefs did to make those kind of decisions to put air between the skin to baste it, hang it, dry it and then basically roast it that way. That’s the only way you can get the skin so crispy. There are these lamp-like hallmarks of Chinese cuisine, I feel like Peking duck is one of them.

That technique is something that you don’t find in any other cuisine. That one is so unique to the outcome of getting crispy skinned duck. I still am fascinated with it. We cook about 100 of them over the course of the week, when we were open and operating. We just take a lot of pride in that dish, knowing that it’s something that is a culinary masterpiece. That technique pays homage to a real deep understanding of the product and the skill of the chefs.

In your book, you also write about soup. Your other grandmother would always cook you soup, and you say “soup is always part of a proper Chinese meal.” Can you elaborate on that?

One memory that I will always have of my grandma . . . she had a pot of soup on the stove. And you got to say hi to her, give her a kiss and then you had to drink soup before doing anything. You were not allowed to do anything until the bowl of soup that was given to you was done. And I think that was her way of . . . it was like medicine. The soup was restorative, it was a way of really deep nourishment. And so having soup be part of a Chinese meal to me is about the mix of textures that you can have over a course of a meal. But more important, I think, is that nourishment. It’s a warming you up from the inside out kind of a feeling. A lot of what goes into those — broth, ginger, mushrooms, chicken bones or pork bones — all those things are meant to be restorative and medicinal. So yes, drink your soup, got to drink your soup.

We’re in the middle of the pandemic, and winter weather, so I think that’s a message for the times for sure. You write about dessert and Chinese meals: As you’ve said, in Chinese meals, the desserts are really just the closers. Why is dessert less of an important aspect?

A lot of the more pastry focus was, I think, as far as dayparts go, it was more of something that you would have during the day. You look at Chinese bakeries, most of those things there are a mix of sweet and savory things. In American dining, you know how important it is for dessert to be part of the meal. And so we have a very talented pastry chef, Melissa, who’s in the book, and these are her recipes. She does in pastry what I do in the savory area. Having a sweet something at the very end is, I think, really part of American dining. And so we wanted to have that experience be where we kind of also get to really play on the mix of Chinese flavors with sometimes American, sometimes French, sometimes Italian, pastry techniques.

I wanted to talk to you, too, about identity and the Chinese American experience. In your book you write, “my first language was Cantonese, I lost it growing up. And with that, I thought I lost a lot of my heritage for forever. But I discovered I’m more Chinese than I ever imagined, in the way I eat and the way I define dessert.” Can you tell me about how your restaurant has helped you to better understand your identity?

Yes, it really comes back to this question that I kept getting, especially in the beginning of the restaurant: Is this restaurant authentic? And authenticity, understanding what that meant for me, authenticity, you have to be authentic. It means that you have to feel like it’s what defines you. And for me, as a chef, for me as a Chinese American, having someone ask me if the food’s going to be authentic, it really kind of put me in front of a mirror, and had me realize, well, what is my authenticity? What can I say is my authentic experience that I’m giving someone? And I think that really played out in my life, and understanding where I fit in between. Was I Chinese enough? Or was I American enough? There’s a lot of pictures of my childhood going from one side to the other, trying to find where to be in the middle.

I’d say, immigrant American communities, their children are experiencing this. I saw my parents experience it, I saw my grandparents experience it. And I think for myself, I was trying to find what that authentic-ness was, where I fit in between the two cultures. And I think my experience in Shanghai really kind of shaped it because I thought I was going to Shanghai to get this motherland experience. But what I got instead was really understanding how American I was, and how American people viewed me. And I came back feeling a little more at peace with being in the middle.

How that translated into my food was my authenticity is really my training. The things that I’ve come to love over the course of being here in the Bay Area, being exposed to a lot of other cuisine and cultures. My training is Italian training. There’s things that I do still to this day that are very Italian. I still have three or four different amazing extra virgin olive oils that we have in our pantry.

So there’s things that I have incorporated, that I feel like is more authentic to my training, and more authentic to me being at peace with being in between two cultures. That is the authenticity that I bring to Mister Jiu’s.

And I encourage and I promote chefs finding their identity through their food and being comfortable there. Not feeling like you have to do something that is not speaking to yourself. And at the end of the day, I think the diners, they want food that they know that the chef deems is delicious.

It’s the same thing with a writer when they say write about what you know — you’re cooking about what you know, and your family and your experience.

The issue of authenticity is really interesting when we talk about comfort food. And that’s a topic that we’ve talked a lot about here over this past year with the pandemic and the return to comfort food. “Comfort food” means different things to different people — it’s not macaroni and cheese for everybody. For example, my grandmother is an immigrant from Mexico, and I grew up eating a lot of the dishes that she made, and those are the things that I think of as comforting. Do you have any thoughts about comfort food, when it comes to authenticity?

A lot of those comfort foods go back to some of those memories that you have of things that are delicious. And they’re not necessarily fancy, they’re more memorable, I think, like you said, you think of your mom or your grandparents when you have those dishes, they have a deeper meaning. A lot of times, I feel like comfort food, you’re getting comforted by not only the taste that you get, but by the remembrance that you have of having those dishes with those people, or traveling to a certain place and having something there and wanting to relive that experience again by tasting that.

I think that’s something that’s multifaceted about comfort food, that you’re being comforted by not only the flavor of something, but also another layer of either remembering people or places. And I think it just puts a smile on your face when you have that kind of food; you start to realize that that food has a lot importance, and it has a lot of significance.

When you put those pieces together, that’s part of what I was searching for in this industry — wanting the food that I cooked to be more than just putting a meal together. I wanted to have it be about my memories and about the people that were influential to me. And to pass on the recipes to another generation of cooks.

I’d be remiss to ask you this because Ashlie Stevens, who’s one of our columnists here in the food section, has a column called Saucy where she takes deep dives into condiments. It was really interesting when I read that “when Americans were pouring on Chinese condiments at the turn of the 19th century, their cookbooks used the terms ‘soy sauce’ and ‘ketchup’ interchangeably.”

From what I know of ketchup, ketchup was not even tomato-based, really, until Heinz, I think, developed that. It was more almost like a fish sauce, a condiment that was more salty than sweet. So the word ketchup was an evolution, I think, of the use of the condiment and it being altered to a point where no one imagines ketchup being anything other than a sweet tomato kind of sauce.

But its origins are in China, which is interesting, because we think of it as a uniquely American sauce or condiment.

Yes, I love the history of that.

Read more:

How ketchup, an invention of imperial China, eventually became a polarizing American staple

Fox News host calls out Tom Cotton for flip-flop on COVID-19 relief now that Biden is president

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Sunday defended his decision to vote against a stimulus bill that had similar provisions to bills he supported under former President Donald Trump.

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace called out Cotton after he said that he had opposed the bill that was signed by President Joe Biden because “prisoners” could get relief checks.

Wallace noted that Cotton voted for similar COVID-19 relief bills that were signed Trump.

“But senator, under two previous COVID relief bills that you supported and voted for and that President Trump signed, prisoners also got checks in those bills,” Wallace said.

“That was obviously never Congress’s intent,” Cotton opined. “The Trump administration, the IRS and the Treasury Department did not send checks to prisoners. Liberal advocacy groups sued to try to force that. A liberal judge said they had to.”

“This month was the first time we had a simple up or down vote on whether those checks should go to prisoners,” he added. “And the simple fact is that every Democrat voted to keep sending checks to prisoners.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Kentucky Republicans are trying to make cancel culture law

Following one of the most controversial debates in the state’s legislature to date, the Kentucky State Senate just passed a bill that would make it a crime to insult police officers.

Senate Bill 211, inspired by the social justice response to Breonna Taylor’s death, increases penalties for those convicted of rioting, which it defines as “public disturbance” of five or more people whose “tumultuous and violent conduct creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons or substantially obstructs law enforcement or other government function.”

The bill also makes it a misdemeanor to “taunt,” “challenge,” or “insult” an officer with words or gesticulations “that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.” The misdemeanor is punishable by fines and up to 90 days of jail time, with no chance of bond over the duration of the riot.

State Sen. Danny Carroll, a Republican, the bill’s lead sponsor and former law enforcement assistant, argued that the bill is designed to protect first responders and private property. “We need to send a clear message to those outside this Commonwealth that the welcome mat is no longer there if you plan to come to our Commonwealth to terrorize our people, attack our police, assault communities, assault people, assault first responders and destroy our cities,” he said.

Carrol noted that the bill is modeled after laws in other states barring comments that could “reasonably” incite violence. Those laws –– which do not specifically address police violence –– are rooted in a First Amendment exception known as the “fighting words doctrine,” which designates words that incite immediate violence as unprotected speech.

However, the legal footing of the bill remains in question, as Caroline Mala Corbin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Miami, told The Washington Post. Given that the language in the bill only addresses speech against police, it appears that “the government is trying to ban speech it does not like,” she said. “And that is a paradigmatic violation of the free speech clause” of the First Amendment.

Sen. Gerald Neal, a Democrat who represents an area of west Louisville that is predominantly black, condemned the bill as a “hammer” on his district. “This is a backhand slap,” he said. “And I resent it, I personally resent it. This is beneath this body. “

“Because you have power doesn’t make it wise to use it,” he continued, “Because you want to express your feeling doesn’t mean you have the answer. You don’t know what’s going on in my district.”

In a floor speech, Neal argued that the bill was ill-timed with Louisville still healing from the wounds of last Summer’s protests and the police violence that erupted out of them.

Sen. Morgan McGarvey, the Democratic Senate floor leader from Louisville, expressed grave concern about the bill’s provision related to bond postings.

“Why do I sound outraged by that?” he said “You can bond out of jail in under 48 hours if you’ve been accused of murder, arson or rape,” he said. “But you can’t do it if you taunt somebody because we’ve decided it’s not right up here. We don’t like it.”