Amid donor blowback, Josh Hawley’s fundraising problems get even more complicated

The campaign for Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., received a notice from the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday for failing to disclose its affiliation with two joint fundraising committees. The notice comes as a Disney World-area resort cancels a Hawley fundraiser, citing the Republican’s role in the Capitol riots as well as safety concerns for guests and staff.

The Hawley campaign responded to the FEC promptly by updating its statement of organization with the two committees, the Indiana/Missouri Victory Committee and the Hawley Win Fund. Indiana/Missouri Victory is a joint vehicle between Hawley, Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., and former Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and Vice President Mike Pence’s Great America Committee. The Hawley Win Fund pairs Hawley’s campaign with the NRSC and Republican National Committee.

In 2018, when Hawley ran for Senate, FEC records show that his campaign received more than $70,000 from Indiana/Missouri and around $180,000 from Hawley Win Fund. Both committees were largely dormant this year, except for a number of small-dollar transfers executed in late September, mostly with the RNC. The Hawley campaign did not immediately respond to Salon’s emailed questions about the nature of those transfers.

Last week, Salon was first to report that Hawley’s leadership PAC, Fighting for Missouri, had announced in an awkwardly-designed email (including a number of fonts chosen seemingly at random) that it would hold a three-day “fun-filled-family-friendly” fundraiser at an Orlando-area hotel in February. The next day the resort, Loews Portofino Bay, pronounced itself “horrified” and announced in a statement, without mentioning Hawley’s name, that his campaign event was no longer welcome.

“We are horrified and opposed to the events at the Capitol and all who supported and incited the actions,” the statement said. “In light of those events and for the safety of our guests and team members, we have informed the host of the Feb. fundraiser that it will no longer be held at Loews Hotels.”

In response, Hawley fired off a statement framing the decision made by a private company as a knock on free speech.

“If these corporations don’t want conservatives to speak, they should just be honest about it. But to equate leading a debate on the floor of the Senate with inciting violence is a lie, and it’s dangerous,” he said. “I will not be deterred from representing my constituents and I will not bow to left wing corporate pressure.”

Indeed, Hawley has seen fierce and sustained blowback for inciting insurrectionist violence by amplifying President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and voicing support for the mob that laid siege to the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Republican who launched the objection movement was photographed raising a fist in a gesture of solidarity with groups gathered at the Capitol hours before the deadly riots, and was attacked later that afternoon in an editorial from his home-state Kansas City Star saying that he “deserves an impressive share of the blame for the blood that’s been shed.” But when Congress reconvened later that night, the Yale Law graduate held fast to his objections and meritless, long-debunked claims about fraud, which had sparked the violence in the first place.

In the wake of the attack, a number of Hawley’s colleagues and constituents called for him to resign or be expelled from the Senate. He took the criticism as an affront to his civil rights, framing it as a struggle against “cancel culture” and attacks on the general principle of free speech. That week, Hawley was widely mocked for complaining about publisher Simon & Schuster’s decision to yank his book deal amid the insurrection fallout, claiming that the “Orwellian” move was a “direct assault on the First Amendment,” even though that amendment applies only to government restrictions and not market-driven decisions of private companies. He quickly signed a new deal with the conservative publishing house Regnery.

In the aftermath of the violence, a wave of corporate entities suspended campaign contributions, and many have pulled the plug on donations to Republicans like Hawley who objected to the vote counting. (Hallmark’s PAC specifically asked Hawley to refund its donations.) However, while many companies have cut off campaign giving broadly, none are known to have specifically ended donations to national committees such as the NRSC and RNC — both of which have agreements that allow them to transfer funds to the Hawley campaign, including through the two joint fundraising committees that he failed to register until now. (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who also objected to the votes on Jan. 6, chairs the NRSC.)

Salon has asked more than a dozen major financial institutions and trade associations whether they will specifically target national GOP committees, including Wells Fargo, Visa, Travelers, American Express and Bank of America. So far, none have said they will.

Will 2021 be the year offshore wind power finally takes off?

Five lonely wind turbines spin in the state waters off the coast of Rhode Island. They’re the entirety of the Block Island Wind Farm, the United States’ only commercial-scale offshore wind facility currently in service, with an installed capacity of just 30 megawatts.

By contrast, on-land renewables are growing. We’ve installed more than 100 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity and 89 gigawatts of solar.

The Block Island project, completed in 2016, remains a monument to possibility, though. And it’s one that’s about to be realized.

Admittedly, no new commercial-scale offshore wind energy projects will break water this year in the United States. Despite that, the industry is poised for a big year. And we desperately need it, experts say.

“If we’re thinking about powering the nation in line with global climate science assessments, we need serious investment in renewable energy and serious deployment,” says John Rogers, senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And that includes large-scale offshore wind.”

Coastal states account for 80% of U.S. electricity demand and the federal government has estimated that offshore wind has the technical potential to supply more than double the country’s demand.

In the next decade our existing five turbines could be joined by 2,000 more — a fleet of projects capable of generating 22 gigawatts of energy.

Those projects would be the result of years of work, efforts which experts say could begin to pay off this year. East Coast states have set ambitious procurement targets for offshore wind, technological advances have made costs competitive and European companies have brought their experience stateside. A White House that will soon look a whole lot greener is likely to be a big bonus.

Europe already has 22 gigawatts of installed capacity, and the European Union hopes to increase that number by 25-fold in the next three decades. Offshore wind’s slow start in the United States has much to do with a climate of regulatory uncertainty and the slow pace of federal permitting — the domain of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). But there are signs that’s changing, too.

“This year I think we will break the logjam on project approvals,” says Jeremy Firestone, the director of the Center for Research in Wind at the University of Delaware. “We might consider that to be the beginning of pretty large and steep buildup.”

Still, it’s not all smooth sailing ahead.

Vineyard Wind Saga

In federal waters along the Atlantic coast there are already 15 active leases for offshore wind projects. Developers for 10 of those that have submitted their construction and operations plans for the federal environmental review and permitting process.

But the fate of the project that had been at the front of the line — Vineyard Wind — could influence the rest.

The 800-megawatt project of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables was set to be the first utility-scale wind development in federal waters. If approved, it would be built 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and could generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes.

Vineyard Wind initially expected a federal permitting decision from BOEM in August 2019. But Interior Secretary David Bernhardt unexpectedly announced his agency would instead require a supplemental study to examine the cumulative impacts of all the other offshore wind projects planned in Northeast and mid-Atlantic waters.

The move came after the commercial fishing industry raised concerns that the turbines would interfere with its operations.

The decision also sparked worry among some that it was an intentional delay from President Trump, who’s been outspoken about his dislike of wind energy, even falsely claiming that turbines cause cancer.

“I think it’s important to look closely at projects — and at suites of projects — but that process would have been easier to take if it had been a little bit more predictable and if there was less suspicion that some things were be done just to throw monkey wrenches in the progress of particular projects,” says Rogers.

That supplement to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement was published in June 2020, with the final EIS expected this past December. But then the decision was delayed again. This time until January 15 — just five days before Trump leaves office.

In response, Vineyard Wind added its own speed bump to the process.

The developers announced at the start of December that they wanted to hit pause and were temporarily withdrawing the construction and operations plan so they could update their project with the most recent technology. Replacing the planned 12-megawatt GE Haliade-X wind turbine with a new 13-megawatt turbine would enable the project to trim its 84 turbines to 62, while still producing the same amount of power.

Despite the benefits of a smaller price tag and footprint, experts speculated that the decision was a political calculation and Vineyard Wind wanted to push off a decision on its project until the Biden administration took the helm.

But Trump’s Interior Department responded by declaring that the Vineyard Wind application was being terminated and its developers would need to restart the application process for a federal permit.

What that means to the timeline of the project, and the other developments waiting in the permitting line behind it, is unclear. Years of scientific inquiry and project planning have already been completed, so in theory, restarting the process wouldn’t be starting from square one.

“BOEM already knows a lot and they will still know a lot come Jan. 21,” says Rogers. “One could imagine that they should remember what they know and, assuming that the science is solid, they could proceed quickly.”

If Vineyard Wind does get its eventual go-ahead from BOEM, the hope is that the completed cumulative environmental impact statement could help speed up the process for other projects in the pipeline.

“And that will give some needed confidence to the industry and their investors that these projects are going to move forward,” says Firestone.

It’s also likely that another project will leapfrog Vineyard Wind. A 132-megawatt project in New York by Ørsted and Eversource Energy is now next in the queue.

States Drive Action

The federal approval process is paramount, but we wouldn’t be standing on this precipice without a few other factors, too. One of the biggest is the push from state governments to mandate offshore wind procurement in the mix of clean energy solutions being employed.

States from North Carolina to Maine have used the legislative or regulatory process to call for upwards of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Rogers predicts that offshore wind along the eastern seaboard “is going to be the dominant piece of the expected power mix as we look to fully decarbonize.”

Virginia, which is looking to procure 5,200 megawatts by 2034, is already off to the races. In 2020 Dominion Energy built a two-turbine pilot project off the state’s coast. Following successful reliability testing, the company has just submitted plans for its full 2,640-megawatt project — the largest thus far in the pipeline.

And while East coast states are leading the charge, there’s offshore wind potential in other coastal waters, too.

The Gulf Coast, now home to the oil and gas industry, is readying for wind development. In November, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called on BOEM to start a task force to coordinate leasing in federal waters in the Gulf.

On the West Coast, California is studying where offshore wind power could best be sited. Because of the depth of the waters, wind developments will likely be floating arrays — a technology that’s been used in Europe and soon in Maine.

Even lakes are in play. In the Midwest, Icebreaker Wind is nearing approval for a plan to construct North America’s first freshwater offshore wind development on Lake Erie.

Technical Advances and Environmental Challenges

Like the rest of the clean energy industry, offshore wind has seen technology growing by leaps and costs falling. The most noticeable difference is the size of turbines, which have gotten bigger and more efficient.

The blades now stretch about the length of a football field, and towers reach 400 feet. The six-megawatt turbines used at Block Island are now being upgraded to 13-megawatt turbines for new projects. Operating at full power, a single 13-megawatt turbine could supply a whole household’s daily electricity needs in seven seconds, Rogers calculated.

These advances mean that fewer structures need to be constructed in the ocean to generate the same amount of power and they can be farther apart. A decade ago, the thinking was that turbines need to be spaced about 0.6 nautical miles apart. Now the industry says it can make do at 1 nautical mile — which creates a bigger pathway for fishing boats, search and rescue, and other marine vessels.

How the proliferation of wind development along the Atlantic coast will affect wildlife — particularly marine mammals, like endangered North Atlantic right whales, and birds — is still being studied and best practices developed.

From a climate change perspective, the impending build out of offshore wind energy is good, says Shilo Felton, the field manager of Audubon’s Clean Energy Initiative. But there are potential harms to birds that include collisions with turbines, or the development displacing birds from foraging or roosting sites, or migratory pathways.

“We don’t really know to what degree the species that we have off the coast of the United States will experience these effects,” she says. “It could be very minimal, but we still want to know.”

The threats to marine mammals are greatest during construction, and some animals could be bothered by noise from the turbines after they’re operational, but experts say there are existing and emerging technologies that could help to avoid or minimize the impact.

“We believe that offshore wind can absolutely be developed in an environmentally responsible manner,” says Francine Kershaw, staff scientist at NRDC. “But it requires a collaborative effort between developers, agencies and other stakeholders.”

Political Landscape

As 2020 came to a close, the wind industry scored wins with the end-of-the-year COVID relief and government spending bill, including a five-year extension for offshore wind tax credits. And with the Biden-Harris administration soon taking up the reins, the political landscape for offshore wind development looks more certain.

“We’ll shortly leave behind an administration that has been at best ambiguous and at worst downright hostile to clean energy and maybe especially offshore wind,” says Rogers. “And there’s no question that the incoming [Biden] administration will be a whole new ballgame when it comes to the importance of addressing climate change, cleaning up the power sector and embracing clean energy.”

As the administration looks to tackle climate change and shore up an economy struggling with the pandemic, offshore wind could boost both, its backers say. The offshore wind industry could add 83,000 the U.S. economy in the next 10 years, according to the American Clean Power Association.

“Continued efforts by the states to build out offshore wind supply chains, port infrastructure and local workforces will be key as the industry develops,” says Laura Morton, senior director of policy and regulatory affairs for the group.

The industry and environmental organizations have their own wishlists from the administration, but University of Delaware’s Firestone says one helpful immediate change would be a budget increase for BOEM.

“It needs to staff up greatly to handle the 30 gigawatts of presently planned offshore wind,” he says. “They need a lot more people in order to review those plans if the projects are to be built in a timely fashion.”

Rogers is optimistic that the new administration, and the years of work that have come before, could result in a breakout year for the industry.

“I think it could be an incredible year for offshore wind,” says Rogers. “And given the scale of the challenges we face — from an energy and an economic perspective — I think we really need it to be an incredible year for offshore wind.”

Another mess left by Trump: A cult of die-hard followers whose delusions run deep

We all have them. The handful of Trump supporters who somehow still show up on our social media. The ones that we didn’t block or unfriend because they seemed like the “reasonable” ones. We thought, maybe, that staying connected would be valuable, might offer a chance at dialogue, might provide insight.

One of my token Trump supporters sent me a direct message the other day. It was a meme that has a photo of the National Guard troops arriving at the Capitol building. The text reads, “If you need 10,000 armed soldiers to protect your inauguration from the people, then you probably weren’t elected by the people.” On The Right Can’t Meme Reddit thread trashing this particular meme the comments follow a predictable pattern of pointing out the astonishingly bad logic that frames it.

How exactly do you blame Joe Biden for the presence of troops at his inauguration and infer that he is the one that wasn’t elected? How exactly does harming elected officials make sense for a group that claims to honor law and order? The deep ironies that underpin these false beliefs are as stark as they are common.

As we all know, it has been tremendously exhausting to deal with the faulty logic, made up truths, and cognitive bullying that has characterized Trumpland these last years. Well before Trump even took office, many of us were calling attention to the collective brain rot his administration was sure to cause. We documented the lies, the BS, the tortured reasoning, the gaslighting and the outright absurdity of many Trumpist claims. And we worried that having such a disinformation machine occupy the White House would pose a grave threat for the future of our democracy.

On January 6, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of insurrectionists hellbent on disrupting the electoral process, we got a chilling glimpse of what many of us had predicted. It is not just that 70 percent of Trump supporters don’t think the election was free and fair. It is that a significant subset of them thought that the appropriate response was to enter the Capitol by force and violently stop the certification of Joe Biden as the next president of the United States.

These people believed that the best way to defend our democracy was to destroy it. That literally made sense to them.

What this means is that the problem we face is far deeper than a community trapped in its own delusional reality. The problem is not just the culture of lies and deception and bluster and bragging; the problem is the cult itself.

This vocal subset of Trump supporters didn’t just swallow falsehoods; they were brainwashed. Moreover, they weren’t just confused about the facts. The core concern is not just disinformation; it is the violent response to it. So, if we are going to recover from the Trump years we will have to recognize that we need to do more than stop the lies. We also have to stop the actions and behaviors that have been justified by these lies. His diehard supporters will require collective deprogramming.

The Cult of Trump

Over the last four years various commentators have flagged Trumpism as a cult. Former White House director of communications Anthony Scaramucci, of all people, called attention to the idea that his supporters were part of a cult. In June 2018, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN) suggested that Republicans were in a “cult-like situation” with Trump because most refused to even consider disagreeing with him.

To make matters even more disturbing, when Donald Trump Jr. was asked on Fox & Friends about Corker’s claims, he replied “You know what? If it’s a cult, it’s because they like what my father’s doing.”

The reason why it matters to think about Trumpism as a cult is because it allows us to consider that the problem is not simply a consequence of falsehoods consumed via right-wing media. Yes, the culture of disinformation was severe, but those listening to the falsehoods did much more than fall for a bunch of BS. They blindly adored their leader, refusing to question any of his actions, and then they were prepared to use violence to protect him, even if, in the case of the Capitol marauders, it meant risking their own lives.

Yet, as Benjamin E. Zeller points out, describing Trumpism as a cult misses a few critical distinctions and may not be an effective strategy to counteract the negative effects of Trumpian ideology. There are a few reasons for this, he argues, including the fact that Trump supporters are not a fringe minority as most cult members tend to be. In fact, they come close to representing half of the voting electorate. But, perhaps, most importantly, Zeller argues that focusing too much on brainwashing absolves those holding false beliefs from being responsible for themselves. Brainwashing conjures up victimhood and turns the brainwashed into innocents.

Will a cult pushed to the extreme fracture?

That’s what leads to the silver lining of the terrifying and disturbing attacks of January 6 on the Capitol. The good news is that they were so bad.

Certain rioters planned and schemed and deliberately and coldly sought to overthrow the government. They were not just caught up in a frenzied swoon caused by Trump’s incendiary speech that day. They were not innocent victims of brainwashing, though they were clearly delusional. They were openly and unabashedly attempting to perpetrate an insurrection. The images of them attacking a Capitol police office with a U.S. flag, for example, are too disturbing for most Trump supporters to justify. The awful truth of it, it turns out, could prompt an encouraging step forward.

Sure, the rioter who was shot and killed by Capitol Police is now being martyred as an innocent victim. Sure, there are rumors circulating that the attackers were actually Antifa. Sure, there are those who try to insist that Trump wasn’t to blame. But as the truth comes out, thanks to the fact that most of the rioters had a compulsive need to document their every move on social media, it becomes harder and harder for those Trump supporters who are not part of the fringe extreme to ignore the horror of the attacks.

The chilling reports that the rioters may have been given tours of the building in advance by Republican representatives, that they had guns and bombs, that they intended to abduct and harm Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, and that they spent weeks preparing to storm the Capitol combine to offer such a grotesque picture of the insurrection that few can stomach it. The promising news is that the type of “patriotism” on display in the attack was so obscene that it is serving as a wake-up call for many of those aligned with Trump ideology.

Consider it this way: Trump’s call for carnage was so grotesque that it may well have broken his spell.

In fact, a recent PBS New Hour/Marist poll shows that 80 percent of Republicans oppose or strongly oppose the actions of the Trump supporters who broke into the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the process of certifying the presidential election. While a disturbing 18 percent of Trump supporters still back the rioters, it is the 80 percent in opposition that offers a glimmer of hope, because it shows a stark division among the mass of Trump supporters, a crack in the cult, that offers the possibility that Trump’s ideological grasp on his “base” may no longer be complete.

We have seen defections from the Republican elite in the form of Mitch McConnell’s condemnation of Trump and the fact that ten Republican members of the House voted to impeach. But if we look at the general public, we see that the percentage of the population that voted for Trump, yet condemns the attacks, is far higher than what we are witnessing in Congress.

This offers a unique opportunity to dismantle Trumpism and its cognitive hold on his supporters. The more that the violent rioters can be separated out from other Trump supporters, and the more that Trump supporters can be separated from the Republican party, the better our chances of fragmenting the right and unraveling Trump’s psychic hold on the party.

On one of the few lawns that has a Trump sign in my neighborhood, the name “Pence” has been cut out. When I first saw it, I wondered why someone would deface the sign that way only to quickly realize that the Trump household itself had cut out “Pence” from their very own sign. It struck me to see an act that was so openly childish and silly and also so deeply anti-democratic and aggressive. The worse it is, the better it gets.

And it made me hopeful to think that it may well be exactly through these sorts of absurd, cult-like actions that others might start to question their allegiance to Trumpism. What if the excessively delusional dogma of Trumpism might actually be its own undoing?

“President Biden” is both a reassuring and worrisome look at a leader built from “the Obama halo”

Decades of producing “Frontline” profiles about government leaders has made Michael Kirk an accurate predictor of what type of president a person will be. This comes with the territory of being a prolific documentary producer, but Kirk’s experience makes him uniquely qualified to declare in such cases that personality is destiny.

He said this during an interview that took place weeks before the late September premiere of “The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden” – before Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in November; before Trump’s supporters refused to acknowledge the election results; before the deadly Jan. 6 riot in which Trump-supporting paramilitary extremists breached the Capitol building in an attempt to stop congress from certifying Biden’s win.

“President Biden” makes its “Frontline” debut on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, and essentially it expands Biden’s half of “The Choice” into a full hour entirely devoted to him. Instead of being a retread, it fully explains how and why Biden, a man who ran for president three times over the course of along career, finally won. More than that, it gets to the heart of why American voters chose him for this moment, and what his method tells us about his leadership.

In the context of our previous conversation when Kirk made that “personality is destiny” remark he was talking about Trump and how in 2016 and 2020, Trump’s ego profile provided plenty insight into what kind of leader he would be.

Kirk’s view is consistently true of every politician and president he’s profiled. While he cannot predict the policies they will enact, he’s one of the best at distilling the essence of a politician’s life method into a compelling hour of television that helps us to understand what or whom we’ve voted for.

And in the wake of the far-right’s failed insurrection, and after watching the vast majority of House Republicans vote against impeaching Trump for inciting it, what “President Biden” tells us about what we can expect from our 46th Chief Executive is reassuring and worrisome in equivalent measure.

Many of the scenes shown in “The Choice” are repeated here, but the crux of the documentary’s singular thesis about Biden crystallizes around the 36-minute mark when the experts discuss what they refer to colloquially as “the Obama halo.”

This refers to Barack Obama’s selecting Biden as his running mate in 2008 even after Biden referred to him in 2007 as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Obama selecting Biden was a clear signal to American voters about his style of leadership and his capacity for forgiving and moving forward.

More than this, it was a strategy for winning over white voters uncomfortable with non-white politicians. From Obama’s side of things, if people who might say something along the lines of what Biden said can see him forgiving and embracing someone like them, perhaps they’ll be comfortable voting for him.

The documentary doesn’t specifically say this, to be clear, but by the time we reach that mark, “President Biden” has painted Biden as a man of determination and ambition and a figure of suffering and tenacity, who has stumbled significantly despite his good heart and best intentions.

Among many Americans Biden is known as a national political figure who came from a modest background and lost his first wife Neilia and one-year-old daughter Naomi in a car accident that happened a few weeks after he won Delaware’s 1972 Senate race. His sons Beau and Hunter survived that crash, and Beau went on to launch his own political career before he died of brain cancer in 2015. People also know Biden overcame a massive stutter, an attribute that gave him early experience with being bullied and marginalized.

Whatever determination that manifested in him also made him prone to reckless mistakes. Various examinations of Biden show him as a politician who built his success on what he perceives to be the displays of success and power propelling other popular politicians.

Emulating that success got him in trouble, as has his demonstrated hesitancy with going against tides of popular opinion.

There was the time when he took a moving speech made by British Labour Party Neil Kinnock and presented it as his own in 1987. There was his mishandling of Anita Hill’s 1991 Senate testimony alleging sexual harassment from Clarence Thomas, who was at that point a Supreme Court nominee. Among other criticisms, then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Biden didn’t allow testimony from three women who also had stories about Thomas.

And then there were the many questionable policy stances over the years for which he had to answer including, and famously, his opposition to school busing in the 1970s.

In many of these cases Biden has had to explain himself or just as often express regret for his actions. Parallel to this narrative in “President Biden” is the man’s association with loss and sorrow, and his public expressions of empathy to the grieving, along with his dedicated outreach to Black voters over the decades, the demographic that has propelled him to victory from the earliest days of his career.

These factors play as potent a role in explaining Biden’s appeal to the mainstream as anything else, in that he appears to be a plainspoken, humble figure who takes responsibility for his biggest gaffes but over many years of practice demonstrates a strategic shrewdness.

He stumbles, learning from each mistake and often takes his cues from successful examples set by others. After all, would he have selected Kamala Harris as his running mate if Obama hadn’t chosen him to be his vice president more than a decade ago?

However, this is not “The Choice,” its about the president we’ve chosen – or as Kirk put it during that same conversation, “It’s about who they are and not what they’ll do, because who they are is what they’ll do.”

“President Biden” spells out the benefits and drawbacks of this truth as it concerns Biden, a man tasked with leading America through one of its darkest eras. His capacity for empathy is cited as a quality that will serve him and us well when it comes to handling the pandemic.

But will it be his Achilles heel when Republicans insist he make good on his promise to reach across the aisle even as they hide their hands in their pockets? And how will that impact his efforts to start the healing process in matters of the environment, the economic, and racial justice?

When I wrote about “The Choice 2020” I observed that Biden’s reputation as a man who some familiarity with grief and resilience is likely to appeal to those seeking a comforting leader after surviving four years of instability and strife. “President Biden” underscores this again while making the viewer wonder whether comfort and compromise are what we need at a time when half the country has little to no desire to acknowledge the necessity or value of either.

“Frontline: President Biden” premieres Tuesday, Jan. 19 on PBS member stations and is available stream on the “Frontline” website.

Chemicals called SVOCs, emitted from household objects, are altering children’s microbiomes

The chemicals in our environments, while sometimes useful, can also hurt us. Materials like asbestos fibers can move through the air and into the lungs in the form of tiny particles, causing long-term damage to human tissues. But free-floating, harmful chemicals are also emitted from the furniture, wallpaper, flooring, and household items around us. And these chemicals are entering our bodies, damaging them in many different ways.

In a recent paper published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters, researchers from Duke University found a connection between bacteria and fungi in the digestive tracts of children and the amount of volatile household chemicals found in their homes. A healthy gut microbiome has been linked to improved nutrient absorption and stronger immunity, among other few benefits. An imbalance in the flora of the gut has been linked to gastrointestinal conditions, obesity, diabetes, and more.

Children’s health is an important area of research for studying the effects of harmful chemicals, because young children are typically more exposed to chemicals than older children and adults. Young babies and toddlers crawl, exposing them to more surfaces, generating more dust for inhalation, and they are more likely to put objects into their mouths. Children are also at a higher risk for impacts of harmful chemicals, since they are still in early, fragile stages of development.

The thousands of chemicals present as gases in human environments are called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. These chemicals are given off by common building materials, furnishings such as wallpapers or flooring, cleaning materials, toiletries, and even by cooking without proper ventilation. Vinyl wallpaper and vinyl flooring contain retardants which reduce the threat of fire in the home, but also give off VOCs that enter our lungs or settle on food surfaces.

VOCs are also found in outdoor air, but at much lower concentrations. A subgroup of VOCs with a higher molecular weight and boiling point temperature are called semi-volatile organic compounds, or SVOCs. Some examples of SVOCs include flame retardants, plasticizers (substances added to material to make them softer and more flexible), and pesticides.

Volatile compounds are a ubiquitous part of our indoor environments. Extremely small quantities of dangerous inhalants settle on surfaces all around you, and can be inhaled and carried into the lungs on tiny dust particles, or settle on surfaces used for food preparation and accidentally eaten. Intense household cleaning can lead to a build up of potentially dangerous chemicals, reducing beneficial microbial communities found around our homes – even while reducing harmful bacteria and viruses.

These chemical particles enter our bodies through breathing the air around us, eating food that particles may have settled on, and through skin contact from touching materials in our homes. Health effects associated with VOCs and SVOCs include allergies, altered semen quality, lower birth weight and delayed development in children, and even cancer. But what are the specific communities of bacteria that are affected by chemical ingestion, and how could these levels affect human health?

During their study, the researchers collected urine and fecal samples from young children (between the ages of 3 and 6) and analyzed them for SVOCs, bacteria, and fungi. The researchers could detect beneficial bacteria as well as a snapshot of the microbiome of each child. Their analysis allowed them to understand which microbes were living happily in each child’s gut, helping digest their food and keeping them healthy, and which bacteria were missing.

The researchers found a relationship between the amount of bacteria and fungi in the gut microbiome and the level of SVOC exposure the children experienced, with some gut microbes declining in abundance with increasing exposure to these indoor chemicals. The most common types of bacteria, such as Clostridiales and Bifidobacteroidiales, found in the human gut did not seem to be heavily affected by the presence of SVOCs, indicating that the largest drivers of microbiome health are safe from harm from indoor chemicals.

However, less common but equally important taxa such as Thermogemmatisporales, Stigonematales, and Legionelles – which play a pivotal role in nutrient absorption in humans – were harmed by the presence of PFAS, a type of man-made chemical used in manufacturing, including food packaging, commercial household products such as polish, wax, cleaning products, and even drinking water. PFAS, many of which are types of SVOCs, are compounds that do not break down and can build up in our homes and our bodies over time.

The important bacteria species in these taxa such as Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Ruminococcusare only present in small numbers in the gut and so may be much more sensitive to chemical ingestion, with SVOCs lowering the diversity of life in the digestive system. Ruminococcus is responsible for protecting our immune system and regulating our metabolism. Bacteroidesresponds to rich environments, breaking nutrients down for easy digestion. At normal, healthy levels, these bacteria are responsible for keeping our systems working properly – at extremely high or very low levels, they can cause much more harm. Overall, researchers found that these beneficial bacteria species are reduced with increased accumulation of SVOCs in the body, potentially reducing overall human health and causing an imbalance of bacteria in the gut.

The results of the study found that there is a connection between the amount of SVOCs and a decline in gut microbiota, leading to a potentially less effective immune system, poor digestion, and the more severe effects of an imbalanced microbiome. Much of the work around ingested SVOCs and their effect on bacteria imbalance in the gut has previously been performed in experiments on mice. This study was extremely comprehensive, giving us a much clearer understanding of the connections between a loss diversity of gut microbes and the everyday chemical compounds that work their way into our systems in the human body.

Considering the potential for SVOCs to build up in our bodies over time, since many of us are subject to prolonged exposure to them in our homes, it is crucial to understand more about SVOCs and human health so that we can work on solutions.

How animals’ group rituals can help explain human nature — and politics

Elephants may not resemble humans in the slightest, yet their behavior is often eerily similar to our own. Elephants are known to grieve for their lost loved ones, and experience trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in reaction to events that would induce the same in humans.

These beloved creatures, the largest land animals in the world, have been the subject of Dr. Caitlin O’Connell’s research for decades. A renowned behavioral ecologist, O’Connell co-developed the award-winning Smithsonian documentary “Elephant King” and has studied elephants in the wild for the last thirty years. O’Connell currently teaches at the Eaton Peabody Lab at Harvard Medical School and has also taught creative science writing for Stanford University and The New York Times.

Yet those aren’t the sole reasons I was curious to interview Dr. O’Connell. I also wanted to do so because she has a wonderful new book out called “Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us About Connection, Community, and Ourselves.” O’Connell’s book reveals the rituals used by a wide range of creatures, from mammals to birds, and boldly argues that we can apply what we know about animal interactions to our own day-to-day lives. In other words, it’s not merely a story of wildlife or a rumination on what human nature really is, but somewhere in-between.

America is now nearly a year into the grips of a terrible pandemic, and the ongoing threat of climate change is endangering many of the animals that O’Connell and others like her (myself included) so dearly love. Perhaps now is the time to learn from nature as to how we can protect our future.

Your book discusses the animal rituals of different creatures, such as whales, apes, elephants, rhinoceroses, flamingos and zebras, to name merely a few. What inspired you to look at these animal rituals and apply them to human behavior?

That’s a very good question. I have been studying elephant behavior for the past 30 years. During that time, I have seen many different animals engage in rituals that are so strikingly similar to our own. They really are just like ours. It occurred to me that many people don’t really connect our rituals with the rest of the animal kingdom, and I thought it would be an inspiration to see how important these rituals are to other animals as a reminder of how important they really are to us and how interconnected we are with other animals.

Obviously this interview is occurring in the context of a coup attempt that occurred in the Capitol. We’re dealing with a global pandemic. We’re dealing with climate change that is destroying our ecosystem. Do you think any of the observations from your book are applicable in terms of major stories in not just the news, but human history right now?

Absolutely. I’ll address them in the order that you mentioned them. In this very shocking coup attempt, there is a precedent for this kind of behavior throughout human history, and it’s a warning call for us that this kind of very powerful energy is derived from a fascinating evolutionary history of groups. There’s a chapter in my book called “Group Rituals,” and why group rituals evolved, anthropologists believe, is that early humans needed to work together in order to hunt and to succeed at hunting. We needed to build coalitions and develop trust and build deeper bonds with each other. And so these group kinds of rituals were used to facilitate these deeper bonds. And this is true for many animals to form alliances to coordinate a hunt, just as it similar for humans.

But then these rituals over time, they are so powerful that we have to wield them in a way that we’re careful about them. There are many current research studies showing that people that are within a group recognize the symbols and — I hate to say the symbols that were used during the coup attempt, [like] the red hats and other things, I won’t even bother to mention them — but they bring you into that group and make you feel like you have an identity with this group and are bonded with this group. Whereas the people that are outside that group, you view as the enemy. These kinds of rituals have existed throughout our human history, but it’s our responsibility to rein in the downsides of those group rituals. Group rituals should be an inclusive, beautiful things that develop bonds within our family and within our groups, whatever those groups might be, a religious group or a community group. But to turn insular and look at other groups as the enemy, that is where it’s gone horribly wrong. And so that’s how the book relates on a political level.

Talking about the pandemic and this inside-outside, the anti-maskers versus the maskers. Seeing as we all have to wear masks and social distance during the pandemic, we miss getting to hug, shake hands and smile at each other. These simple rituals that we all took for granted are critical to our wellbeing, and having to deprive ourselves to keep everyone safe has been hard on everyone. We’ve got so many ways that we have been divisive in our society over the past few years. And the pandemic reminds us of how important [it is] being in touch with each other socially and physically, tactile rituals and grieving rituals, seeing each other, looking each other in the eyes, smiling. And we can’t smile to each other these days because we’re all wearing masks, and that smile releases oxytocin in the brain and actually makes you feel better. Smiling is contagious, and it brings a positive mood to the group so that these are some of the reasons why, in a pandemic, we’re actually hurting ourselves with this isolation because we are by nature social animals, and to isolate ourselves does real psychological and even physiological damage.

The other you mentioned was about climate change. I’ve talked about climate change a bit in my chapter on migrations and how climate change has affected not just human migrations, but other animal migrations. There’s shocking headlines like birds have dropped out of the sky during a migration because their migration paths have shifted because of fire damage. And so that if there’s no food on their migratory path, they can’t eat. And so they don’t have the energy to actually make their migration. And so there’s a lot of examples in my book about how our changing climate is affecting our rituals and our cultural norms.

Let’s talk about broader lessons, not specific to the news cycle, but just in terms of human relationships. For instance, you discuss in your book how animals can be very caring toward each other and very affectionate. What would you say people could learn from, say, elephants in order to improve their own relationships and be happier in their own lives?

There are so many things that elephants have taught me about ourselves and the importance of, for one, tactile interaction. Male elephants, particularly adult male elephants, are very tactile with each other within bonded groups. They’re either putting a trunk over the head or shoulder or touching each other with a trunk or ears or rubbing their ear on the side of another. They’re extremely physical. And if you watch male elephants for a certain amount of time, it kind of feels like you’re in a bar with a bunch of buddies where they’re backslapping, and different kinds of fancy handshakes when they’re really enthusiastic to see each other. Male elephants have a type of handshake where they’ve placed their trunk in the other’s mouth as a greeting, and they’ll do that to each other at the same time, or also wrap trunks. There’s a lot of this tactile and visual and vocal communication that just shows you how similar they are in expressing themselves within these bonded groups.

Another example is to see two adult females, a mother and a grandmother, helping each other to get a baby who’s stuck in the mud out of the mud, and coordinating their behavior. Without much effort, they both just kneel down, take their trunks and scoop the baby out. And seeing that, versus a young mother who doesn’t have a very strong connection, she struggles to get her baby out and struggles to coordinate a group and gets really nervous, and it’s similar in humans with a young mother who doesn’t have that much experience versus a grandmother and a mother with a lot of experience. They just come in and show everyone else how it’s done. And that’s pretty powerful.

I think one more example that I love is the fact that elder elephants, when they get old, they naturally will die of losing their last tooth. They have six sets of teeth in their mouth and as the last one drops out, they aren’t able to chew their food. And in some situations, young bulls will follow around an elder and chew their food for them. And that’s just such a stunning example of how other animals that have these bonds within society and how we treat our elders, and just to see how elephants care about each other. It’s a reminder that we should be caring about each other just as much and how special these other animals are in relation to our own society. We tend to think of ourselves as above the rest of the animal kingdom, when in fact we are among the other animals within the animal kingdom.

Dr. Caitlin O’Connell’s book, “Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves,” was released on January 12, 2021 from Chronicle Prism books.

A study that attempts to count the number of rodents used in lab research sparks a controversy

A controversial new study claims that more than 110 million of the mammals used in American scientific laboratories for experiments are either mice or rats — an assertion that, if true, is astonishing for what it implies about humanity’s attitudes towards the tiny, intelligent creatures.

The paper, which was published in the scholarly journal Scientific Reports last week, was written by Larry Carbone DVM PhD, who has specialty certifications in Animal Welfare and in Laboratory Animal Medicine. To explain how he arrived at his shocking number, Carbone wrote to Salon that he used a different method for counting lab mice and lab rats than Speaking of Research, an advocacy group that pushes the use of animals in scientific testing. He emphasized to Salon that he cannot say with certainty how many mice and rats are in these laboratories.

“The challenge I see with their method is that while everyone who uses the Animal Welfare Act-covered species that USDA posts on its website, you still need a way to go from that number to an estimate of the mice and rats the AWA does not cover,” Carbone explained, referring to the federal law that requires research animals be treated humanely but does not extend to mice and rats. “I was able to get mouse/rat numbers mostly from state institutions in states with open records laws; I would not have been able to get those data from private companies, and neither will someone 3-5 years from now who says ‘Even if Carbone’s estimate is off, we can still use his method to look for relative trends.'”

Carbone stressed that his research is important because while the Animal Welfare Act covers animals from dogs and cats to monkeys and hamsters, mice and rats “are at least 95% of mammal in US labs — my method found that at large academic institutions, that percentage is more likely at least 99%, not 95%.” Although he added that he personally believes mice and rats should be covered by the Animal Welfare Act, “the point of this paper was to establish a number that would allow tracking trends (something Congress enacted in 1970 in the Animal Welfare Act, but mice and rats aren’t covered, so no one knows).”

Allyson J. Bennett, PhD, senior editor at Speaking of Research, strongly disagreed with Carbone’s analysis.

“Our analysis shows that Carbone hasn’t provided strong evidence that his findings from study of 16 universities would hold for the 900+ universities and companies that conduct animal research and, raising further flags, his estimate is wildly different than those provided by experts with direct experience and broad knowledge of the field,” Bennett wrote to Salon. She also challenged the idea that people should focus on the number of mice and rats in laboratories, claiming that “the key question for global public health and science policy is not the number of mice involved in research, but whether human society can continue to responsibly and ethically engage in scientific studies that are needed to stop pandemics, reduce disease, and improve lives—human and other animals.”

Bennett also pointed to the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki, ethics codes which, she argued, support animal research because it is necessary for continued medical progress and that it was ethical as long as the animals’ welfare is respected.

Research has found that mice are capable of feeling pain and experiencing empathy, including a study published earlier this month in Science.

“I’m inclined to see mice and rats in line with other rodents, and not likely as intelligent by most criteria as dogs, pigs and monkeys,” Carbone told Salon. “But certainly scientists study them in lots of psychology studies, learning, pain biology, social behavior, and other fields that rely on them being similar to humans in important ways.”

Trump’s unhinged, tone-deaf list of “American heroes” is a fitting emblem of his presidency

On Monday afternoon the White House released an executive order detailing the figures that Trump wants represented in his National Garden of American Heroes.

Trump originally pitched the idea during a July 2020 speech at Mount Rushmore, amid nationwide protests that again brought questions of who should be memorialized through monuments into focus; across the country, statues of slave owners and Confederate officers were vandalized and removed.

In his speech, Trump said that these actions constituted a branch of “cancel culture.”

“This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore,” he said.”They defile the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.”

He continued: “I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.”

In the seven months since, there has been no movement on creating the statue park. No Congressional funding was secured for the proposed project and, despite the executive order, it’s unlikely to be picked up by the next administration. Regardless, two days before leaving office, Trump released the list of figures he’d like to see memorialized — and it is completely unhinged.

The list is a bizarro grab bag of 244 individuals, defined simultaneously by its randomness and tone-deafness. Logistics aside (How large would the park be? How close will the insane amount of statuary be to each other? Will it be like a Madame Tussauds cast in stone?), Trump’s definition of “hero” is muddled.

You’d have Grover Cleveland, Walt Disney, Whitney Houston and Dolley Madison all next to each other, flanked by Kobe Bryant, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong and Theodor Geisel aka “Dr. Seuss.” There are civil rights champions and abolitionists like Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside slave-owning presidents such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. More members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show are present on the list than Asian Americans.

In many ways, however, Trump’s list of “American Heroes” — which can be viewed in its entirety here — is emblematic of his presidency. It’s riddled with choices that will make readers pause due to their obvious lack of research, regard for the truth and sensitivity. Here are some of the most weirdest missteps on the list (there are many more), starting with the demographic breakdown:

Demographic Breakdown

While the list is overwhelmingly random, it’s also overwhelmingly male. As Axios’ Danielle Alberti reported, Trump’s “American Heroes” are 73% men. Additionally, 86 of the nominees, nearly a third, were born between 1900 and 1950.

When asked in that same article by Axios about his views on the list, historian Michael Beschloss, who specializes in the United States presidency, said, “Any American who loves democracy should make sure there is never some official, totalitarian-sounding ‘National Garden of American Heroes,’ with names forced upon us by the federal government.”

“The glory of American democracy is that every one of our citizens decides who his or her personal heroes are,” Beschloss said. “That is not the prerogative of any president, especially one rejected by American voters and who is on his way out the door. Many of the people on this list of ‘heroes’ would be embarrassed to be singled out by someone like Donald Trump.”

Additionally, as the Associated Press reported, when Trump first proposed the list in 2020, there were no Native American, Hispanic or Asian American individuals. The list has been diversified some, but it’s obviously an afterthought.

Christopher Columbus

One of the most incendiary names on the list was Christopher Columbus — who was neither American, nor did he ever actually set foot in North America. He did, however, initiate the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of thousands of indigenous people. His cruelties are difficult to fully quantify, ranging from allowing the settlers under him to sell 9- and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery, to forcing indigenous people to collect gold for him.

In June 2020, three statues of Columbus were damaged or pulled down in as many days.

“In St. Paul, demonstrators toppled a ten-foot-tall statue that stood in front of the Minnesota state capitol,” wrote Theresa Machemer for Smithsonian Magazine. “In Richmond, protesters pulled down an eight-foot-tall statue in Byrd Park, carrying it about 200 yards before setting it on fire and throwing it into the nearby Fountain Lake. And, around 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, police in Boston received a report that a marble statue of the Italian explorer and colonizer had lost its head.”

Andrew Jackson

This choice is very much in the same vein as Columbus. Jackson, who was the seventh president of the United States, was one of the primary supporters of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish any Indian title to land claims in the Southeast.

“The result was the Trail of Tears, in which Cherokee and other native peoples of the Southeast were forced at gunpoint to march 1,200 miles to ‘Indian territory,'” Billy J. Stratton wrote for Salon in 2017. “Thousands of Cherokee died during the passage, while many who survived the trek lost their homes and most of their property. Ironically, much of the land on which the Cherokee and other removed tribes were settled was opened to homesteading and became the state of Oklahoma some 60 years later.”

Because of this, it seems deeply tone-deaf to include Jackson next to Native American icons like Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull and Tecumseh.

Muhammad Ali

So, admittedly, this name stuck out to me because I live in Louisville, Kentucky, Ali’s hometown, and have reported previously on why there are no full-body statues of the boxing legend. According to Jeannie Kahnke of the Muhammad Ali Center — whom I interviewed in 2018 — they receive a lot of requests to use Ali’s likeness.

“Over the years, I cannot tell you how many times people have come to us, saying ‘I want to do a Muhammad Ali statue,'” she said. “It has probably been at least 15.”

However, Ali was a devout Muslim, and he felt his faith would prohibit full-body statues being erected of him — which, Kahnke said, would prevent Ali’s family from giving their blessing for a life-size statue of him. Some sculptors have done so without his family’s permission, but many have found other, more creative, ways to honor the boxer.

Including his name on the list demonstrates either an obvious lack of research or a willingness to dishonor Ali’s wishes and religious beliefs.

Ingrid Bergman

In Trump’s executive order, he stated that the park’s goal is to honor those believed to be “historically significant,” and “individual[s] who made substantive contributions to America’s public life or otherwise had a substantive effect on America’s history.”

To that end, one of the defining characteristics of Trump’s list is the mishmash of political and pop culture, but Swedish actress Ingrid Bermgan stands out because she . . . wasn’t American. And unlike Alfred Hitchcock and Alex Trebek (who were born in the U.K. and Canada, respectively), she never became an American citizen.

It really raises the question of what qualifies as a “substantive contribution to America’s public life” in Trump’s mind. Was he just a big “Casablanca” fan? Perhaps, because Humphrey Bogart is on the list, too.

Woody Guthrie and Hannah Arendt

As New York Daily News reporter Chris Sommerfield tweeted yesterday, there are several “incredible self-owns” found on Trump’s list, like the inclusion of Woody Guthrie, “who wrote ‘Old Man Trump,’ a blistering 1950s tune about the Trump family’s racist housing practices in Brooklyn.”

Additionally, Trump included the German-born American political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was perhaps best known for her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Her writings on “the banality of evil” have been repeatedly invoked to describe Trump’s apparent and growing desire for autocratic rule.

“I think she would be appalled,” Roger Berkowitz, who directs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College — on whose campus Arendt is buried and where she taught for many years — told Jewish Insider on Monday evening. “I think Arendt would find it ridiculous that Trump nominated her. I think she would find Trump ridiculous, and I think she’d find him dangerous insofar as he undermines the basic idea of truthfulness and truth in the country. His attack on the election she would have found abhorrent and dangerous.”

Edward R. Murrow

Finally, Trump’s disdain for legitimate, objective reporting is no secret. He has called the media the “enemy of the people,” and as such, it was no surprise to see the phrase “Murder the media” scrawled on a door of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

That’s why it was kind of a shock to see Edward R. Murrow, the broadcaster and war correspondent who had a deep impact on journalistic ethics, included on Trump’s list. If Murrow were still alive and writing, I have no doubt that he would have reported truthfully on Trump — just as he reported critically on Senator Joseph McCarthy — and been decried as another “enemy of the people.”

For what it’s worth, Trump’s executive order directed the secretary of the interior to identify a site and provide funding and said a taskforce would “publish an annual public report describing progress on establishing the National Garden and on building statues.”

Joe Biden has nominated Deb Haaland for the position, and neither she nor Biden’s transition team have issued a comment on the garden, making it unlikely that it will ever actually take root.

Paleontologists may have found the largest dinosaur of all time

Paleontologists in Argentina have discovered bones that they suspect belonged to a dinosaur so large, it would have been the largest land animal to ever live.

Paleontologists confirmed that a pile of bones, discovered in an Argentinian section of Patagonia, belonged to a type of dinosaur known as a sauropod, according to a paper published in the scholarly journal Cretaceous Research. Sauropods were dinosaurs with extremely long necks, elongated tails, small heads and legs that resembled trunks or pillars. Brontosauruses, apatosauruses and brachiosauruses are among the most famous sauropods known to have existed.

The bones discovered in Argentina’s Neuquén Province appear to have belonged to a titanosaur, a group of enormous sauropods which experts believe survived right up until the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. That was the moment roughly 66 million years ago when an asteroid is thought to have hit the planet and wiped out a majority of the animals that lived here at that time. Up until then, titanosaurs like the famous patagotitan and puertasaurus are believed to have thrived in the same areas of South America where the new fossils were discovered.

It is unclear whether this new dinosaur surpasses the size of the patagotitan, as well as that of every other known sauropod, because the fossil record is incomplete. That said, scientists are intrigued by the proportions of the pelvic bones and vertebrae that have been discovered.

Alejandro Otero, a paleontologist with Argentina’s Museo de La Plata and a co-author of the study reporting the find, told Salon by email that there were a number of physical differences between the new dinosaur and other titanosaurs that lead scholars to believe it is a different and larger species. These include the shapes of various parts of the vertebrae, the appearances of the neural spines (or the spike-like appendages that appeared on the backs of many dinosaurs) and the sheer differences in size. Otero also pointed out that “this new specimen comes from a younger age than Patagotitan.”

Otero also told Salon by email that “the specimen here reported strongly suggests the co-existence of the largest and middle-sized titanosaurs” along with smaller sauropods known as rebbachisaurids “at the beginning of the Late Cretaceous in Neuquén Province.” That suggests that natural selection compelled different species to find alternative ways of using their environment in order to coexist, a phenomenon known as “nice partitioning.” The new findings in Patagonia have “contributed to a better understanding of the phylogenetic relationships of titanosaurs, revealing the existence of a previously unknown lineage and shedding new light on body mass evolution.”

That said, Otero said that the new findings will not change that much about what we know regarding paleontology without additional research.

“We need to go back to the field place to recover more bones to picture out more about this huge specimen,” Otero wrote to Salon, explaining that groups like the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the European Regional Development Fund and a number of other organizations helped finance the work already done on this subject.

Two National Guard members removed from Biden inauguration over right-wing militia ties: report

Two members of the National Guard were removed from the mission to provide security for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration after they were discovered to have ties to “fringe right” militias, according to the Associated Press.

An Army official and a U.S. intelligence official told the AP they did not find a plot against Biden himself but that as a precaution, the two members were removed from the massive security force preparing for Wednesday’s ceremony. They did not say what group they belonged to. The National Guard and Secret Service did not comment on the report.

The report came after the AP reported on Sunday that the FBI was vetting all 25,000 National Guard members deployed to Washington ahead of the swearing-in over fears of an “insider attack.”

“We’re continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told the outlet, adding that as of Sunday officials had not flagged any major issues.

A day later, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement that there is “no intelligence indicating an insider threat.”

Some Republicans had bristled at the background checks. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said it was the “most offensive thing he’d ever heard.”

“No one should ever question the loyalty or professionalism” of National Guard members, he said on Twitter, adding that he would “never” send his troops to the nation’s capital again “if they are disrespected like this.”

The two National Guard members were removed amid growing scrutiny that militias or far-right extremists could try to attack the inauguration after the deadly Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday unsealed documents revealing that Edward Caldwell, the suspected leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, has been charged with conspiracy and other charges stemming from his alleged role in the riot.

The FBI said in an unsealed affidavit that members with Oath Keeper gear were seen in videos from the riot moving in an “organized and practiced fashion and forc[ing] their way to the front of the crowd gathered around a door to the U.S. Capitol.” The FBI said Caldwell later boasted about “storming the castle” in Facebook messages and urged others to storm state capitols.

The FBI also privately warned law enforcement agencies on Monday that “lone wolves” and QAnon followers have discussed posing as National Guard members in Washington to potentially “disrupt” Biden’s inauguration, according to an intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post. The FBI also said some people had shared maps of sensitive locations in the nation’s capital, though it did not specify any plots against the swearing-in ceremony.

“QAnon members have discussed posing as National Guard soldiers, believing that it would be easy for them to infiltrate secure areas,” the report said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said last week that the bureau was monitoring an “extensive amount of concerning online chatter” and “trying to distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”

The FBI report noted that some QAnon adherents may have access to military uniforms through prior military service or surplus stores. Numerous current and former military members have been charged in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot. The FBI also noted that some National Guardsmen have noticed an uptick in surveillance of security preparations ahead of the event.

An AP review found that at least 22 current or former members of the military or law enforcement agencies have been identified as being at or near the riot, while more than a dozen others are still under investigation.

Ashli Babbitt, the woman killed by Capitol Police when she tried to breach the House chamber, spent 14 years in the Air Force. A man seen carrying zip-tie handcuffs on the Senate floor during the riot was identified as retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Brock Jr., who prosecutors said planned to “take hostages” and “kidnap” members of Congress. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, an Army reservist and naval contractor accused of being a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. was also charged with federal offenses related to his alleged role in the riot. Prosecutors said he had “secret” security clearance that gave him access to a “variety of munitions.”

A senior defense official told CNN that extremist groups have long focused on recruiting current and former military members and seeking to infiltrate their own members into the armed forces.

“We know that some groups attempt to actively recruit our personnel into their cause, or actually encourage their members to join the military for purposes of acquiring skills and experience,” the official said. “We recognize those skills are prized by some of these groups not only for the capability it offers them, but it also brings legitimacy to them in their mind for their cause.”

McCarthy told the AP that the FBI has been vetting Guard troops deploying to D.C. since last week as thousands more have continued to flow in from states across the country.

“The question is, is that all of them? Are there others?” he said. “We need to be conscious of it and we need to put all of the mechanisms in place to thoroughly vet these men and women who would support any operations like this.”

Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy: The right-wing has a dangerously overblown sense of entitlement

The aspect of the Capitol insurrection that continues to carry the most fascination is the way that most of the people involved seemed utterly unafraid of potential consequences, legal or otherwise. The FBI has already charged more than 100 people for their involvement in the riot, and they are, according to the Washington Post, “mostly individuals who revealed themselves as participating in the Jan. 6 riot through social media boasts”. Most people committing crimes desire anonymity, but these folks acted with utter impunity, buoyed by their belief that, if an election didn’t go the way they desired, they could simply demand it be thrown out, as if they were telling a waiter to send an unsatisfying dish back to the kitchen.

One woman, Jenna Ryan from Dallas, TX, has become the face of this attitude. During the storming of the Capitol, she posted a video in which she juxtaposed her calls to overturn the election with hype for her company. The Texas real-estate agent who flew in a private jet to take part in the riot continues to behave in a shockingly brazen manner, insisting during an interview that she was right to fly in a private jet to take part in a riot and asking for a pardon from Donald Trump with the confidence of a woman demanding extra ketchup for her fries at McDonald’s.

The whole incident is a microcosm of what will likely be Trump’s most lasting legacy after he leaves the White House in disgrace on Wednesday: The metastasizing sense of entitlement on the American right.

The “Karen” meme has, in recent months, been distorted through sexism to become a slur term replacing “nag.” But in its original form, it was a useful shorthand for the entitled attitude of Trump-loving America. Karens hold the belief that everything — particularly every public space or shared resource — belongs to them and them only, and that everyone else should always accommodate their preferences. The purest expression of Karenism was the white woman who called the police on a Black family having a picnic, absolutely certain she was entitled to determine who is and is not allowed to use a public park.

Trump himself, of course, was the ultimate Karen. Nowhere was this more evident than in his behavior since November, which was guided by his stalwart belief that all he needed to do was talk to the manager and this whole “losing the election” situation would be cleared up. Trump spent months calling every state and local official he could find, blackmailing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, threatening Vice President Mike Pence, and filing dozens of lawsuits, guided by his conviction that someone, somewhere had the power to simply toss out the presidential election results and install him in office for a second term.

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It was, at times, downright comical — or would have been, anyway, if Trump hadn’t been training his base to more fully embrace the notion that the rules are for other people. But now his base believes that, by virtue of being white and right-wing, they are generally allowed to break any rule that they want, deny realities they find unpleasant, and even demand that other people kiss their ass no matter how nasty they behave.

To be clear, conservatism has always been an ideology of entitlement.

From the belief that rich people shouldn’t have to contribute their fair share in taxes to the belief that conservatives should determine for other people such private choices as who they can marry and when to give birth: It is all entitlement. But under Trump, the right-wing’s faith in their own privilege has become all-encompassing, as has their collective bitterness and anger towards anyone who dares suggest that conservative Americans show respect for others, responsibility towards their community, or even an acknowledgment of factual information.

The ridiculousness of the White House’s 1776 Report is just the most recent of the often very silly examples. The whole thing started because right-wing America, under Trump’s leadership, had a long and childish temper tantrum over the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which chronicled the centrality of racism in American history. The 1776 Report is Trump’s attempt at a counternarrative, forwarding a series of lies about the history of racism in America — basically, the American version of Holocaust denialism — repackaged as a “patriotic education.”

This is a classic version of the right-wing entitlement that has exploded under Trump. History itself is viewed as the rightful property of white, conservative America. If they wish to replace actual factual history with a series of lies meant to flatter their own bigotries, then they believe that is their right.

As Matthew Rozsa detailed this weekend at Salon, psychological research shows “conservatives, not liberals, are far more apt to let their feelings to get in the way of accepting facts.”

Again, this was a problem before Trump, most notoriously in the right-wing refusal to accept that climate change is real, despite there being an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence proving that it is. But the 1776 Report shows how ugly this entitlement has become, that conservatives assert that the facts of American history should simply be evacuated and replaced with their reactionary fantasies.

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This attitude manifested in a more day-to-day way in the refusal of so many Trump fanatics to wear masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, a refusal that grew so toxic that 26 Republican-led states refused to pass mask mandates, choosing the snowflake-delicate feelings of Trumpers over the literal lives of their residents. The mask tantrum combined multiple forms of conservative entitlement: The belief that their feelings matter more than scientific facts, outrage at being asked to behave responsibly and a rejection of the idea that they owe any decency to other people.

Similarly, the Trumpian obsession with “cancel culture” is about this all-encompassing sense of right-wing entitlement.

At the heart of so many right-wing temper tantrums over being “canceled” is the idea that they should be able to say what they want, do what they want, and act like absolute jackasses without ever suffering a personal, professional, or social consequence for it. This attitude was epitomized by a September tweet from professional whiner and former New York Times writer (she left after tantruming about how others on the staff weren’t accommodating enough of her repugnant personality) Bari Weiss.

It’s always helpful to remember that literal life-and-death issues are just hobbies to some people pic.twitter.com/nKqMQkMdEH

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) September 14, 2020

Needless to say, no one is entitled to someone else’s friendship, much less their “romance,” and if people don’t want to give you either because of your views, that is their right. But in Trump’s America, having liberals decline your friendship is treated as a human rights violation. The ridiculousness of this attitude was most recently illustrated in the choice of GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene to wear a “CENSORED” mask — while giving a speech to a national audience from the floor of the House of Representatives.

Trump is leaving office on Wednesday, but this right-wing entitlement he cultivated lives on in Republicans demanding that the entire insurrection at the Capitol be thrown down the memory hole. Republican leader after Republican leader has insisted that “healing” and “unity” can only occur if there are no consequences for those, especially Trump, who incited the riot.

This is simply more of the Trumpian entitlement. Republican politicians spent over two months supporting and elevating Trump’s lies about the election. And their assumption is that the responsibility for cleaning up the mess they made should be shouldered entirely by someone else, the liberals who are expected to do the hard work of forgetting and forgiving. Responsibility is for other people, not for Republicans, even when their lack of responsibility led to a violent attempt to overthrow the government.

It’s outrageous, but no surprise. This is the culmination of years of the sense of unchecked entitlement Trump encouraged on the right. It’s the same attitude that leads them to believe that they should be able to spread disease and spew hate, and to squeal about “cancel culture” if they get pushback. Trump may be leaving, but his poison of right wing entitlement will continue to rot away at our national fabric, unless something is done to curtail it. And that something can only look like accountability — for Trump and everyone who enabled him over all these years.

Rep. Steve Cohen: QAnon fan Rep. Lauren Boebert gave Capitol tour to “large” group before riot

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., alleged on Monday that freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., gave a Capitol tour to a “large” group ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which she adamantly denied.

Cohen told CNN that he and House Budget Committee chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., saw Boebert leading the group in the Cannon House Office Building tunnel prior to the siege, which left five dead. Cohen’s comments came after Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., alleged that members of Congress took groups on “reconnaissance” tours the day before the riot and 34 House Democrats have called for a probe into the “suspicious behavior” leading up to the insurrection. The House members noted that the tours were “unusual” because the Capitol has been closed to public tours due to the coronavirus pandemic since last March and said that some of the visitors “appeared to be associated with the rally” that preceded the riot.

“Congressman Yarmuth refreshed my recollection yesterday,” Cohen said. “We saw Boebert taking a group of people for a tour sometime after the 3rd and before the 6th. I don’t remember the day. We were walking in a tunnel and we saw her and commented who she was and she had a large group with her. Now, whether these people were people that were involved in the insurrection or not, I do not know.”

Cohen acknowledged that he had no evidence that members of the group were involved in the riot but noted that Boebert was involved in the House GOP objections to the Electoral College results based on baseless allegations that the election was stolen, and had previously referred to Jan. 6 as a “1776” moment.

“She was a freshman, she might have had a large number of people coming to be with her on this historic occasion and just wanting to give them the opportunity to have a tour,” he said. “But it is pretty clear that her team is the team — she’s not on the home team. She was with the visitors.”

"We saw congress[woman] Boebert taking a group of people for a tour sometime after the 3rd and before the 6th." — Rep. Steve Cohen says he and a colleague saw Rep. Boebert giving people a tour of the Capitol in the days leading up to the riot pic.twitter.com/dNPymWqjPY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 18, 2021

Christopher Schuler, a spokesman for Yarmuth, told the Washington Post that the congressman saw Boebert and a large group on Jan. 3 or 4, but could not say for sure whether the group was with Boebert.

“While Congressman Yarmuth remembers there was a group of people around Congresswoman Boebert, he has no knowledge of who they were or if they were with her,” he told the outlet. “He simply exchanged greetings with a new colleague and continued on his way.”

Boebert was sworn in on Jan. 3 at the Capitol with all other members of the new Congress, where she was photographed with her husband and four children.

Boebert, who has demanded the right to carry her gun in the Capitol and has publicly supported the QAnon movement, which has been labeled by the military as an “extremist group,” denied Cohen’s allegation and accused the congressman of slandering her.

“During your interview on CNN today, you made false, slanderous statements that have threatened the safety of my family, my staff and me,” she said in a letter that she published on Twitter.

“In the future, if you have concerns about my actions, as a fellow Member of Congress, please speak with me before making baseless and dangerous allegations,” the letter said. “This basic professional courtesy would have allowed you to avoid the embarrassment of being caught in a dangerous lie that has compromised the safety of a Congresswoman, her family, and her staff.”

Boebert said in a separate statement that she did not give tours to anyone except family members.

“Representative Cohen’s claim that he saw me give a reconnaissance tour with people not on the team is 100% false,” she said. “I have never given any tours of the U.S. Capitol in the 117th Congress to anyone besides family members in town for my swearing in. As Members of Congress, we have a duty to elevate the discourse and unify during times of crisis. Unfortunately, Rep. Cohen instead chose to go on CNN today to repeat irresponsible lies in order to elevate his own political relevance and to further fuel the division of our country.”

Boebert, who has come under criticism for tweeting about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, D-Calif., location during the riot, voted to object to the Electoral College results hours after supporters of President Trump attacked Capitol police and overran the halls of Congress. She has come under heavy scrutiny for her links to militia groups and her role in spreading fraudulent election-rigging claims. She later refused to comply with new security measures installed in the Capitol. Some prominent donors have called on her to return their contributions following the riot and her communications director quit in response to the riot after less than two weeks on the job. Dozens of Colorado lawmakers have called for her to resign and for House officials to investigate her conduct surrounding the riot.

Cohen is the only member of Congress so far to directly suggest that Boebert was involved in the alleged tours. Sherrill did not mention any names when she alleged that members had given “reconnaissance” tours to riot participants on Jan. 5. Sherrill and 33 other House Democrats later sent a letter to top Capitol security officials calling on them to investigate the allegation and why the rioters “seemed to have an unusually detailed knowledge of the layout of the Capitol Complex.” Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., who did not sign the letter, has separately questioned how rioters found his unmarked office but avoided his main office which bore his name on the front. The chief of staff for Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., has said that the panic buttons in her office had been inexplicably ripped out prior to the lockdown.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., confirmed on MSNBC that House members had witnessed a tour group, but said he had no firsthand knowledge about it. Though he never mentioned Boebert or any other member by name, the congresswoman claimed in a letter that he “implied I was that Member of Congress” who gave Capitol tours to “insurrectionists.”

Boebert accused Maloney of “spreading disinformation” and called his comments “extremely offensive, shameful and dangerous.”

“Um, I’ve never said your name,” Maloney replied. “Never. Not once.”

Boebert has remained unrelenting since the riot, accusing Democrats of “encouraging and normalizing violence” when discussing last summer’s widespread protests over racial injustice. She has refused to go through the newly-installed metal detectors in the House chamber, which were installed after House Democrats expressed concerns that “members who were in league with the insurrectionists who love to carry their guns” might aid in a potential future attack. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said last week that she worried “there were QAnon and white supremacist sympathizers, and, frankly, white supremacist members of Congress” that “I have felt would disclose my location and would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, et cetera” during the lockdown.

“So I didn’t even feel safe around other members of Congress.”

Donald Trump started no new wars — but he is one of history’s biggest war presidents

One of the more remarkable achievements of Donald Trump’s unique form of hucksterism is that he was able to create a myth that he is a branding genius when his only real brand is his name, something he inherited from his father. Trump also took credit for political slogans that were created by other people, although it’s highly unlikely he knew where they came from or what they referred to when he cribbed them. The most famous is “Make American Great Again” which was Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan in 1980. There was also “Law and Order,” Richard Nixon’s 1968 dog whistle and going back even further “America First,” which was the isolationist’s slogan in the years before Pearl Harbor pulled the US into World War II. He has little to no historical knowledge so he almost certainly didn’t see that reference when he used it to explain his foreign policy which really came down to, “we do whatever we want, and you will pay us ‘protection’ to make sure we don’t do it to you. We are untouchable because our massive military is so bloated no one will mess with us no matter what. We’re Number 1!”

One appealing aspect of that weird and incoherent policy to many people on both sides of the political spectrum was the idea that America would withdraw from the hot wars we’d been bogged down in since 9/11. Trump claimed that he wanted to do that but was clueless, of course, and proceeded to make decisions willy nilly, antagonizing traditional adversaries, like Iran, as well as insulting our allies, like Germany, raising the stakes dramatically. Mike Pence fatuously declared that this was “peace through strength” but it was anything but. It was dumb luck.

Under Trump, the U.S. has been involved in increasingly deadly conflicts in Yemen, Somalia and Niger. His belated 11th Hour “drawdowns” Iraq, Afghanistan, and various African countries are being rushed without proper planning or forethought at the end of his term, leaving them more likely to be landmines set to explode on the Biden administration. As the Nation’s Andrew McCormick wrote in a scathing indictment of Trump’s policy:

To be clear, I’m no proponent of indefinite or ill-defined troop deployments, and in this magazine I’ve argued on multiple counts against forever war. I believe America should pursue every responsible option to leave Afghanistan and that a thorough review of our footprints in East Africa and elsewhere is long overdue. Drawdown shouldn’t look like this, though. To our foreign partners, whom we have trained and fought with; to the people of these countries whom we have asked to trust America, even despite the enormous human tragedies war has wrought; and, speaking from just one veteran’s perspective, to all the military men and women who have served and died in these conflicts over the years, America’s leaders owe a great deal more than a slipshod, self-interested rush out the door.

We should have been out of many of these places a long time ago but giving Trump any credit for his belated decisions even as he made incoherent or obviously ill-considered decisions to favor his dictator buddies, as he did with Turkey and Syria, is ridiculous. His killing of the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was one of the most provocative acts by the U.S. in many a moon and it was only by the forbearance of Iranian leaders that it did not escalate into a terrible conflagration.

Still, it is true that he did not start any new wars in foreign countries. Some people on the right are saying this makes him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower not to do so but that’s not true. Still, he is the first since Jimmy Carter who can say that. (Frankly, I think that’s probably attributable to “the Madman Theory” than anything else, but he does get credit for it. )

Nonetheless, despite his endless, futile begging for the Nobel Peace Prize, let’s not pretend that he is some kind of peacenik who has made the world a safer place. This was a man who ran for office the first time promising to torture prisoners while extolling the virtues of capital punishment and summary executions. Since then he has excused Neo-Nazis and defended the Confederacy. He restored the federal death penalty racing to execute as many people as he can before he leaves office. He banned citizens of Muslim countries from coming to the US, put children in cages and pardoned a series of war criminals, sending a pretty strong signal to the world that the US has become a rogue superpower that ignores common decency and international law.

Trump may not have started up a new war overseas but he sure as hell waged one at home, using propaganda techniques, technology and a non-stop barrage of lies and lurid demagoguery. He demonized immigrants and racial minorities, portrayed Democrats as evil and the free press as enemies of the people.

In fact, he did start a “foreign” war, by turning Americans who didn’t support him and allies who’d betrayed him into alien invaders.

He built up that theme during his entire term, portraying his political rivals as criminals and encouraging his rally-goers to chant “lock her up!” He claimed that Democratic Party-run states were undeserving of federal assistance during disasters and clearly favored his own voters in Republican-led states, both rhetorically and materially. He relentlessly degraded and demeaned his political opponents always insisting he was just “fighting back.”

When the country exploded in protest last summer over the endless police killings of unarmed Black men, Trump responded by trying to call up the military and demanding that authorities “dominate” the protesters. After a vigilante who believed he was called to help the cops protect the streets killed three people in Kenosha Wisconsin, Trump proclaimed that to stop the violence “we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence.” There was no doubt who he was talking about. In one epic Twitter flurry on August 30th, Trump insulted Joe Biden, retweeted a call to imprison New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, went after CNN and NPR and strongly implied that protesters were forming a coup to take over his government.

Throughout his term, he behaved as if Democrats, immigrants, Black Lives Matter protesters, Blue state residents, etc. had seized the country from Real Americans — Trump voters. Since the election, he inundated the nation with the Big Lie that the election was stolen and on January 6th, his “very fine” followers stormed the US Capitol believing they were seizing it back.

So yes, Donald Trump is a war president, one of the most notorious in our history. The five people killed at the U.S. Capitol are combat casualties and since one of his main reasons for failing to properly respond to the pandemic was the desire to blame Blue State governors for the death toll, we can add a fair number of the 400,000 dead Americans to his body count.

When Richard Nixon resigned and Al Gore conceded, the usual talking heads and gasbags all smugly reassured the nation that everything was just fine because there were no tanks on the corner and no soldiers in the streets proving the system worked.

How’s that working out for us this time?

Thousands of National Guard troops pour into Washington as states answer the call https://t.co/pCjixaVyyR pic.twitter.com/8Z2ly8aFca

— Military Times (@MilitaryTimes) January 17, 2021

How should Joe Biden handle Donald Trump’s post-presidency? Gerald Ford provides a guide

President Donald Trump has achieved many shameful firsts. He is the first sitting president to refuse to accept his reelection loss, making him a historic loser. He is the first president to urge his followers to commit an insurrection so he can stay in power. And he is the first president to be impeached twice. That’s just a shortlist. There is no precedent for Trump’s disgraceful behavior, however, that doesn’t mean that his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, will enter completely uncharted territory when he takes office.

One of Biden’s first tasks will be to heal a nation that has lost faith in its institutions after the presidency has been disgraced and the other branches of government failed to provide a real check. In that regard, Biden can take a page from the book of President Gerald Ford, the man who followed Richard Nixon in the White House after the Watergate scandal.

The Watergate scandal occurred because five burglars were arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices during the 1972 presidential election. After it was revealed that Nixon had attempted to cover up various activities following the burglary and in other ways interfered in the investigation, he was pressured into resigning before his inevitable impeachment. Normally this would have meant that the person elected as Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, would have taken over, but Agnew had resigned less than a year earlier after being accused of bribery, tax fraud and extortion. Agnew ultimately pleaded no contest to one felony charge of tax evasion and was replaced by Ford under the 25th Amendment. That meant Ford was next in line when Nixon left office in 1974 (at that time, interestingly enough, Biden was already serving his first term as a senator from Delaware).

Ford faced an unenviable task. He was the first and to this day the only president who took office without having been elected to either the presidency or vice presidency. American partisanship was extremely vicious in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War in which thousands of Americans died due to government incompetence, a floundering economy, and a gas shortage. Similarly, Biden has to take over after hundreds of thousands needlessly died due to Trump’s incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic, the economy is in horrific shape, climate change threatens to destroy the planet and Trump has convinced millions to falsely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Yet each president also had the advantage of comparatively high approval ratings. The initial Gallup Poll taken after Ford assumed office had him at 71%, whereas a recent Pew Poll found that 64% of Americans approve of Biden’s conduct since Election Day and 58% approve of how he has explained his upcoming policies and plans. Biden has the added benefit of Trump’s approval rating plummeting due to the Capitol Riot, with that same Pew survey finding Trump with a measly 29% approval rating and 76% of Americans holding a negative view of his post-election behavior. A Quinnipiac Poll last week found Trump’s approval rating is at 33% while his unfavorable numbers are at 60% and an average of recent polls at FiveThirtyEight.com said that Trump’s approval rating is at only 38%. Overall Biden enters office with a 49.9% favorable rating and a 43% unfavorable rating, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average as of Friday, giving him a net favorable rating of 6.9%. That may seem unpromising but, considering that Biden is bound to be compared to Trump, it is more hopeful when you realize that RealClearPolitics shows Trump with an average favorable rating of 39.8% and an unfavorable rating of 57%, resulting in a net unfavorable rating of 17.2%.

The challenge now is what each president should do with that public support. What can Biden learn from Ford? What did Ford do right — and what did he do wrong?

“He began things off on a good note,” V. Scott Kaufman, a historian at Francis Marion University who wrote a biography of Ford, told Salon. “He said our national nightmare is over. He reached out to groups like the Black Congressional Caucus to try to say, ‘Look, I’m not like Richard Nixon. I want to reach out to all Americans.’ He also approached things so he came across as just your average American, while Richard Nixon was very aloof, was not very gregarious.” As Kaufman emphasized to Salon, Ford did his best to focus on bringing Americans from all walks of life together and focusing on the shared problems that they faced as Americans.

Kaufman’s views were echoed by Gleaves Whitney, executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation.

“In the wake of the Watergate scandal, President Ford knew the most important thing he could do to heal the nation was reinforce that he was trustworthy,” Whitney told Salon by email. “He just had to keep being himself. That meant he would lead by example. He would be transparent with the media. He would talk straight with the American people. And he would work his hardest to reestablish trust, at home and abroad, in the office of the presidency of the U.S.”

At the same time, Ford also made a very serious mistake.

“What he did wrong — and again, we can debate this — but pardoning Nixon,” Kaufman explained. “He did a very poor job of preparing the nation for that possibility. What he did came as a surprise not only to the average American, but even to members of his own party. And it only added to the belief that there’s a conspiracy out there. It came back to haunt him in the 1976 presidential election.”

There has been a lot of debate over whether Ford should have pardoned Nixon. For the rest of his life Ford defended his decision on the grounds that it allowed Americans to move past the Watergate scandal, which would have been impossible if Nixon had undergone a prolonged trial. Ford also cited the 1915 Supreme Court case Burdick v. United States, which held that accepting a pardon implies an admission of guilt. An obvious counter to those defenses is that, by setting a precedent in which a president could break the law and not be held legally accountable, Ford emboldened future presidential lawbreakers like Trump. Perhaps if Nixon had spent time in jail for his misconduct while trying to win in 1972, Trump wouldn’t have been brazen enough to try to win in 2020 by attempting to coerce Ukraine into smearing Biden and, later on, working to overturn the election results.

Either way, it is definitely clear that Ford paid a steep political price for how he handled the pardon, with his approval rating plummeting to 50% in the immediate aftermath and being stuck in the high 30s and 40s for most of the remainder of his presidency. If Ford had not pardoned Nixon, he could have capitalized on the massive goodwill he initially inherited, worked with members of both parties to achieve important things and even been elected to a term of his own. Instead the single thing he is most remembered for doing as president is pardoning Nixon.

This brings us to Biden. Although there will no doubt be pressure on him to pardon Trump — or at the very least discourage impeachment and prosecutions for the former president — he should not succumb to those pressures. All of the talk of “unity” will be nonsense because (a) Biden will alienate millions of Americans by sending the message that, once again, a criminal president is above the law and (b) it is absurd to think that die-hard Trump supporters will give Biden credit for going easy on Trump (or anything else, for that matter). While Biden should avoid seeming vindictive toward his predecessor, he will suffer immensely if he allows Trump to avoid the same legal consequences that ordinary Americans would face if they were accused of comparable crimes. The best way to unify the country is for people to have faith in Biden’s integrity and judgment, not simply for his disgraced predecessor to be out of the headlines.

In a similar vein, it will behoove Biden to emulate the example Ford set before he pardoned Nixon. While the hostility toward Biden is much greater in 2021 than the hostility toward Ford in 1974, that animus is almost entirely rooted in Trump’s bogus claims that the election was stolen; it is no more personal against Biden than it would have been against any other Democrat who beat Trump in the 2020 contest. Although die-hard Trump supporters will never let that go, the passage of time will likely cause the anti-Biden anger to fade for those who aren’t part of the Trump cult and will want to move on with their lives. Therefore, like Ford, Biden will have the opportunity to focus on the constructive things he wants to do as president — revive the economy, end the pandemic, fight climate change — and use his Senate and House majorities to achieve them.

This, too, will not be easy. But when Ford focused on being proactive in solving America’s problems, and using his genial image to seem like a well-intentioned statesman, Americans warmed up to him. If Biden behaves honorably and similarly adopts a “let’s move forward” approach, he could similarly benefit… again, except among those who have a cult-like devotion to Trump, and are therefore beyond hope.

This doesn’t mean that Biden won’t face unique challenges. Perhaps the biggest one is that Republican timidity is much greater now than in the 1970s, when Nixon’s own party played an instrumental role in convincing him to step down. For example, when Salon reached out to Ford’s 1976 vice presidential running mate, Bob Dole, for his thoughts on what Americans can learn from Ford’s presidency, a representative from Dole’s team told Salon that “he has been entirely laying low on the topic.” Salon pointed out that this was surprising, given that Dole should at least be willing to go on record saying Ford would not have approved of the Capitol Riot, and asked whether Dole personally disapproved of the riot and believed Ford would have as well. Dole’s camp did not reply.

This may speak to the fact that America is far more polarized in 2021 than it was in 1974.

“There are some similarities but many differences,” Whitney told Salon when asked to contrast Ford’s America in 1974 with Biden’s America in 2021. “Despite the turmoil of the Sixties, the social foundation of the U.S. was more intact in 1974 than it is today. There was more unum and less pluribus then. More Americans shared common beliefs and values when it came to religion, economics, politics, and society than they do today. Given our divisions today, it will be extremely difficult for President-elect Biden to bring about more unity. He will have to work at least as hard as President Ford did to start the healing process. But he has to do it. It is Job One.”

Incidentally, Ford’s successor President Jimmy Carter had a similar observation when he was interviewed by this reporter in 2018 about the 1970s, observing that “we still have the same crises of that time, plus a serious loss of faith in democracy, the truth, treating all people as equals, each generation believing life would be better, America has a good system of justice, etc.”

As for what Ford would have thought of the Capitol Riot? Kaufman shared a revealing anecdote.

“After Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, President Ford departed the White House via helicopter,” Kaufman wrote to Salon. “As he flew over the Capitol building, he said, with tears in his eyes, ‘That’s my real home.’ For a person who had served in Congress for a quarter century, Ford knew that that ‘home’ was where the representatives of the people conducted business for American people. It is a hallowed place, a symbol of democracy. Had he been alive today and witnessed a group of thugs break into the Capitol, ransack it, and desecrate his statue by putting a Trump flag in his hand and a MAGA hat on his head, he would have been irate.”

With U.S. on edge and Trump still in power, state capitals on guard against far-right “shock troops”

With less than a week until President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration—which will come in the wake of outgoing President Donald Trump’s historic second impeachment for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—Washington, D.C. and communities across the country are heeding the FBI’s recent warning and bracing for more violence.

While, according to Military Times, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy has authorized up to 21,000 National Guard members from throughout the United States to help provide security for next Wednesday’s inauguration, the FBI earlier this week warned that right-wing groups are also planning armed insurrections in state capitals nationwide.

“The biggest threat posed by right-wing extremists is not in Washington, D.C., but in state capitals, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former law-enforcement officials, local authorities, and domestic-extremism experts,” TIMEreported Thursday. “For years, local law enforcement officials have largely failed to keep pace with the growing menace of right-wing violence and are ill-equipped to track the network of extremists operating in their jurisdictions.”

TIME: "Amid the escalating tension, state and local efforts are also being hampered by the consequences of the Trump Administration’s decision to gut federal programs and grants meant to combat far-right extremism” https://t.co/AroF0cmM6b

— Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) January 14, 2021

“If you have people showing up to state capitals with weapons, even if they don’t have the intent of launching an attack, the prospects for confusion or miscommunication are much higher,” Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, told TIME. “That’s what I’m concerned about—Lansing, Michigan, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Richmond, Virginia, and the Pacific Northwest in the coming days and weeks.”

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Officials in Pennsylvania haven’t identified specific threats to Harrisburg, but Gov. Tom Wolf is ordering the Capitol to close Tuesday, when three statewide officials are to be sworn in, and Wednesday, Biden’s inauguration. The Capitol complex has been generally closed to the public amid the pandemic, and the state Senate said its offices would close Saturday through Wednesday.

The administration activated 450 members of the Pennsylvania National Guard to assist State Police, Capitol Police, and Harrisburg Police in securing government buildings and other potential targets across the commonwealth. Police plan to close streets around the Capitol ahead of any demonstrations, and State Police are providing aviation support in the form of helicopters and drones.

Clarke told the newspaper that securing the U.S. Capitol is essential but he also worries that as it becomes more “hardened” thanks to the flood of National Guard troops pouring into D.C., state capitals will become bigger targets, particularly states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, with established militias.

At the Wisconsin statehouse in Madison, for example, the lower-floor windows have already been boarded up in preparation for possible violence on Sunday, January 17—a date that has been reported as a focus for some right-wing, pro-Trump elements.

Windows boarded up as precaution for potential protests:
@nbc15_madison https://t.co/1Gws462PL8

— Elise Romas (@EliseRomas) January 11, 2021

In April 2020—just days after Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”—armed gunmen stormed the statehouse, demanding an end to public health measures related to the coronavirus pandemic, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order. In October, federal and state officials announced terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges against 13 men accused of plotting to kidnap Whitmer as well as an attack on the Michigan State Capitol.

The Michigan Capitol Commission on Monday voted unanimously to ban the open carry of guns inside the building, after resisting such a move for years. According to the Detroit Free Press, “Critics say the ban does not go far enough and the commission should ban all firearms inside the Capitol, whether they are carried openly or concealed, by anyone who is not law enforcement.”

Other states are also boosting security around government buildings, from California to Georgia to Texas to Washington state, NPR noted Wednesday.

Amnesty International USA wrote in an open letter to U.S. mayors, governors, and state attorneys general on Wednesday that it “is deeply concerned by reports that armed white supremacist groups and individuals are planning further disruption” and urges local and state leaders “to do everything in your power and within human rights standards and obligations to protect people from violence by these armed groups and individuals, and to condemn white supremacy.”

You have the right to be free from fear of armed violence.

Tell your governor and mayor you demand safety from white supremacists and armed groups: https://t.co/7Y9aOczYIJ

— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) January 14, 2021

In a statement Wednesday afternoon, Trump—who was banned from various online platforms after the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol—said: “In light of reports of more demonstrations, I urge that there must be NO violence, NO lawbreaking, and NO vandalism of any kind. That is not what I stand for, and it is not what America stands for. I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers. Thank You.”

After the Democrat-controlled U.S. House impeached the president an unprecedented second time later Wednesday—noting that at a rally before the attack, he repeated lies about the November election and urged the crowd to march to the U.S. Capitol—Trump released a video with similar remarks discouraging violence.

However, some experts worry that even if Trump sticks to those talking points in the days ahead and leaves office because Biden is sworn in—rather than being removed via the 25th Amendment or a Senate vote before the inauguration—violence from right-wing groups will continue across the country.

“There’s more threats now and the online chatter feels more violent and energized than at any point in the past four years,” Clarke told the Inquirer. “The Capitol siege has provided far-right extremists with significant momentum.”

As TIME put it:

The forces that converged to cause chaos in D.C. have been building across the country for years, from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 to armed demonstrators who overcame police and stormed the Michigan and Idaho statehouses this summer. While it was Trump’s election loss that galvanized them to act on January 6, their far-right, anti-government, white supremacist, and other causes won’t end with his time in the White House. Now, newly emboldened by what they view as a successful siege on January 6, they have dispersed back into their communities, preparing for the next round of armed demonstrations, not just timed to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration but in the future.

Michael German, a retired FBI special agent who is now a fellow with the Liberty & National Security Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, told the outlet that “it has created a real nightmare here.”

“Many of the people committing violence at these rallies have been conditioned to believe that law enforcement will allow it to happen,” he explained. “They believe they’re the shock troops of the United States. Not just organized groups, but a lot of people you have taught that acting violently against their political enemies is okay. It’s hard to put that back into the bottle.”

How two friends’ farcical, failed schemes ended with the biggest fail of all: Stop the Steal

In January 2013, a 26-year-old right-wing blogger named Ali Akbar joined the campaign of Curtis Bostic, a former Charleston, South Carolina, city councilman and Tea Party conservative who was running against disgraced former governor Mark Sanford in a Republican congressional primary. Bostic lost to Sanford (who served two more terms in the House before getting primaried out in 2018), and the campaign disassociated itself from Akbar, whose history as a convicted felon and hack political operative had caught up with him once again.

But over those first three months of 2013, Akbar — now known to the world as Ali Alexander, architect of the 2020 Stop the Steal movement — befriended the candidate’s son, Daniel Bostic, then a 20-year-old aspiring model and actor who over the next eight years would partner with Ali in a number of failed ventures, including a cryptocurrency project, a listless consulting agency, a defunct MAGA gossip blog, and a scam donation project created with right-wing trolls Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer. The partnership’s lasting contribution to the world, however, came earlier this month, when the massive pro-Trump rally they organized on the National Mall on Jan. 6 turned into a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, defiling the seat of American democracy and leaving half a dozen people dead, including two police officers.

Back in 2013, Akbar (as he was then known), a fast-talking aspiring strategist from the Dallas-Fort Worth region, had been casting about for a new gig after Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid failed, taking with it his own efforts to make inroads with mainstream Republicans. Conservatives had grown increasingly wary of Akbar’s felony fraud convictions and other allegations of improper conduct, such as asking donors for personal information. Akbar’s political journalism project, known as National Bloggers Club, was struggling, too, after its founder’s history and conduct created complications for top advisers to the Romney campaign. (Akbar was first anti-Romney and then pro-Romney.) He claimed the site was a nonprofit but apparently never registered it as such with the IRS. Its current status is “revoked,” according to federal tax records.

“Akbar was a Libertarian, a Reagan conservative, and a Tea Party journo all at the same time,” said freelance reporter Ron Brynaert, whose complicated history with Akbar/Alexander stretches back more than a decade. “He’s always been a delusional liar with a messiah complex, who talks out of both sides of his mouth and contradicts himself.”

Under Akbar’s guiding hand, Slate awarded the Bostic campaign its “social media fail of the week” during the primary, specifically citing one of Akbar’s sites, ViralRead.com, as having become “a one-stop shop for #SC01 news, with a jaundiced view of Sanford.” Akbar had also created a hashtag that got a shout-out from former Republican senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who had co-sponsored Akbar’s CPAC “Blog Bash” parties two years in a row and flew in to campaign with Bostic for a day. Bostic did see a surge, but it was too little too late.

Notably, Akbar also created a since-deleted donations landing page “paid for by the committee to elect Curtis Bostic,” which was quite likely illegal, since the campaign denied ever officially hiring the convicted felon. After Bostic’s primary defeat, the campaign dismissed Akbar in the press as an overzealous volunteer.

But Akbar had grown close with Daniel Bostic, who had a certificate in theology from Appalachian Bible College and a few months experience as staff assistant to then-Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., now the state’s junior senator. Bostic yearned to be a professional actor, but had only landed a few regional ads, such as for American Eagle and Nokia, and some local short films, along with an extra role in an episode of “Army Wives,” which he described as something of a formative experience.

Akbar’s online footprint dries up a bit after Curtis Bostic’s defeat, but he re-entered the political sphere in 2014, with a hybrid PAC called the Black Conservatives Fund, which took in $150,000 from right-wing financier Robert Mercer. But for much of that spring and summer, it seems that Akbar devoted much of his time to helping Daniel Bostic convince people that he was a celebrity with a rabid, obsessive fan base.

Operation Bostic involved a coordinated lineup of fake Twitter fan accounts promoting a number of blog sites, interviews and press releases with Bostic fan content, which Bostic and Akbar most likely either commissioned or created themselves. The profile of one Twitter account, “Daniel’s Lover,” links out to a WordPress site called Daniel Bostic Daily, which the account would regularly promote in hundreds of tweets at a time, drawing hardly any response from the larger world. One tweet from May 29, 2013 (“Fans are CRAZY about Daniel’s Twitter!”) tags Akbar’s Twitter account and links to a Daniel Bostic Daily entry that itself quotes a since-deleted tweet from Akbar:

Few folks have the honest joy that @debostic has. It’s fun to watch happy positive people online.

— Ali A. Akbar (@ali) May 28, 2013

Three days later, the same blog published another entry titled, “Euphoria for Ladies — Daniel Bostic posted a shirtless picture and became an Instagram sensation,” which features said shirtless selfie and a quote about it from a website called Viral Read.

The news site VIRAL READ had this to say:

Walking the fine line between #hotmess and #hotness, Bostic wins the day and lands gracefully in the hotness column. Who knew this skinny kid had this hiding under his bro-tanks? He’s the eventual celebrity you’ll love to hate and we intend on watching him closely. All of him.

The now-defunct Viral Read was one of Akbar’s blog sites, which named controversial right-wing blogger Robert Stacy McCain as editor-in-chief on March 13, 2013, while Akbar was working in South Carolina. The Viral Read article on Bostic from May is similarly titled “Daniel Bostic, Hotness or Hotmess?” and begins like this:

ViralRead was first introduced to the young actor, Daniel Bostic, during a special election run-off in April where his father, Curtis Bostic was up against now-Congressman Mark Sanford. Our Publisher and Editor even traveled down to the lowcountry district. Sadly, they came back with zero pictures of him. Epic fail.

Other Bostic fan sites include “Bostiholics,” which migrated from the “allwewantisdaniel” blogspot site. “We are here for one reason and one reason alone,” reads the Bostiholics tag line. “We are OBSESSED with Daniel Bostic.” Other Twitter accounts include Dan Bostic Is Life and Dan Bostic Daily. It also seems that Akbar helped place Daniel-centric content in other outlets around that same time. In March 2013 alone, as Curtis Bostic was waging a vigorous campaign, posts about his fake celebrity son appeared on sites called Jakes Take, Daily Entertainment News and Entertainment Worlds, as well as in a Newswire press release titled, “Born To Be Distinguished, Daniel Bostic Has Made A Huge Difference In The World Of Acting.”

“Being young has not deterred this young actor from climbing heights in this intricate acting career,” the release says, then lists “exciting films” in which he has “made headlines”: “From Darkness into Light,” “Gone for the Day,” “Crash” (no, not that “Crash“), “Secrets in the Fall.” The release also says Bostic “is much into politics” and “a proud certified black belt Tae-Kwon-Do.” His LinkedIn and IMDb pages boast of the 2008 black belt, but for the art of karate.

Two months later, Bostic featured in another Newswire press release, titled, “Bostic Calls on His Fans to Support Oklahoma Tornado Victims.” The release is attributed to Marti Youngue, and gives a phone number and address. The address is tied to Curtis Bostic’s law firm, but the phone number belongs to Marti Young, former owner of a Nashville agency called Illuminating Talent, which at one point represented Daniel Bostic. Presented with the press release, Young told Salon in a text message, “Wow that’s the first time I ever saw this.”

While the extent of Akbar’s involvement in Bostic content creation is unclear, his prints appear to be on some of the self-promoting replies, including those aimed Dana Loesch and Michelle Malkin, who were relatively obscure at the time but would go on to become big names in right-wing political circles.

By 2014, however, Akbar had moved on from South Carolina’s low country, landing himself a consulting gig in Louisiana with his new Mercer-backed PAC, the Black Conservatives Fund. According to investigative journalist Lamar White Jr., this PAC was mostly a proxy for former Louisiana State Sen. Elbert Guillory, who at the time was putting together an ultimately unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor. CNBC reported the PAC distributed money that year to a handful of successful Black conservative candidates, including Rep. Mia Love of Utah, as well as Bostic’s former boss Tim Scott, who won South Carolina’s special election to the Senate in 2014.

Bostic in the meantime attended Anderson University, a private Christian school with both online and in-person degrees, eventually earning a BS in international business, according to his LinkedIn page. He appears to have done some political blogging, identifying as a never-Trumper in 2016 and becoming one of the few donors to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s ill-fated presidential campaign.

Politico reported in 2018 that a PAC advised by Akbar had accepted $60,000 from Mercer just before the 2016 presidential election. After Trump’s victory, Akbar popped up again amid the Unite the Right controversy, and in 2018 tried to help kickstart a Trump-centric alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) called the American Priority Conference, which collapsed in short order.

After that defeat, Alexander (having dumped his original surname at some point) teamed up with longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, who first conceived of the Stop the Steal movement — which, believe it or not, did not originate with the 2020 election. The name and the “movement” began with the 2018 midterms, and specifically with the Florida U.S. Senate campaign in which then-Gov. Rick Scott narrowly defeated incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. That was when Roger Stone launched the group as a kind of tribute or coda to his infamous “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount of 2000.

Alexander signed on to work for the “Stop the Steal” campaign, which was aimed at locking down Scott’s victory over Nelson. In a Periscope video, as reported in Right Wing Watch, Alexander said he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and “homeless people in all the adjacent counties” to keep an eye on the vote count in Broward County.

“Ali Alexander is a noxious political activist who often animates extremist groups and individuals to fulfill his activism goals,” Jared Holt, journalist and expert in domestic extremism, told Salon. “Political groups and organizations that have turned to him for his work should be embarrassed and ashamed. The fact that he has a molecule of influence in GOP organizing is a damning indictment of the priorities of pro-Trump politics.”

Alexander has associated with a number of young pro-Trump flunkies who would also seem to fit Holt’s description, as with his aforementioned ill-fated 2019 joint venture in Minneapolis with right-wing personality Laura Loomer and the recently-indicted Jacob Wohl.

That scam also involved Daniel Bostic. Alexander, Loomer and Wohl directed donations to a company called Cystra Ventures Ltd., which had been created in Bostic’s name just three weeks before the group met up in Minnesota. Cystra Ventures is apparently held under Cystra LLC, Bostic’s “consulting company,” whose website doesn’t work (this archived version does) but which received $14,477 in federal coronavirus small business loans this spring — after much apparent consternation on Bostic’s part.

Cystra appears to have been designed to get Bostic and Alexander in the cryptocurrency game. In late June 2017, less than two months before Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Alexander and Bostic teamed up to pitch a new cryptocurrency “focused heavily on free speech.” According to the pitch, the coin would be “a medium of exchange for individuals who value free speech above all else,” and would be exchanged on the Crown platform, based on the Dash network. “Our project will feature no pre-mine and a decentralized governance with the sole goal of promoting free speech,” they claimed.

Nothing came of this venture, shockingly, but the duo were back at it in 2018, cranking out a series of videos pitching the Crown crypto platform, whose “overarching goal is to build a community of dedicated users who maintain a free, legally compliant, open-access and decentralized sandbox economy.” Nothing came of that, either.

Then in 2019, Alexander launched a tabloid called Culttture, a right-wing organ that employed a handful of writers to write breathless gossip about MAGA-world’s second-string celebs, often plugging Alexander’s tweets and videos in the course of the day. The site’s homepage took a hiatus the next spring, however, citing the coronavirus pandemic (“China’s virus”) for the need to “simplify.” Although the homepage still promises a steady stream of content, that promise appears not to have materialized. Twitter suspended Culttture’s account when it suspended Alexander, on Jan. 10. Bostic had claimed on his Twitter profile to be a “lead at Culttture,” but deleted that sometime after Jan. 9.

Alexander also still retains control over the Black Conservatives Fund, and the group regularly promoted Stop the Steal rallies to its more than 80,000 Facebook followers. One post ahead of the Jan. 6 riots read: “D.C. becomes FORT TRUMP starting today. Fight to #StopTheSteal with President Trump.” It then listed rally locations, including at the Capitol building. That post disappeared from the Facebook page after an inquiry from CNBC.

That PAC’s treasurer, Patrick Krason, also happens to be treasurer for Stop the Steal PAC — the group that initially registered in November with Bostic as designated agent. During the two months prior to the riot, Bostic, who also listed himself as the media contact for Stop the Steal, helped organize rallies and sometimes addressed crowds briefly himself.

On Jan. 6, Bostic was in Washington with Alexander. The two can be clearly identified in video clips climbing the Capitol steps with Alex Jones. After the violence, Bostic tweeted, “This could’ve all been avoided if we were shown signatures and allowed to audit our elections. You cannot expect elections to be conducted in secret without repercussions. I do not in any way endorse violence, but path has been traversed time and time again throughout history.”

Two days after the attack, Bostic’s name was removed from the Stop the Steal PAC’s statement of organization. Bostic told Salon that “some answers are too long for Twitter,” adding that “you have slandered me, my friends, all to meet your monthly ad revenue quota.”

Salon then asked Krason, the PAC’s treasurer who manages compliance for a number of political committees, why Bostic was no longer a listed agent. Krason outlined a complex but plausible scenario in which he had to change bank accounts. Krason would not say what role, if any, Bostic had played in that well-timed change, and would not say whether Bostic had asked to remove his name, or why he had been listed as an agent to begin with.

After Alexander went into hiding, apparently concerned about the authorities, Bostic at first made his Twitter account private. He reopened it again this past Friday, having deleted all tweets prior to Jan. 5 (except for a New Year’s Eve post), as well as a number of tweets from Jan. 6, the day of the riot, including one that called Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer “evil” for posting an image of a Stacey Abrams votive candle. Bostic has also removed two tweets that appeared to show live-streamed video which he had captioned “Storming the Capitol.” Those tweets are archived here and here, but the media files appear inaccessible. He did, however post that the chants of “Stop the Steal” that day were “indescribable.”

That refrain, believe it or not, can be traced all the way back to the apparent beginning of Bostic and Alexander’s relationship. One of the first tweets from the “Daniel’s Lover” fan account is a retweet of an uncannily prescient post from Curtis Bostic, Daniel’s dad, whose underdog campaign had just hired Akbar, perhaps unofficially.

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” – Benjamin Franklin

10:47 AM · Jan 22, 2013·Twitter for iPhone

Alexander could not immediately be reached for comment.

Cleaner air and a climate solution, are now within reach — if we have the political will

Fifty years ago, as a young environmental lobbyist, my first big assignment came to fruit: Congress passed, and President Nixon signed, the Clean Air Act of 1970. That bill made the nation a promise: By 1977, the air in every community would be safe to breathe.

That deadline was missed and extended. Every subsequent extended deadline for air safe to breathe been missed. While the act is usually described as being a success, it has failed to achieve its fundamental purpose; clean air for every American. Cars are 99% cleaner than they were in 1970 — but Americans are still dying from breathing exhaust.

That’s because making individual pollution sources cleaner doesn’t protect our health. Today, 46% of the American people still live in communities where the the air is unfit to breathe. Sixty thousand Americans die from breathing this air each year. For the past 30 years progress has steadily slowed — and for the past three years emissions have actually increased.

Multiple factors have contributed to this 50-year history of failure: economic and population growth, inadequate enforcement of existing rules, Trump Administration rollbacks of previous standards, and industry resistance to filling in regulatory gaps.

But the underlying problem is deep, and structural. The Clean Air Act was written in 1970 on the premise that we couldn’t replace our dirty power plants, factories, refineries, cars, trucks and airplanes with truly clean innovations — we could only clean them up partially with add-on control devices.

The typical success story about the Clean Air Act remains rooted in this premise. Today’s pollution levels are compared with those of 1970 or, even worse, with how filthy today’s environment would be with 1970s technology — it would be worse than places like Delhi and Beijing.

That reporting is accurate. With some shocking exceptions, we have cleaned up each individual pollution source — but we are still losing the war. There is no way that 330 million Americans, at today’s consumption levels, can breathe clean air with energy from coal, oil and gas. The cleanest refinery, gas well, diesel truck or coal power plant isn’t clean enough to be a safe neighbor. The only way Americans can have air that’s safe to breathe is if we stop relying on burning fossil fuels. The last 50 years proves that.

Recognition of this dilemma actually preceded the 1970 legislation.

In 1969, the California State Senate defeated by one vote legislation premised on the alternative and, as we now know, correct idea — that the solution to air pollution had to be fundamentally clean new technologies, not the incremental cleanup of existing ones. The defeated California legislation would have banned the sale of internal combustion cars, and required 100% clean automobiles. California tried this alternative again in the 1990s, with a mandate that automakers start selling electric cars. Again, industry strangled the threat of an energy transition.

But the real breakthrough that showed we could, should and indeed must move to zero-emission technologies came with the development of solar and wind. Beginning with Iowa, states passed requirements that an initially small but growing share of a utility’s power must come from renewables. As more states adopted such zero-emission mandates, the cost of renewable power plunged with economies of scale. States then increased the required share of 100% clean power. Soon, wind and solar were cheaper than any other sources, and states like Oklahoma, with no government policy support at all, started seeing wind power supplant coal.

In 1998, California applied this idea to cars. That enabled Tesla to find a growing market for its electric vehicles. Other states joined. This year those states added trucks. Today, almost half the U.S. auto market is moving towards cars and trucks powered by electricity, not gasoline and diesel.

America’s homes and offices are the next ripe opportunity. A single gas stove, furnace or water heater emits enough nitrogen pollution to poison the air in an average kitchen. Cumulatively, such home appliances contribute more to California’s nitrogen oxide pollution than power plants. Yet the technology for all-electric buildings is well developed — in fact, half of new homes built every year are already emission-free.

Even better, cleaner is cheaper. Shifting to 100% clean energy for electrical generation, cars and trucks, as well as heating and cooling for buildings, will actually lower energy bills. The cost of the new clean-energy equipment will be more than paid back by consumer savings on fuel. The wind and the sun are, after all, free and local.

And replacing fossil technology in these uses brings ever-spreading benefits. If cars and trucks aren’t using oil, the need for refineries shrinks dramatically, with enormous health benefits for those who live near those facilities. If homes and offices are all electric, we won’t need to drill for natural gas. Neighboring communities will enjoy clean air. Indeed, the replacement of coal as a source of electricity is already reducing the exposure of communities across America to coal dust and coal ash pollution.

But the biggest benefit of all may be that if we replace fossil fuels in power plants, cars, trucks and offices — all of which we know how to do, while lowering consumer costs — we will also eliminate two-thirds of the contribution the U.S. makes to climate change. That’s right: If we take the Clean Air Act seriously, and fulfill the 50-year-old promise of air that is safe to breathe, by replacing fossil fuels with 100% clean energy, we also solve most of our contribution to the climate problem. And we do that while lowering ordinary people’s energy bills.

Americans are not as divided about climate as they used to be. But they have never been divided about the need for clean air for their families. So one way the Biden administration could start delivering on the new president’s promise to bring us together would be to sit down with the cities and states which have started deploying 100% clean energy technologies for power, transportation and buildings, take the lessons from these pioneering jurisdictions, and use the tools of the federal government to bring their benefits to all Americans, in every zip code.

Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden’s foreign policy team

Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media’s foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.

Nor do they know that from 2003 to 2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.

You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying “Fuck the EU” during a February 2014 phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.

During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be plotting to replace or undermine elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for favoring former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko to take over as prime minister, instead of the U.S. first choice, Artseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed took power after Yanukovych was ousted about three weeks later.

The “Fuck the EU” call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call’s authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies.

Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine’s elected government — and America’s responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.

In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan — co-founder of The Project for a New American Century — and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.

Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. How much more trouble could she stir up as the No. 3 official at Biden’s State Department? We’ll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her nomination.

Joe Biden should have learned from Barack Obama’s mistakes that appointments like this matter. In his first term, Obama allowed his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and military and CIA leaders held over from the Bush administration to ensure that endless war trumped his message of hope and change.

Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, ended up presiding over indefinite detentions without charges or trials at Guantánamo Bay, an escalation of drone strikes that killed innocent civilians, a deepening of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, a self-reinforcing cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism, and disastrous new wars in Libya and Syria.

With Clinton out and new personnel in top spots in his second term, Obama began to take charge of his own foreign policy. He started working directly with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to resolve crises in Syria and other hotspots. Putin helped avert an escalation of the war in Syria in September 2013 by negotiating the removal and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped Obama negotiate an interim agreement with Iran that led to the JCPOA nuclear deal.

But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a campaign to brand Obama as “weak” on foreign policy and remind him of their power.

With editorial help from Nuland, Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic article entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” proclaiming that “there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters.” Kagan called for an even more aggressive foreign policy to exorcise American fears of a multipolar world it can no longer dominate.

Obama invited Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons’ muscle-flexing pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.

The neocons’ coup de grace against Obama’s better angels came with Nuland’s 2014 coup in debt-ridden Ukraine, a strategic candidate for NATO membership right on Russia’s border.

When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a tantrum.

Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.

The EU trade agreement was to open Ukraine’s economy to European imports, but without a reciprocal opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine’s economic woes.

The muscle for Nuland’s $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and “other scum” during World War II.

After protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square turned into battles with police in February 2014, Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity government and hold new elections by the end of the year.

But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sector militia marched on and invaded the parliament building, a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and his members of parliament fled for their lives.

Facing the loss of its most vital strategic naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia accepted the overwhelming result (a 97% majority, with an 83% turnout) of a referendum in which Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, of which it had been a part from 1783 to 1954.

The majority Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine, triggering a bloody civil war between U.S.-backed and Russian-backed forces that still rages in 2021.

U.S.-Russian relations have never recovered, even as the two nations’ nuclear arsenals still pose the greatest single threat to our existence. Whatever Americans believe about the civil war in Ukraine and allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we must not allow the neocons and the military-industrial complex they serve to deter Biden from conducting vital diplomacy with Russia to steer us off a suicidal path toward nuclear war.

Nuland and the neocons, however, remain committed to an ever-more debilitating and dangerous Cold War with Russia and China to justify a militarist foreign policy and record Pentagon budgets. In a July 2020 Foreign Affairs article entitled “Pinning Down Putin,” Nuland absurdly claimed that Russia presents a greater threat to “the liberal world” than the Soviet Union posed during the old Cold War.

Nuland’s narrative rests on an utterly mythical and ahistorical narrative of Russian aggression and U.S. good intentions. She pretends that Russia’s military budget, which is one-tenth of America’s, is evidence of “Russian confrontation and militarization” and calls on the U.S. and its allies to counter Russia by “maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses to protect against Russia’s new weapons systems.”

Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days as U.S. ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush’s second term, she has been a supporter of NATO’s expansion all the way up to Russia’s border. She calls for “permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border.” We have pored over a map of Europe, but we can’t find a country called NATO with any borders at all. Nuland sees Russia’s commitment to defending itself after successive 20th-century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to NATO’s expansionist ambitions.

Nuland’s militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and “liberal interventionists,” which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.

As Obama learned too late, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time can, with a shove in the wrong direction, unleash years of intractable violence, chaos and international discord. Victoria Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden’s State Department, waiting to sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama’s second-term diplomacy.

How Trump’s language shifted in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot

On Jan. 6, the world witnessed how language can incite violence.

One after another, a series of speakers at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse in Washington redoubled the messages of anger and outrage.

This rhetoric culminated with a directive by the president to go to the Capitol building to embolden Republicans in Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Fight like hell,” President Donald Trump implored his supporters. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Shortly thereafter, some of Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol.

Throughout his presidency, Trump’s unorthodox use of language has fascinated linguists and social scientists. But it wasn’t just his words that day that led to the violence.

Starting with a speech he made on Dec. 2 – in which he made his case for election fraud – we analyzed six public addresses Trump made before and after the riot at the Capitol building. The others were the campaign rally ahead of the runoff elections in Georgia, the speech he made at the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, the videotaped message that aired later that same day, his denouncement of the violence on Jan. 7 and his speech en route to Texas on Jan. 12.

Together, they reveal how the president’s language escalated in intensity in the weeks and days leading up to the riots.

Finding patterns in language

Textual analysis – converting words into numbers that can be analyzed as data – can identify patterns in the types of words people use, including their syntax, semantics and vocabulary choice. Linguistic analysis can reveal latent trends in the speaker’s psychological, emotional and physical states beneath the surface of what’s being heard or read.

This sort of analysis has led to a number of discoveries.

For example, researchers have used it to identify the authors of The Federalist Papers, the Unabomber manifesto and a novel written by J.K. Rowling under a pseudonym.

Textual analysis continues to offer fresh political insights, such as its use to advance the theory that social media posts attributed to QAnon are actually written by two different people.

The “official” sounding Trump

Contrary to popular thinking, Trump does not universally use inflammatory rhetoric. While he is well known for his unique speaking style and his once-frequent social media posts, in official settings his language has been quite similar to that of other presidents.

Researchers have noted how people routinely alter their speaking and writing depending on whether a setting is formal or informal. In formal venues, like the State of the Union speeches, textual analysis has found Trump to use language in ways that echo his predecessors.

In addition, a recent study analyzed 10,000 words from Trump’s and President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign speeches. It concluded – perhaps surprisingly – that Trump and Biden’s language was similar.

Both men used ample emotional language – the kind that aims to persuade people to vote – at roughly the same rates. They also used comparable rates of positive language, as well as language related to trust, anticipation and surprise. One possible reason for this could be the audience, and the persuasive and evocative nature of campaign speeches themselves, rather than individual differences between speakers.

The road to incitement

Of course, Trump has, at times, used overtly dire and violent language.

After studying Trump’s speeches before the storming of the Capitol building, we found some underlying patterns. If it seemed there was a growing sense of momentum and action in his speeches, it’s because there was.

From early December to early January, there was an increase in the use of words that convey movement and motion – terms like “change,” “follow” and “lead.”

This is important, because it signals that the undertone of the speeches, beyond the overt directives, was goading his supporters to take action. By contrast, passive voice is often used to distance oneself from something or someone. In addition, research on linguistic indicators of deception has found that people who are lying often use more motion words.

We also looked at Trump’s use of presidential language during the same time frame. Researchers have identified the hallmark features of presidential language. These include using more articles – “the,” “an,” “a” – prepositions, positive emotion, long words and, interestingly, swear words.

Trump used the most presidential language in the video recorded the day after the riots, in which he denounced the violence, and in his Dec. 2 election fraud speech. His other four speeches more closely match the level of presidential language reflected in his State of the Union speeches.

The violence at the Capitol building and impeachment of the president have only added fuel to a contentious period marked by a pandemic, an economic crisis, widespread protests over racial inequality, a heated presidential election and citizens divided over real and fake news.

In this context, the role of language to calm, reassure and unify is more important than ever – and in this task, Biden has a steep challenge ahead of him.

Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis and Leah Cathryn Windsor, Research Assistant Professor, University of Memphis

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

Biden terms vaccine rollout “a dismal failure” as he unveils pandemic response plan

In the past 24 hours, President-elect Joe Biden has delivered two speeches focused on the nation’s covid response.

Thursday night, he laid out a $1.9 trillion-dollar plan to address what he’s calling the “twin crises” of the covid-19 pandemic and the economy.

Biden proposed, among other things, that Congress allocate funds for implementing a national vaccination program, reopening schools, sending $1,400 checks to Americans who need them, providing support for small businesses and extending unemployment insurance. He also proposed increasing subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance coverage, and providing more assistance for housing, nutrition and child care.

The plan is ambitious and will likely face some pushback in Congress. (Read PolitiFact’s analysis here.)

Friday afternoon he offered a more detailed take on his vaccine distribution plan.

On his first day in office, he said, he will instruct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start setting up mass vaccination centers across the country. Biden promised to have 100 of these sites set up by the end of his first month in office.

He also said his administration will work with pharmacies across the country to distribute vaccine more effectively and employ the Defense Production Act to ensure adequate vaccine supplies. His administration will also launch a public education campaign to address vaccine hesitancy and ensure that marginalized communities will be reached.

Biden maintained during the speech that he intends to reach the goal of “100 million shots the first 100 days in office.” He also said he will stick with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest recommendation to distribute covid vaccines to those who are 65 and older, as well as essential workers, to push states to allocate the supply quickly.

During his Thursday speech outlining what he’s dubbed the “American Rescue Plan,” Biden made several claims about the current response to the pandemic and how it’s affecting Americans. We fact-checked and gave context to a couple of the president-elect’s statements.

“The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a dismal failure thus far.”

The vaccine rollout is far short of what officials promised. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker, since mid-December, when vaccines first started being distributed, about 30 million doses have been sent out. But only about 11 million have actually been administered into the arms of Americans. The Department of Health and Human Services had initially issued a goal of administering 20 million doses by the end of December.

A key reason for the slow pace, experts said, is that many state and local health departments lack the funding and resources to execute such a mass vaccination campaign. Communication with the federal government has also been dicey. Many states have complained that they aren’t informed about how much vaccine they will receive and when — making logistical planning difficult. In addition, the outgoing Trump administration recently changed its recommendations for who should qualify, adding an additional layer of confusion.

Still, public health experts say part of the reason the initial rollout was slow was that it occurred during the December holidays, when many locations were understaffed. And since Congress approved a second covid stimulus bill, states will receive about $3 billion in funding, which will help efforts.

“One in 7 households in America — more than 1 in 5 Black and Latino households in America — report they don’t have enough food to eat.”

This is accurate. Estimates vary on the exact number of Americans who live in households that are food insecure, but Biden’s numbers match recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. The numbers translate to about 14% of all households and 20% of Black and Latino households.

The Census Bureau estimates food insecurity throughout the pandemic in a weekly report. According to numbers from December, 14% of all adults in the country reported their households sometimes or often not having enough food in the past seven days. The data from December also shows that 24% of Black households and 21% of Latino households did not have enough to eat.

A Northwestern University study estimates that at one point during the pandemic, nearly 23% of households experienced food insecurity.

“These crises are straining the budgets of states and cities and tribal communities that are forced to consider layoff and service restrictions of the most needed workers.”

This is accurate. State and local governments generally by law are required to balance their operating budgets, resulting in layoffs and reductions in services — though federal aid provided through covid relief helped. Late last year, the Brookings Institution projected state and local revenues would decline by $155 billion in 2020 and $167 billion in 2021. According to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states and localities had furloughed or laid off 1.2 million workers through October 2020. Brookings also noted that, because state and local governments “are at the forefront of the response to the pandemic,” they “will likely need to increase their typical spending to provide crucial public health services and help communities adapt to social distancing guidelines.”

Additionally, news reports starting early last summer detail a high number of health care workers being laid off or losing their jobs during the pandemic. Public health workers have also been furloughed or had their hours cut, despite having to create covid testing sites, initiate contact tracing programs and now create mass vaccination campaigns.

“Over the last year alone, over 600,000 educators have lost their jobs in our cities and towns.”

This is a softened version of a previous claim about laid-off “teachers” that we rated Mostly False. This number likely refers to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that shows the number of local government education jobs declined from March to October by 666,000.

But that number doesn’t refer only to layoffs. Rather, it notes a net decrease in jobs. Reports show that, during the pandemic, some educators have quit, retired or taken a leave of absence.

It’s also not clear what type of educators Biden was referring to, and though the BLS does track layoff data by industry, it lumps state and local education data together, which means public college staff numbers are included. The BLS data shows that from March to October, 39,000 state and local educators were laid off or discharged.

Source List:

Associated Press, “Teacher Departures Leave Schools Scrambling for Substitutes,” Sept. 13, 2020

Becker’s Hospital Review, “Record Number of Healthcare Workers Laid Off, Furloughed During Pandemic,” June 5, 2020

The Brookings Institution, “How Much Is COVID-19 Hurting State and Local Revenues?” Sept. 24, 2020

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics Survey (National), accessed Jan. 15, 2021

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, accessed Jan. 15, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID Data Tracker – Vaccinations, accessed Jan. 15, 2021

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Tracking the COVID-19 Recession’s Effect on Food, Housing, and Employment Hardships,” Jan. 8, 2021 (updated Jan. 15)

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Pandemic’s Impact on State Revenues Less Than Earlier Expected But Still Severe,” Oct. 30, 2020

U.S. Census Bureau, Household Pulse Survey Data Tables, accessed Jan. 15, 2021

Kaiser Health News and Associated Press, “Hollowed-Out Public Health System Faces More Cuts Amid Virus,” July 1, 2020

Northwestern University, “How Much Has Food Insecurity Risen? Evidence from the Census Household Pulse Survey,” June 10, 2020

NPR, “As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than a Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs,” May 8, 2020

PolitiFact, “Biden Mischaracterizes Teacher Layoffs From Pandemic,” Nov. 20, 2020

Rev.com, “Joe Biden Speech Transcript on COVID-19 Economic Recovery Plan,” accessed Jan. 15, 2021

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

New video details tense moments as Capitol mob sought out lawmakers

More than 10 million people have seen the video shot by HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic showing a Black Capitol Police officer leading pro-Trump rioters away from where senators were holed up in the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Now, ProPublica has uncovered new footage — amid a trove of content archived from the now-shuttered social platform Parler — that reveals the raw moments before Officer Eugene Goodman’s actions. The clip, recorded minutes after crowds breached a barrier outside, allows the public to see and hear new details from a turbulent day that ultimately led to President Donald Trump’s second impeachment.

As the just-under-two-minute recording begins and the door is opened, cheers are heard from crowds of demonstrators gathered outside. Once inside, the mob fans out, passing a Senate appointments desk and heading toward a bank of elevators.

Half of the video depicts the showdown between Goodman and the angry mob, and lets viewers see more clearly the size of the crowd and its rage. “Where they countin’ the votes?!” yells a man in the crowd repeatedly after rioters approach Goodman, who was blocking a corridor and stairs that lead to the Senate floor and other key offices.

Goodman had been guarding the entrance before demonstrators broke open a door moments earlier on the west side of the Capitol. After a loud crack, rioters are seen streaming into the building to the sound of glass breaking. Some chanted “U-S-A” as they sought out lawmakers.

The video also shows the brief, but tense, standoff with Goodman as he keeps his hand on his gun holster. Goodman — eyes wide and mask sliding below his face — continues trying to keep the crowd at bay. “Don’t do it!” someone shouts.

It soon became clear that Goodman was outnumbered. He turns and heads up the stairs he had been blocking moments earlier.

“Are you going to beat us all?” a man in the crowd says. Seconds later, the camera pans to the floor and cuts out.

The Justice Department said this week that at least 30 people have been charged for crimes committed at the Capitol.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced a bill to award Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal for luring the mob away from lawmakers. Goodman is a 40-year-old U.S. Army veteran and deployed with the 101st Airborne Division to Iraq for a year, The Washington Post reported.

Video by Lucas Waldron and Maya Eliahou. Derek Willis, Jeff Kao, Lisa Song contributed reporting.

GOP nightmare about to come true: Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders

The long-held Republican nightmare that a champion of working-class people and the common good — someone who has dedicated his political career to curbing poverty and injustice while denouncing corporate greed, endless war and the cruelty of a for-profit health system that leaves millions upon millions uninsured or without affordable access to care — would assume the powerful position of chairing the Senate Budget Committee is about to become a reality.

“Time to face the harsh reality, socialist Bernie Sanders will become the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. He has vowed to use his position to enact his progressive agenda on healthcare, climate, infrastructure spending, and cutting defense spending,” Nikki Haley tweeted Saturday.

While this was meant to come from Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as an ominous warning, Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, was among those who shot back with a clever and simple quip. “Yes he has,” she tweeted in response.

Yes he has. https://t.co/wh9MGyj82h

— Jane O'Meara Sanders (@janeosanders) January 17, 2021

Not that Jane Sanders was alone:

Imagine being horrified by the prospect of spending more money on things that make life better for people everywhere and less on things designed to kill people outside the U.S. . . . https://t.co/gycEQYH0al

— Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) January 17, 2021

“You forgot to mention raising the minimum wage and taxing your rich friends,” the organizing group People for Bernie tweeted back at Haley.

Republican fears of Sanders taking over the committee go back to at least 2016 when Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, then-Speaker of the GOP-controlled House, said ahead of that year’s election: “If we lose the Senate, do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee? A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”

The GOP trepidation over such a reality is about to materialize now that Democrats have seized razor-thin majority control of the Senate. While the committee gavel has yet to be placed in his hand, Sanders and his staff have signaled in recent days that he will be ready and willing to wield it to push the incoming Biden administration — as well as Democratic leadership in the House and Senate — to enact the kind of bold, working-class friendly policies that fueled both of his presidential campaigns.

Among the chief powers that the chair of the committee will utilize is fostering legislation through the Senate using the budget reconciliation process — a procedural tool that will allow, even under current rules, legislation to pass with a simple majority.

On Sunday, Sanders posted this on social media:

For too long our country has prioritized corporate profits, tax cuts for the rich and military spending over investing in the American people.

That is what I will fight to change as Senate Budget Committee Chairman. pic.twitter.com/dqjJ9hPGJa

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 17, 2021

“Yes, we can, and we must use budget reconciliation to increase the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour with a simple majority vote in the Senate, just like Republicans did to pass massive tax breaks to the 1%,” declared Warren Gunnels, one of Sanders’ most senior aides, who went out of the way to identify himself as the “Incoming Majority Staff Director” for the “Senate Budget Committee” in a tweet Friday morning.

Following the Democratic wins in Georgia that gave the party back the majority in the Senate, Sanders told Politico in an interview that he has no plans to be sheepish from his perch atop the committee.

“I’m going to use reconciliation in as aggressive a way as I possibly can to address the terrible health and economic crises facing working people today,” Sanders told the news outlet. “As we speak, my staff and I are working. We’re working with Biden’s people. We’re working with Democratic leadership. We’ll be working with my colleagues in the House to figure out how we can come up with the most aggressive reconciliation bill to address the suffering of the American working families today.”

Nina Turner, national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign and now a candidate for U.S. House in her home state of Ohio, has been among those in the progressive movement championing the legislative potential of his powerful new role in the Senate:

Go Big, Mr. Chairman. We have a moral imperative. Hello Somebody🙌🏾https://t.co/7np4HnUuDE

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) January 12, 2021

In a tweet on Saturday evening, Sanders himself stated: “When Republicans controlled the Senate, they used the reconciliation process to provide huge tax breaks for the rich and large corporations. We’re going to use reconciliation to protect working families, the sick and the poor.”

Dead orangutans and burnt forests: Nature lovers see the ravages of climate change up close

Diane Vukovic loves newts, and is devastated that they are dying off.

The owner and author of the blog Mom Goes Camping told Salon by email that she spends a lot of time in nature, backpacking and camping, and particularly enjoys a glacier lake in the mountains of Kosovo perched 6,500 feet above sea level.

“The lake used to be full of newts as well as cool water beetles and other animals,” Vukovic reports. “You’ve got to understand that newts are very sensitive to pollution, so seeing newts in the wild is always a thrill: I know I’ve found an unspoiled place in nature. But, over the past few years, I started seeing fewer and fewer newts on our trips to the lake.”

Vukovic cannot prove definitively that their population decline is due to global warming, but there is plenty of evidence that global warming is hurting newt and salamander communities. She suspects that is the cause.

“Warmer winters mean less snow melt to keep glacial lakes filled,” Vukovic explained. “Higher temperatures dry up the mountain lakes even further, leaving the newts with nowhere to live. Newts, as well as other amphibians, are very sensitive to temperature changes. So, even if the lake doesn’t dry up completely, the animals still might not be able to survive.”

She added, mournfully, “It’s depressing knowing that one day I might return to the lake and find it — and all the life it held — completely gone.”

Climate change is often positioned as a vast, abstract, hard-to-fathom phenomena, something that the everyday person struggles to comprehend directly. Yet nature-lovers around the globe are seeing it manifest in their everyday lives, in parks, rivers and wildlife. And their stories are as tragic as they are alarming.

They come from all walks of life. Wesley Wheeler is a professional exterminator and self-described “nature-lover.” Wheeler has observed how our winters have become more mild, which is leading to a higher tick population and therefore more “truly nasty diseases” like Lyme Disease.

“Sustained cold is a major natural force that kills ticks and their eggs over the winter,” Wheeler wrote to Salon. “We’re getting fewer cold days, so more and more ticks are surviving and spreading disease across the northern US.” He recalled how, while on a hike in December, he found a tick attached to himself and was prescribed a dose of antibiotics that doctors hope will prevent Lyme Disease.

Wilderness Guide Steve Silberberg, who runs a business called Fitpacking, recalled to Salon in an email that he has regularly hiked through the Rocky Mountain National Park and noticed a troubling increase in the number of dead trees.

“Years ago, there were hardly any dead trees in Rocky Mountain National Park,” Silberberg explained. “By the time I started taking backpacking groups there in 2011 and 2012, you could see that maybe a quarter or even a third of the trees were dead and dying from the pine beetle infestation. The infestation is a result of warmer temperatures which allow these beetles two life cycles in a season instead of one. The beetles bore into the trees and ultimately kill them.”

He noted that the same phenomenon is occurring in the Black Hills of South Dakota, located near Mt. Rushmore, where “lots of pine beetles and dead trees. . . it’s only a matter of time before wildfire will strike.” Silberberg also talked about how the Troublesome Fire of 2020 “devastated” the tree population in the park.

Leif Cocks, founder of the conservation group The Orangutan Project, has first-hand experience observing how primates have suffered from climate change. As rainforests shrink in size, they are unable to generate as much rain, creating a toxic feedback loop in which rivers run dry, droughts become more common and local temperatures in the deforested areas of Indonesia spike beyond even the global averages.

“This means orangutans are not only dying from the destruction of their habitat, but their remaining rainforest is less productive,” Cocks explained. “Droughts mean the forest produces less fruit. In addition, the dry forest is more susceptible to increasing fires. This not only kills the orangutans directly, but causes the surviving orangutans to starve, as the fire destroys the fruit and the flowers of the already stressed forest system.”

He added that “unsustainable palm oil plantations and other monocultures that replace the rainforest are always planted in the lowland and riverine landscapes, leaving struggling wildlife to survive in remnant, least productive, highland forests.”

Cocks and his rescue teams have witnessed the horrific consequences. Cocks says they have observed “many burnt and starving orangutans . . . Skeletons with their babies hanging off their malnourished, dying frames. . . Desperate orangutans try to steal crops from community gardens or the unsustainable palm oil plantations that have replaced their rainforests, and are then seen as agricultural pests, and that’s when the real horror starts — they are macheted to death, petrol poured on them and set alight, or eyes shot out by pellet guns.”

“Sometimes rescue teams can save the babies, although they often have horrific physical and physiological injuries, which will remain for life,” Cocks added. “The road to extinction of these highly intelligent self-aware persons, now exacerbated by climate change, is a series of individual stories of horror beyond the average person’s imagination.”

There are economic consequences to climate change as well, some of which are manifesting already. Landon Yoder, an assistant professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, wrote to Salon about how the farmers he has interviewed are “on the front lines in dealing with climate change. Most of them have noticed that rainfall patterns have changed and that when it rains it’s more intense and less consistent.” To cope with this problem, he found that a lot of farmers are using cover crops, or a non-commercial crop that they plant after they’re done harvesting so that the soil will remain in place over the winter.

“Several colleagues and I went out and interviewed 30 farmers last year in southern Indiana, where there is already above-average use of cover crops, to see whether climate changes were driving the use of the practice,” Yoder explained. “We found that some farmers are using cover crops to deal with the intense rainfall, but that the learning process for cover crops is still challenging and that the additional spring rainfall from climate change in some cases has also discouraged some farmers from using cover crops because the additional moisture they retained delayed when they could terminate the cover crop and get into their fields to plant their cash crop.” Although farmers may be able to manage their problem with more experience, “it’s just one example where climate change is making it more complicated to farm and in some cases that can discourage farmers from continuing to use or expand cover crops.”

Finally there are the stories that have been experienced by literally millions of people, such as the wildfires that engulfed millions of acres in the west last year. For residents in those areas of California, Oregon and Washington, they had to watch in horror as the sky turned orange, the air filled with smoke and the wilderness around them was literally burnt to a crisp. That was only last year; climate change has led to an increase in wildfires in the American west for years now, even though wildfires used to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

“I remember waking up to a smoke-filled apartment as I had left the window open in my bedroom at night, and suddenly realizing what the deep red sky I noticed at sunset the night before had really meant – it was caused by the smoke particles in the atmosphere that hadn’t yet reached me but were on the way,” Ryan Sullivan, associate professor of chemistry and mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, wrote to Salon about his experience in the first month of his PhD program in chemistry at the University of California — San Diego. A large wildfire had broken out in the San Diego area.

“This was especially traumatic in my first year of graduate school,” Sullivan recalled. “I was living in off-campus housing about a mile from campus in a very suburban area. I had no car, but my roommate did. Campus and most businesses closed for two weeks.” He remembered how his apartment was filled with smoke for two weeks despite the windows being closed and the kitchen range vent remaining on.

Coty Jen, assistant professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, told Salon that she remembered the northern California wildfires of October/November 2017 while she lived in Berkeley, California, which she described as “a pretty surreal experience.” She recalled driving to the University of California — Berkeley’s campus and thinking it was hazy without realizing at first that it was due to the wildfires.

“Everywhere smelled like smoke and it continued for days,” she recalled. “Since I was researching wildfire smoke and how it impacts air pollution, I started collecting measurements of the smoke from our lab. We normally have to travel to sites to do outdoor measurements so it was really strange to just stick a sampling tube out the window of our lab to sample some smoke.” She reflected that “now major wildfires are happening every one to two years instead of once a lifetime.”

Conservatives, not liberals, are more inclined to value feelings over facts, psychology study finds

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” a quip that implies that empirical data is more important than anecdotal evidence. Yet a recent psychological study suggests that conservatives, not liberals, are far more apt to let their feelings to get in the way of accepting facts.

In a paper published in the journal Political Psychology in October, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College describe a pair of studies that they conducted to determine if there is a connection between a person’s political ideology and their willingness to accept scientific and non-scientific views on non-political subjects. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. They allowed the surveyed individuals to either rate one higher than the other, or argue that “both sides” were equal.

The researchers then conducted a pair of studies in 2018 in which participants, after being screened based on their political philosophy, “read a supposed article excerpt where a researcher was quoted as debunking a popular misconception. An alternative viewpoint followed, rejecting the researcher’s viewpoint.”

The authors of the paper found that, although conservatives and liberals both reported more favorable views of the science researcher than the rejecter, conservatives were more likely to think both sides were closer in legitimacy. They also found that in general conservatives held a less favorable view of the expert than liberals and a more favorable view of the rejecter than liberals.

Why are conservatives more likely to reject empirical data?

“From my understanding traditional conservatism is all about individualism, so more weight is given to an individual’s experience with any given phenomenon,” Dr. Alexander Swan, assistant professor of psychology at Eureka College and a co-author of the paper, told Salon by email. “This experience is fueled by our innate sense of intuition — what feels right to me? What makes sense?”

Although he noted that liberals are not immune to this tendency, Swan pointed out that modern conservative ideas are often opposed to scientific conclusions, citing as one example how many conservatives are skeptical of the reality of man-made climate change because “this would impact the capitalistic pursuit.”

Dr. Randy Stein, assistant professor of marketing at Cal Poly Pomona and another co-author of the paper, had a similar observation, recalling in writing to Salon how an unnamed official from President George W. Bush’s administration once said that they are “not part of the ‘reality-based community,’ and studying reality is something you can do but studying it is subservient to creating it, and if you study it you’re kind of a sucker.” He described this as a “kind of imperialistic approach to reality, you can do your research but that’s just one way of looking at it, because in the end I’ll create my own.” Like Swan, Stein added that liberals can do this too, but it is more pronounced among conservatives in part because their media is hostile to institutions like academia and medicine whose conclusions contradict their biases.

“Keep in mind, political ideology is something you can pick,” Stein explained. “Trumpist/populist conservatism is pretty open as far as pushing ‘don’t believe what the media tells you’ and ‘don’t believe experts’ type thinking, so it’s going to be more attractive to those who think that way.”

Stein and Swan also saw a partial connection between their conclusions and the refusal of both President Donald Trump and many of his supporters to accept that President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

“In our studies we had people rate the perspectives of researchers and people arguing against the research. So that’s a bit different than a refusal to admit defeat, but it’s not in another universe entirely,” Stein observed. “If you’re an ‘all ways of looking at it are equally good’ kind of person, you’re increasing vulnerability to all sorts of ideas, and scattered, flimsy ‘evidence’ can start to sound legitimate even if there’s no evidence in a systematic sense.”

Swan argued to Salon that the 2020 election results are a “sticky subject and not really an extension of our research” because “the outcome of the election isn’t a belief in science or not, but rather a faith in our democratic institutions and practices.” He argued that propaganda plays a role, for instance, in refusal to accept the election results and that he is hesitant to apply their findings to the elections. He added, however, that people need to trust the institutions and individuals producing evidence in order to have faith in them. “I think there is a pretty clear marker in this instance that distrust was deliberately sown over months and months.”

Swan also emphasized that he was not arguing for people to “blindly accept what scientists say,” but instead that they should look at the strength of evidence regarding certain conclusions. “The more you grapple with this difference at all levels of education, the more scientifically literate a person is, a stronger critical thinker they become, and it doesn’t allow for confirmation bias to take hold by allowing somebody to just nod along with their side because it aligns with a pre-existing belief (e.g., creationism taught side-by-side with evolution.)”