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Trump’s loss was radicalizing: His promise to “cheat” the system has further deluded his fans

For years, many liberals have been confused by why so many Donald Trump voters seem unperturbed by all his criming and cheating. To understand Trump’s supporters, it’s important to understand that they don’t believe he’s a good person. On the contrary, the appeal of Trump from the beginning was a belief that he’s a liar, a cheat, and a crook — but one who would implement his evil-doing skills towards goals Republican voters support, with triggering the liberals and snagging all the government goodies for their tribe at the expense of other Americans at the top of the list.  

This wasn’t exactly subtle. Trump repeatedly promised his supporters during the 2016 campaign that “Nobody knows the system better than I do.” He often bragged about his supposed skills at buying off and working politicians. 

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy,” Trump crowed to an adoring crowd in early 2016. “But now I want to be greedy for the United States. I want to grab all that money. I’m going to be greedy for the United States.”

The key is realizing that the typical Trump supporter, as I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, sees himself as in on the con. Indeed, the easiest way to hoodwink someone is to convince them that they’re part of the conspiracy, that they’re the ones getting one over on someone else. Trump’s story for his supporters was that all of politics is a rigged game, but this time he was rigging it for them. 

All of which explains why Trump supporters, like their idol, are losing their minds right now. They elected a man who assured them he knew all the tricks and could get away with breaking any rule. But despite all his efforts at stealing the election from Joe Biden — and all the money he’s raised from them to do so — Trump is failing. Trump’s voters never believed he was an honest man, yet they got snookered by the biggest lie of all: that he had almost god-like powers to cheat the system. 

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The result is a nationwide tantrum from Trump’s devout followers, who are raging incoherently at every opportunity, stunned and mentally wrecked by the revelation that Trump does not, in fact, have some secret plan to undo the election he lost. 

On Monday, state legislators in Oregon got together to discuss proposals to mitigate the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, a session that was closed to the public for health reasons. But outside, an armed and delusional crowd of Trump supporters — about 300 in number — gathered, screaming conspiracy theories about a “stolen” election that Trump has floated to justify his attempted coup. They also denounced restrictions on public gatherings and mask requirements that have been passed to curb the pandemic. 

The protesters weren’t allowed in the capitol building so they decided to storm the place with guns. They were met with state troopers in riot gear, but the troopers were understandably spooked and hesitant at times since they were dealing with an armed mob in thrall to dangerous delusions. 

To make it worse, inside the capitol building, some Republican legislators were egging the armed militants on. Republican state senator Dallas Heard, in particular, went on a rant about how it was an “illegitimate session” because of the crowd restrictions and threatened that the “adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces,” clearly intending to conflate people who believe in science and democracy with “adversaries of the Lord”. 

On the same day, across the country in Georgia, the two incumbent Republicans trying to keep their Senate seats in January’s run-off election were having a bad time at what was supposed to be a campaign rally.

Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue found it was hard to be heard over throngs of Republican voters chanting “stop the steal,” which has become the rallying cry for people who support Trump’s efforts to steal the election. (Confusing, I know, for pro-steal people to declare they’re the victims of election theft, but psychological projection is the beating heart of modern conservatism.) 

It’s unlikely to hurt the electoral prospects of either Senator, to be clear — conservatives may be delusional, but they still know better than to give their power away by not voting. But the situation shows that Republican voters aren’t ready to “move on”, and are still angry and confused about why the president they voted for, the man who assured them he knew all the tricks to cheat the system, the man who claimed he had an “elite strike force” at his disposal, can’t figure out how to nullify the election. 

Meanwhile, a chorus of increasingly deranged voices are pushing Trump voters further and further towards the edge.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, keeps demanding that Trump declare martial law and threatening violence if the president fails to comply. The military coup plan is also being pushed by the Epoch Times, a far-right conspiracy theory-laden rag that has grown in popularity as irate conservative audiences reject Fox News for not being unhinged enough. The Family Research Council, which is an incredibly powerful lobbying force in the GOP, has also been putting out “prayers” (which are really press releases) asking God to “expose all election interference and voter fraud engineered by foreign enemies.” 

Tuesday morning, Axios released an article detailing how Trump has gone into berserker mode, accusing “everyone around him” of being “weak, stupid or disloyal” for not supporting a plan to use military or Department of Homeland Security powers to seize voting machines. (This wouldn’t work anyway, since the votes have been tallied and the Electoral College has certified Biden’s victory.)

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It’s definitely fun to imagine the suffering of Trump and all the people who have enabled him all these years, of course. One can even hope Trump will never recover and will spend the rest of his life lost in a miserable black hole of rage and paranoia. Unfortunately, however, Trump is taking his supporters with him, and that’s a problem.

We now have millions of Americans — nearly three-quarters of Republicans reject the legitimacy of the election — believing elections should only count if they win them. This is the mentality that led to the Civil War erupting in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s electoral win in 1860. But, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out in his newsletter, the different camps are no longer divided by geography, and “we are bound to each other, whether we like it or not.”

Don’t believe anyone who claims to know what will happen next, now that an entire political party — one that controls most state governments, the courts, and the Senate — has embraced an anti-democratic ideology. This is uncharted territory for the country. It may be that this is a temporary delusion and Trump voters will eventually chill out and start pretending they weren’t flirting with a fascist coup. Or they could become more hardened and violent with time. Or it could be that some go one way and others become terrorists. The scariest thing of all is that we won’t know how this Trump-induced delusion shakes out for months, or even years to come. 

Ritz cracker shortbread is a holiday miracle

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. This week, we’re turning crackers into cookies.

* * *

Shortbread’s ingredient list is so little to begin with—just flour, butter, and sugar—that if you took away anything, the whole shebang would fall apart. But this snackable rendition calls for no flour, not all-purpose, not pastry, not whole-wheat. Instead: a box of crackers that might already be in your pantry.

To be clear: No disrespect to flour. In most cookies, especially shortbread, this is the foundation of the house. Still, all-purpose is as mild as mild gets, practically flavorless, a blank page with a blinking cursor waiting for someone to start typing.

This seems like a waste when flour is the main ingredient in a few-ingredient recipe. Typically, shortbread follows a ratio of three parts flour to two parts butter to one part sugar by weight. Another popular template is one cup of flour (about 128 grams) to one stick of butter (about 113 grams). Either way, flour leads the charge.

Which is why, when you swap in another ingredient — one that’s louder and brasher and more opinionated — the whole recipe changes for the better.

Ritz crackers are mostly flour to begin with, but along the way, they become buttery and rich, salty and sweet, and impossible to eat just one. When buzzed in a food processor, they take on the consistency of fine cornmeal, a flour look-a-like with loads more personality.

This flavor-forward trick is well-known in crumb crusts for pies. Think: graham crackers, Oreos, or saltines. So why not extend the same technique to cookies? Who’s stopping us?

Of course, Ritz shortbread is stellar as dessert, with a nip of whisky or cup of tea. But it’s equally at-home with coffee as an afternoon pick-me-up. Or even a can of beer once five o’ clock strikes. The savory sweetness (or sweet savoriness?) doesn’t want to be put in a corner.

After you try this recipe, I hope you’ll keep going. I hope you’ll venture toward saltines and Cheez-Its and Goldfish and pretzels—and we could be here all day, and isn’t that fun?

***

Recipe: Ritz Cracker Shortbread

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cook time: 40 minutes

Makes: 16 cookies

Ingredients

  • 2 sleeves (about 200 grams) Ritz crackers
  • 1/2 cup (63 grams) confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (heaping if you’re feeling salty)
  • 1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter, at a cool room temperature, cubed

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 325°F. 
  2. Add the crackers to a food processor and run until a powdery flour forms. Pulse in the sugar and salt. Sprinkle the butter cubes on top and pulse again until a clumpy, lumpy, streusel-ish mixture forms — it shouldn’t turn into one big blob, but it should easily hold together when squeezed between your fingers. 
  3. Dump the shortbread dough into an 8×8-inch baking dish. Use your hand to evenly flatten, then use a fork to prick all over. 
  4. Bake for about 40 minutes, until golden brown and dry to the touch. After you remove the pan from the oven, immediately cut the shortbread into 16 squares, then let cool completely before serving.

Why Facebook antitrust case relies so heavily on Mark Zuckerberg’s emails

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own words play a starring role in the government’s case to break up his social network.

“It is better to buy than compete,” he allegedly wrote in an email in 2008, according to the lawsuit. Four years later, after Facebook purchased what he had called a “very disruptive” photo-sharing app, he celebrated by explaining to a colleague in another email: “Instagram was our threat. … One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”

As an antitrust professor preparing a new spring course called “Antitrust for Big Tech,” I read the FTC’s Dec. 9 complaint with great interest. I have taught my students for years that internal documents can come back to haunt antitrust defendants. But I have never seen a plaintiff’s case rely so heavily on a CEO’s own words.

As I read the FTC’s summary of the arguments it plans to make at trial, I began to highlight every direct quote from an internal Facebook communication. My highlighter ran out of ink.

Basing a monopolization case on a CEO’s own explanations of his conduct may seem like a straightforward strategy to most people. But among judges and antitrust scholars, it’s actually controversial, as it is sure to be in this case.

Despite that controversy, the FTC’s choice to hoist Facebook by its own petard makes sense. Zuckerberg’s emails are voluminous and specific in describing how the mergers will insulate his company from competition. They avoid most of the problems critics have with using what lawyers call “hot documents” to make an antitrust case.

It worked against Microsoft

And anyway, it’s worked before.

The case against Facebook bears similarities to U.S. v. Microsoft, the landmark 2001 case that found the software company liable for monopolization. Here, the FTC will have to prove that Facebook, like Microsoft, acquired its market power in the social media market by excluding rivals, not merely by making a great product. And in both cases, internal statements by executives play a big role.

In the case, the government produced a 1995 memo in which Microsoft founder Bill Gates identified Netscape as “a new competitor ‘born’ on the internet.” A few years later, another executive allegedly said, “We are going to cut off [Netscape’s] air supply.”

When Microsoft proceeded to do so by impeding Netscape’s access to Windows users, statements like these made it hard for the company to argue that its conduct wasn’t predatory, and Microsoft lost the case.

As successful and intuitive as the strategy is, courts are surprisingly reluctant to hang their antitrust rulings on internal documents revealing an executive’s intent.

The problem with relying too much on internal emails

Judges often say that antitrust law is interested only in the economic effects of a business’s conduct – such as whether it suppressed competition – not the motives of its executives. Critics have argued that CEOs are not economists and are sometimes prone to chest-thumping braggadocio, making their emails and other communications better for wowing juries than making an economic argument.

Judges and scholars worry that juries will see all aggressive comments as evidence of exclusionary intent. But you can “destroy” a competitor by outdoing him; economists call that competition.

For example, Facebook’s employee manual reads: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, something else will.” That sounds ominous, but creating things to keep rival startups at bay is exactly what the antitrust laws want Facebook to do – innovate.

More fundamentally, relying on statements like these – where a defendant seems to reveal subjective intent – is controversial because the law is unclear about why or whether a defendant’s intent to suppress competition matters at all. The clearest statement we get on the issue – from U.S. v. Alcoa – is enigmatic: “To read the [law] as demanding any ‘specific’ intent, makes nonsense of it, for no monopolist monopolizes unconscious of what he is doing.”

Even lawyers haven’t been able to figure out exactly what that means.

The role of intent as evidence

On the other hand, other types of evidence may not be enough to make an antitrust case.

The inquiry in a monopolization case is often framed as whether the monopolist enjoys its market position because it excluded rivals or because it made a better or cheaper product. The difficulty with using only objective market evidence to answer that question is that the evidence usually points in both directions.

Defendants can almost always identify some product improvement that came from their conduct, muddying the waters of the plaintiff’s story of exclusion. In the Facebook case, the company has pointed to Instagram’s growing user base and improved interface during its time under Facebook’s control.

So in most monopolization cases, courts get stuck if they try to use only market facts to answer the ultimate question: Did the monopolist flourish because of the improvements or because of diminished competition?

That’s where “intent evidence” – information about what a defendant was thinking – can help. If a CEO intended a merger to insulate her company from competition, it likely did in fact insulate the company from competition. Judges will attribute some of the company’s dominance to exclusion, and that violates the antitrust laws.

That’s why judges will turn to evidence of intent, especially if it is more than just economically ambiguous declarations of war against rivals.

Neutralizing competitors

Unfortunately for Facebook, Zuckerberg’s emails are explicit and detailed in describing his desire to avoid competing with Instagram and WhatsApp. The court will find that relevant – and possibly damning.

For example, in the months leading up to the acquisition, Facebook’s chief financial officer outlined three reasons for buying Instagram:

“1) neutralize a potential competitor?… 2) acquire talent?… 3) integrate their products with ours in order to improve our service?” Zuckerberg responded, “It’s a combination of (1) and (3).”

Zuckerberg goes on to explain Instagram’s competitive threat at length. By the time he gets to the product improvement explanation, he’s changed his mind. “(3) is also a factor, but in reality we already know [Instagram’s] social dynamics and we will integrate them in the next 12-24 months anyway.”

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After the Microsoft case, many companies adopted communications policies that discourage the creation of documents just like these. Google, for one, circulates a five-point antitrust “communications safety” policy to employees.

What I find truly remarkable about this case is not the volume of internal quotes in the complaint, but the paper trail a sophisticated CEO like Zuckerberg created of Facebook’s transgressions – which is now why a federal antitrust lawsuit poses an existential threat to his company.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

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

Democrats open investigation into Trump’s handling of COVID: House watchdog subpoenas HHS, CDC heads

A House panel investigating the Trump administration’s coronavirus response issued subpoenas to two top health officials on Monday after finding extensive evidence of Trump political appointees interfering in scientific coronavirus reports.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., the chairman of the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, issued subpoenas to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ordering them to turn over “full and unredacted” documents sought by the panel for months after finding that political appointees tried to “alter or block” at least 13 CDC reports on the coronavirus.

“The subpoenas were necessary because the… investigation has revealed that efforts to interfere with scientific work at CDC were far more extensive and dangerous than previously known,” Clyburn said in a letter to the two officials. “Top political officials at HHS and CDC not only tolerated these efforts, but in some cases aided them — even after a senior official warned that CDC’s scientific writing ‘needs to remain an independent process’ and that the Administration’s attempts to influence these reports violated ‘long-standing policy.'”

Clyburn said the Trump appointees targeted reports that “provided evidence of the virus’s ‘early spread’ across the country and ‘massive spread’ this summer, which they believed sent ‘the wrong message’ about the Administration’s policies.” The appointees also “drafted rebuttals aimed at undercutting CDC’s credibility” and “attempted to muzzle CDC scientists by retaliating against career employees who provided truthful information to the public,” he wrote.

The efforts came at the same time that some Trump appointees at HHS were pushing for a “herd immunity” strategy to allow the coronavirus to infect large numbers of people.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd [immunity], and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,” Paul Alexander, who was then a science adviser to HHS spokesman Michael Caputo, wrote in a July email to top officials that was obtained by Politico. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc. have zero to little risk … so we use them to develop herd. … We want them infected.”

The World Health Organization has warned that achieving herd immunity by exposing people to the virus was “dangerous” and “unethical.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also warned that such a strategy would result in rampant death.

Clyburn said the officials must turn over all requested documents by December 30 so that investigators can determine “who in the Trump Administration was responsible for this political pressure campaign” and “whether it was intended to cripple the nation’s coronavirus response in a misguided effort to achieve herd immunity” after HHS repeatedly refused to comply with the panel’s requests and blocked lawmakers from interviewing Redfield and other top officials.

Clyburn launched the investigation in September after Politico reported that top Trump appointees sought to “intimidate the reports’ authors” and “water down” their findings because they “would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak.”

Earlier this month, a senior CDC official told the panel that Redfield ordered aides to delete an email showing evidence of interference from Alexander.

Alexander, who along with Caputo has since left the agency, had demanded the right to review the CDC reports and urged CDC officials to alter reports that broke with Trump’s messaging, emails obtained by Politico show. Alexander also tried to block Fauci from warning of the risk to children regarding the coronavirus. Clyburn’s letter detailed numerous communications in which Alexander and Caputo sought to “influence or block CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” and other publications as well as extensive pushback from career officials. Despite the pushback, Alexander sought to alter reports related to the use of hydroxychloroquine and face coverings, comorbidities, child vaccination, outbreaks and deaths among children, and coronavirus transmission in primary elections, according to the letter.

Emails obtained by the committee also show Caputo threatening officials.

“If you disobey my directions, you will be held accountable,” he wrote to one senior official.

Another official described Caputo’s behavior as “a pattern of hostile and threatening behavior directed at … communication staff at CDC.”

Caputo ultimately took a leave of absence in September after a public meltdown over pushback at the CDC and has since left the agency.

Dr. Charlotte Kent, the editor-in-chief of the reports, testified to the committee that Alexander “contacted her directly on numerous occasions to pressure her to make changes to Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports and to seek a larger role in the review process, in violation of longtime CDC and HHS policy to maintain the independence of these reports.”

HHS officials even drafted an op-ed attacking the CDC authors of the hydroxychloroquine report as a “disgrace to public service” because they could “prevent the news from giving the proper coverage of a true ‘miracle cure,'” according to the subcommittee. The op-ed was never published.

Trump has repeatedly pushed hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug shown to be ineffective against the coronavirus, and raised doubts about the use of masks. He has falsely claimed that children are “almost immune” from the coronavirus and insisted that in-person voting during the elections was safe as he waged a months-long campaign to raise doubts about mail voting.

An HHS spokesperson argued that the agency had complied with the panel’s requests and accused Clyburn of politicizing the coronavirus response. “While the Administration is focused on vaccination shots, the Subcommittee is focused on cheap shots to create headlines and mislead the American people,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Associated Press.

The CDC did not comment on the letter but Redfield previously testified to Congress that outside actors were unsuccessful in “modulating the scientific integrity” of the agency’s reports.

Clyburn argued in the letter that although CDC officials were able to beat back some of the interference, the evidence shows that Kent and other officials were forced to “fend off more than a dozen attempts to influence CDC’s scientific publications, and in some cases were instructed to make changes recommended by political officials.”

“To the extent career staff were successful in limiting the damage, as Dr. Kent stated she was, that is a testament to the career staff’s integrity and resilience,” Clyburn wrote, “not an indication that the Trump Administration’s political pressure tactics were appropriate or scientifically sound.”

COVID-19 further exposes inequalities in the global financial system

To stem the economic fallout from COVID-19, developed countries have injected an unprecedented US$9 trillion into their economies.

The International Monetary Fund has recommended sustained fiscal support, emphasizing greater spending on health care and environmental protection projects.

Meanwhile, countries in the “global south” — broadly, low- and middle-income countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa — face more dire circumstances. They don’t have the ability to inject that level of cash into their economies.

And it’s not only because their economies are poorer.

As an economics professor, I focus on the systemic inequalities in the global financial system that block such access in developing economies.

With a greater public awareness of soaring inequality within countries, it is also important to recognize the deep imbalances across the global financial system.

Inaccessible financing

Fiscal support in developed economies is often financed by deficit spending and government borrowing. Countries like the United States finance a major part of deficits by borrowing from companies and central banks within their own countries. Such borrowing remains in the countries’ own currency, making them less risky.

The fiscal deficit in advanced economies — a group of 39 nations including the U.S., European countries and Japan — is projected to expand to 14.4% in 2020 from 3.3% in 2019, according to the IMF.

This deficit financing is practically inaccessible to developing economies, given the extreme inequalities in global wealth. These nations secure most of their deficit financing through lending from multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund. Or they borrow dollars in international capital markets. They then have to pay back the debt in dollars, which makes the loans more expensive if the value of their own currency drops.

Not all debt is equal

During the 2008 financial crisis, the limited availability of multilateral lending forced low-income countries — particularly in Africa — to fund recovery efforts and infrastructure expansion by borrowing dollars in private markets.

Caribbean nations also relied on private loans to recover from the financial crisis and multiple hurricanes.

To reimburse these loans, low-income countries depend on money they make from the exportation of raw materials, or commodities, and tourism, which are paid in U.S. dollars.

Dependence on the sale of commodities, an outcome of trade patterns established by the European colonization of the global south in the 19th century, is often associated with economic instability.

The 2014 crash in commodities prices, for example, caused big declines in dollar earnings in the global south. It also led to a fall in the currency values of commodities exporters.

Consequently, interest payments and the value of dollar-denominated debt increased in countries like Ghana and Mozambique. The commodities crash also increased debt burdens in such countries as Brazil and Mexico. Facing a sudden devaluation of their currencies and lower export earnings, many countries had to borrow more to continue to service previous loans.

Payments on external debt as a percentage of government revenues also ballooned.

Though low-income economies borrow less compared with their GDPs — an estimate of the value of the goods produced by their economies — payment burdens are greater because most payments are external and have to be made in dollars.

Ghana’s debt-to-GDP ratio in 2018, for example, was 59.3% compared with 90.5% for the United States. As a group, the debt-to-GDP ratio in low-income economies — usually defined as countries with per capita income of less than $1,000 — averaged about 20%, according to the IMF. That compares with 105% in advanced economies. These numbers contradict the view that low-income countries tend to overborrow.

Yet because of exchange rate risks and dollar payments, Ghana’s ratio of external payments to revenue, for example, rose from 10% in 2014 to 40% in 2018.

These rising ratios also led to downgrades in credit ratings by private rating agencies and classifications of high risk status by the IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework.

Critics have denounced the Debt Sustainability Framework for focusing on payment capacity and viewing all debt equally. They say that the IMF should distinguish between debt that is wasteful, such as recurring administrative expenses, and debt that funds crucial infrastructure, health and climate crisis projects.

Meanwhile, ratings downgrades led to higher costs for the new loans, as lenders sought higher rates to mitigate greater perceived risk.

This, in turn, set off a new cycle of higher debt burdens.

Calls for debt relief

Amid COVID-19, key dollar-earning sectors in developing countries — tourism, commodities exports and remittances — are projected to take deep hits. Group of 30, a research forum of prominent economists, expects a $150 billion decline for low-income countries.

This has set off another wave of credit rating downgrades that will make borrowing prohibitively expensive.

The African Peer Review Mechanism, a panel set up by the African Union, recently protested these downgrades for blocking efforts to mobilize fiscal resources amid the pandemic.

In Morocco, for example, the credit rating downgrade may force the government to scrap plans to expand health care spending during the pandemic.

So while advanced countries have spent about 8% of GDP on recovery efforts in 2020, low-income countries have managed an average of 1.4% of GDP. And only 0.6% of GDP has been spent in the health sector, according to the IMF.

Amid the pandemic, some economists have called for debt relief and an expanded allocation of the IMF’s global reserve currency unit, known as Special Drawing Rights.

Proposed expansions of Special Drawing Rights would be allocated to each member country of the IMF. That would allow increased access to a global currency unit and therefore reduce the need for dollar earnings.

I believe such measures are a necessary corrective to the disparate burdens and systemic inequalities in the global financial system.

Ramya Vijaya, Professor of Economics, Stockton University

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

This pumpkin bread keeps astonishingly well for days

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

* * *

If you’ve ever found yourself in the company of a pumpkin bread cobbled with chocolate chips, you know the visceral joy of pulling off soft fistfuls, well past the allotment of a single neat slice.

Now imagine that same squishy loaf, glowing a deeper orange, with a fluffier crumb. The chocolate chips are now bittersweet chunks; the glaze extra glossy and, instead of pow-in-the-kisser sweet, faintly savory; the top a-crackle with toasted pepitas and cacao nibs.

This thoroughly modern pumpkin bread is the brainchild of pastry chef Nicole Rucker—who now runs Fat & Flour, a tiny, glorious pie shop in Grand Central Market in L.A.—from her days as Gjelina restaurant’s general manager and pastry chef (and sometimes barista).

Starting from a pumpkin tea cake recipe in the Tartine cookbook, which Nicole calls “a perfect recipe in itself,” she set to deepening the flavors everywhere she could, turning to the staples she had ready access to at Gjelina: notably, crates of local kabocha squash (then used in an agnolotti dish) and lots of good-tasting olive oil.

Roasted kabocha squash has almost-neon orange flesh that’s uniquely dry and creamy, making it ideal for baking tender, fluffy cakes (more moisture can lead to more gluten development, aka tougher, drier cakes). (1) And, as I’ve said time and again, oil in cakes also acts as a buffer against overzealous gluten, leading to batters you’re less likely to accidentally overmix and loaves that defy going stale for days. Olive oil, specifically—unlike vegetable oil and its ilk—tastes like something you want to eat.

Which brings us to that glaze, which might be the most genius takeaway of all. Because why would we whisk just powdered sugar and water, when we could be drizzling in a few buttery spoonfuls of olive oil too? As Nicole told me, “The oil in the glaze makes a really rich and viscous shiny glaze for the surface of the cake,” emulsifying effortlessly and anchoring the straight sweetness with a little fruity heft. (2)

As much as this cake will bring joy in your own home for days, it will really sparkle dropped on a neighbor’s doorstep or in other distanced hand-offs to loved ones. While I haven’t tried shipping it myself, I imagine it would pass the test, given that, after baking two cakes for the video above, I finished the last slice over a week laterand it was still squidgy as ever. In fact, I love the flavor most on days two and beyond, though I’d never stop you from cutting into a warm cake dripping with sticky glaze, if that is what your heart desires. (3)

Your giftees will be just as happy as if a cozy, classic pumpkin bread sidled up next to them, and one bite will send them ringing you up for the recipe. What is the deal with this pumpkin bread??? (4) I predict the texts will say. And you’ll have plenty to share.

***

Recipe: Kabocha, Olive Oil & Bittersweet Chocolate Cake From Nicole Rucker & Gjelina

Prep time: 1 hour

Cook time: 2 hours 15 minutes

Makes: 1 loaf cake

Ingredients:

Kabocha Cake

  • 1 (1-pound / 455-gram) piece kabocha squash, seeded
  • Extra-virgin olive oil for drizzling, plus 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (255ml)
  • 1 1/2 cups (180 grams) all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
  • 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 1/3 cups (265 grams) granulated sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 8 ounces (230 grams) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
  • 3 tablespoons raw pepitas (for the glaze)

Olive Oil Glaze

  • 1 1/4 cups (150 grams) confectioners’ sugar, sifted
  • 2 tablespoons hot water
  • 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons crushed cacao nibs

Directions:

  1. Heat the oven to 425°F (220°C). On a sheet pan, drizzle the squash with olive oil, turn the piece cut-side down, and cook until very soft and beginning to caramelize around the edges, 30 to 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool. Scrape out the squash flesh and transfer to a food processor. Pulse until smooth.
  2. Measure out 1 cup (225 grams) and let it cool to room temperature. (Store any leftovers in the fridge, tightly covered, for up to 5 days—the puree is very good smeared on toast.) 
  3. Heat oven to 325℉ (165°C). Butter a 9×5-inch (23×12-centimeter) loaf pan.
  4. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt into a large bowl. In a medium bowl, whisk together the granulated sugar, olive oil, squash puree, and eggs. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour in the squash mixture. Whisk until just combined. Stir the chocolate into the batter.
  5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until browned on the top and a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, 75 to 90 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Run a knife around the edges and invert the cake from the pan and let cool on the rack for another 20 minutes. Transfer to a serving plate.
  6. In a small, dry frying pan over medium heat, gently toast the pepitas until just fragrant and beginning to brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Let cool. 
  7. To make the glaze, in a small bowl, whisk the confectioners’ sugar with 2 tablespoons hot water until you have a thick glaze. Add more confectioners’ sugar or water as needed to create a smooth glaze with the viscosity of honey. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil, whisking constantly.
  8. Pour the glaze over the cake, allowing it to drip over the sides. Sprinkle with the cacao nibs and pepitas and let the glaze set completely before serving, about 1 hour.

Yes, older people like my mom should get the vaccine first: Here’s why

The calls come almost every day, sometimes twice a day. The message varies little in its directness. Someone else at my mother’s facility in New Jersey, usually but not always a staff member, has tested positive for COVID-19. “We test all employees every other day, and will continue to keep you updated,” the voice says. The calls are a reliable fixture in the endless, fluid days. Maybe soon they’ll stop. And maybe somehow my mother, my eternally reclusive, antisocial, estranged mother, will be a small part of how the rest of us get to be together again.

My mom has Alzheimer’s and a host of other medical and mental health issues. These days, she is relatively comfortable and, as her social worker tells me, “pleasantly demented” most of the time. She will never get better. She is on a path that leads in only one direction. But now that vaccines are being distributed across the country and health care workers and nursing home residents are at the front of the line, I feel more relieved these days than I have since Mom went into care in July. Because the sooner she receives the vaccine, the more promising the odds become — not for her but for the people all around her.

The pandemic has unleashed a host of ethical quandaries upon us, and as a nation we have not risen flawlessly to the challenge. When more patience and restraint could have prevented so much suffering, we’ve instead been mired in conspiracy theories and old fashioned self-will. (The most durable image of 2020 for me will likely be that of a group of screaming, MAGA-hatted protesters gathered in Washington after the election, among them a man with his mask pulled down as he sends spittle into the atmosphere.) But other choices have been harder to call. Get medical attention for a non-COVID health issue, or try to wait it out? Order food to support a local business, or hold off to limit the workers’ exposure? And always, above all the other questions: Who gets treated first? Who gets vaccinated first? What is the value of any of our lives, and what is our place in the queue?

This week, I had a conversation with one of my mother’s administrators about the state’s palliative and end-of-life guidance, and what I think her final wishes might be. It was painful, but not difficult. Whatever happens for the rest of her life, I want my mom treated humanely and respectfully, without invasive procedures or unnecessary suffering. But the vaccination will create new questions and conversations.

As many as 40% of COVID-related deaths in the U.S. have been among residents and staff of nursing facilities. Close to home, New York Times correspondent Mike Baker starkly notes that “New Jersey has reached a new milestone of the pandemic: 1 out of every 500 people in the state have died of COVID-19. It’s the highest concentration of deaths among states — and also higher than any per-capita death toll recorded by any nation on Earth.” My late stepfather escaped the North Tower on 9/11. I never imagined his wife would find herself at the epicenter of a crisis that currently has the fatality equivalent of a 9/11 every day.

Earlier this year, Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine, talked to The Guardian about future treatments and what makes age “an important factor in making the  terrible choice of who will receive scarce resources in a pandemic.” Vaccination creates its own unique logistical and ethical issues. Speaking to Salon this week, Caplan considered the variables.

“I think it’s going in a good direction that we’re prioritizing, at least initially, people with the greatest risk of death,” he said. “That’s an important variable. That pushes nursing home residents and staff very high up at the top of the list. Pushes people who are cleaning rooms in hospitals or getting patient exposure. Their death rates have been very high. The health care workforce is pushed up, not because they’re dying in an exceedingly high rate, but we have to maintain them. I agree with that too. They may not be the highest at risk of death, but if they get sick or get hospitalized or out, you have trouble, it’s a problem.”

Then Caplan asked a painful question. “Should everybody in the nursing home get a scarce vaccine initially? No. Many people in nursing homes would be there knowing that they don’t have very long to live or they’re refusing treatment. … I wouldn’t make them the priority. I don’t think that’s the way to save lives, so to speak.”

Considering further, he said, “On the other hand, they would be up pretty high, maybe in the next rounds of vaccination after it gets through the health care workforce and the initial group of non-terminally-ill residents of nursing homes and palliative care, hospice nursing home settings.”

I think about my mother, and wonder when she will cross over from one type of patient to the other, and where in the hierarchy she will fit. And I know that as uncomfortable as these issues are to examine, the best any of us can do is to consider the greatest good. Not perfection, not ideals, just that. “Personal choice is a key value of the ethics of American health care,” said Caplan. “But when you’re dealing with infection risk to others, then the values of preventing harm can overtake or trump the personal choice, autonomy value. If you’re in a prison, if you’re in an institution for the intellectually disabled, if you’re in a nursing home, there are settings where it’s especially risky for those groups of people. I think your choice has to yield to their protection and safety.”

I was only beginning to fathom these questions back in April, when my stepfather was still alive and I first talked to Lynn Casteel Harper, a New York minister and author of  “On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear.”  She said at the time: “My greatest hope is that on the other side this pandemic can be a portal that we walked through to create a more compassionate setup for our frail, older adults.”

Now, with an American death toll that has long surpassed the combined loss of five wars, I spoke to Harper again more recently to ask what she thinks about the vaccine rollout.

“There’s nothing hypothetical about it,” she said. “Here we have the very real manifestation of who we value. It’s not subtle or tacit. It’s now explicit with this vaccine rollout. I’m very relieved that the United States is prioritizing longterm care facilities. I think it’s a no-brainer, morally. These places have been ravaged. But it’s also such a sad commentary on our American systems and structures that so many people are made vulnerable and we’re having to have these discussions. Is it essential workers or is it older adults? Pitting vulnerable group against vulnerable group is worthy of our collective scrutiny.”

It’s no small irony to me that as long as my stepfather was living and my mother was still in her own home, she was likely well protected from the virus. She didn’t socialize; she didn’t have close relationships. She and my stepfather lived as independently of others as they possibly could. Yet being big on personal freedom made them part of something nonetheless. When I had to go to their home the day my stepfather died, I saw a photograph of Donald Trump proudly displayed on the mantel.

Now my mother is part of a community. She has neighbors she talks to and workers who bring her meals and roll her around in her wheelchair. She’s connected in a way she never would have chosen for herself. There are no border walls for viruses. There’s only the deepening evidence that one person’s safety and health affects all of us. That the child of the person emptying a trash basket in a facility somewhere deep in New Jersey might be better off for the shot in the arm my mom gets. “The idea that we can live in some ways these isolated lives … is just an illusion and a myth and a falsehood,” says Harper. “Maybe a little bit of my hope is that we can see ‘neighbor’ in a much bigger category. This chain of neighbors. And it shouldn’t matter if we don’t know their names, because they’re part of the human community, part of the human family. And that should matter.”

Jared Kushner signed off on secret payments to top campaign officials, source says

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, personally signed off on keeping salary payments to top campaign officials off the books, according to a person involved with the arrangements.

Federal Election Commission records show that the Trump campaign has made no salary payments to chief strategist Jason Miller, who came on board in June, or to campaign manager Bill Stepien, who joined the campaign in late 2018 and took over the top job from Brad Parscale in July. Kushner agreed to both arrangements, and personally directed the payments to Miller, the person involved said.

While the Trump campaign has reported $20,000 monthly salary payments to chief of staff Stephanie Alexander and senior adviser Katrina Pierson, it has not done the same for COO Jeff DeWit or senior advisers Bob Paduchik and Bill Shine. Deputy campaign manager Justin Clark has not taken a direct payment from the campaign since February 2019, according to federal records.

Instead, the campaign has paid these top-tier advisers through intermediaries — some of which are still unknown.

For instance, according to the source, after salary negotiations with Miller, Kushner directed the campaign to route the top strategist’s $35,000 monthly payment through Jamestown Associates, a media and production firm where Miller once worked, and which the campaign contracts for video production. Miller, who is currently contesting child-support payments in court, requested the anonymous arrangement for the $420,000 annual rate, for unclear reasons. Communications, court documents and FEC filings reviewed by Salon make clear that the money was paid to by way of Jamestown. President Trump himself was aware of the deal, a person involved said.

To this point, the campaign has not told government that it has paid Miller anything. Instead, it has stated that all payments to Jamestown are for “video production,” without mentioning Miller’s name or strategy work. Furthermore, Miller’s official role means that he has often directed how and when the campaign uses Jamestown Associates, the company that technically pays him.

Stepien replaced Parscale as campaign manager in mid-July, and allegedly pleased Trump by taking a pay cut when he accepted the position. Salon reported last week that in 2018 the campaign created an in-house shell company called American Made Media Consultants (AMMC) in response to rumors about Parscale’s spending, which according to a campaign source had made the president uneasy.

Reports over the summer said that Parscale had stepped aside partly in response to criticism of his profligate spending, which Stepien promised to rein in. In fact, the campaign’s expenses increased significantly after Stepien took over, including, FEC records show, payments to a company called Elections LLC, a legal firm that Stepien founded in 2019 with fellow campaign adviser Justin Clark.

Stepien and Clark, who worked together in the Trump White House until late 2018, were paid by the firm instead of directly by the campaign, according to a person involved, and Kushner approved the third-party arrangement. FEC records show that some campaign expenses to Elections LLC are marked “ATTN: Stefan Passantino” — the former White House deputy counsel who also incorporated the campaign committee for Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and QAnon supporter. Payments to Elections LLC increased from $20,000 a month to $60,000 over the course of 2020.

Stepien and Clark formed another firm in February 2019, called National Public Affairs. A Trump spokesperson told Salon that AMMC does not pay that firm, but would not say whether Stepien was paid through Elections LLC.

By contrast, Parscale’s salary came through a firm that had his name on it — Parscale Strategy — which took in more than $47,700 a month until the campaign reduced that by $15,000 a month following his demotion, federal filings show.

Another top campaign adviser, Bob Paduchik, also does not appear to have received any payments from the campaign. Paduchik served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee from January 2017 to January 2019, when he departed to work for the Trump campaign. Federal records show that the RNC had him on the payroll during that time, but those RNC payments actually increased after he left for the campaign — except they then went to his consulting firm, Agincourt.

It is even less clear how the campaign compensates Shine, a former Fox News executive who was on the network’s payroll while serving in the Trump White House. The same holds true for campaign COO Jeff DeWit, whom Trump had previously appointed as CFO at NASA.

It’s not clear what role Kushner had in those arrangements, if any, but the person familiar with the campaign told Salon that Kushner would have signed off on any and all decisions at that level.

Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh told Salon that the allegation Kushner had signed off on the payment arrangements was false, and said that “the campaign reported all expenditures as required by federal law.” Murtaugh did not respond to specific follow-up questions about how top campaign officials were compensated.

When previously asked about the missing payroll receipts, Brendan Fischer, director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center, told Salon, “It doesn’t surprise me at all. The Trump campaign has disguised millions of dollars in payments to personnel and vendors by routing the money through LLCs created or managed by senior Trump campaign officials.”

In July the CLC filed an FEC complaint alleging that the Trump campaign had unlawfully covered up at least $170 million in payments through AMMC, thereby keeping its spending a secret from  federal enforcement agencies, its own donors and the public. Some campaign disbursements allegedly went towards salaries, the complaint says, such as payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, who were on the Parscale Strategy payroll.

We’ve lost control: The real lessons of the Trump regime and the pandemic

Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Donald Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, which has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away. 

But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, deindustrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials [Biden has] announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear: “Drop dead.”     

The list of new administration officials includes retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state.  Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state under the Obama administration, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.

Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be Treasury secretary. Yellen, as chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008.  She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security.  Yellen backed “quantitative easing” that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buybacks while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling.”

Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden’s director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama’s expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel’s nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspel’s direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel “intelligent, compassionate, and fair.” Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who advocated austerity measures as an Obama economic adviser, has been chosen to run the White House’s economic policy.

Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as head of the Democratic Party’s think tank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the think tank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She previously proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing of Iran. 

The perpetuation of deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. 

Biden, after his defeat in the Democratic caucus in Nevada by Bernie Sanders, where Sanders got more than twice his vote, immediately played the Russia card, telling CBS News that the “Russians don’t want me to be the nominee, they like Bernie.” Hillary Clinton started this dirty game when she attacked 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as a “Russian asset” and in 2020 leveled the same charge against Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The Democrats need an enemy, real or fictitious, and Silicon Valley and major manufacturers will not allow them to target China.

More of the same means more disaster. If we want to reclaim our open society and save the ecosystem, we must abolish the corporate stranglehold on global economic and political power. If we want to avert zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, swine flu, avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), Ebola and SARS, we must stop consuming animals and their bodily secretions. We must abolish factory farming and adopt a vegan diet. And we must keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Razing the rainforest for cattle grazing and vast tracts of farmland devoted to growing monocrops to feed animals destined for human consumption are responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction since 1970. The loss of forests is one of the single biggest contributors to climate change. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones. Oceans could be devoid of fish by 2048. Each minute, 7 million pounds of feces are produced by the animals raised for human food in the U.S. alone. The continued destruction of natural habitat, coupled with the vast factory farms which use 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. and incubate drug-resistant pathogens that spread to human populations, presage new forms of the Black Death.

The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, and waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.         

Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near coastlines, including New York and London, will be submerged.

Oceans absorb much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters, resulting in the deoxygenation of the oceans. Each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of what climate scientists call the “deadly trio” — warming, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. The next mass extinction of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years.

This is not defeatism. It is realism. We appear to have bought four years with Biden’s election, but if we do not use it wisely — and there is nothing in the Biden nominations that offer any encouragement — we are merely reconstructing a shabby Potemkin village that will soon be flattened by the gale-force political and environmental hurricanes that are gathering around us.

One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion. It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy. 

After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.

Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept. This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country.

The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who with a handful of other writers and artists desperately tried to warn of the suicidal folly of World War I, wrote of what he called “the mental superiority of the defeated.” His anti-war play “Jeremiah,” based on the biblical prophet Jeremiah who issued warnings in vain, illustrated that those who face reality, however bitter, are able to endure and rise above it.

“Awaken, doomed city, that thou mayest save thyself,” the prophet cries out in Zweig’s play. “Awaken from your heavy slumbers, heedless ones, lest you be slain in sleep; awaken, for the walls are crumbling, and will crush you; awaken.”

But the warnings from Jeremiah, called “the weeping prophet,” were ignored and ridiculed. He was attacked for demoralizing the people. There were plots against his life. When the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah, like Julian Assange, was in prison.

“I was always attracted to showing how any form of power can harden a human being’s heart, how victory can bring mental rigidity to whole nations, and to contrasting that with the emotional force of defeat painfully and terribly ploughing through the soul,” Zweig wrote in his memoir, “The World of Yesterday.” “In the middle of war, while others, celebrating triumph too soon, were proving to one another that victory was inevitable, I was plumbing the depths of the catastrophe and looking for a way to emerge from them.”

We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

Texas has $2 billion in COVID relief funds left to spend. Advocacy groups are anxiously watching

With only two weeks before the funding expires, Texas’ state government still hasn’t spent about a quarter of the $8 billion it received from the federal coronavirus relief bill.

In March, the U.S. Department of the Treasury assigned $11.24 billion to local and state governments in Texas. Almost a third of that went directly to cities and counties with more than 500,000 people, which have been quick to use it for a wide range of measures, from rent assistance programs to temperature checks at city offices. The state distributed $1.85 billion to smaller jurisdictions and has been distributing the remaining $8 billion through its health, education and emergency agencies, among others.

The funds can pay for expenses incurred only until Dec. 30, according to federal guidelines. Gov. Greg Abbott‘s office said that it will use the money by that deadline but would not give details on how.

“Governor Abbott has worked closely with legislative leaders and state agencies to allocate $6 billion so far, including an estimated $1.6 billion for [the Department of State Health Services] and [Texas Division of Emergency Management] to fund the state’s response through the end of the year,” said Renae Eze, a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott, in a statement. “With $2 billion remaining of the original funding, the state will spend every dollar by the end of the year to ensure the health and well-being of all Texans.”

Unless the federal government decides to extend the Dec. 30 deadline, unspent funds will have to be returned to the Department of Treasury.

On Monday, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said the remaining funds should be used to help rural hospitals and food banks. With limited staffing and funding, rural hospitals have struggled to keep up with COVID-19 surges.

Food banks have also been strained, serving families in need that have experienced unemployment and wage cuts. Advocacy organizations said they are worried that in 2021 they won’t have enough to respond to demand. Two federal programs that have helped them through the pandemic are ending, and a state program that provides surplus groceries to them has been cut by 40%.

“It’s a very cost-efficient way — keeps down food waste and it serves the needs of a lot of hungry people,” Miller said in an interview Tuesday, who added he hasn’t heard from Abbott’s office yet. “There’s been zero response. The clock’s ticking and we need to move. Hopefully we will hear from the governor.”

State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said that there hasn’t been enough transparency in how the funds have been assigned. She called for a quick allocation in areas like personal protective equipment, support for schools and aid for health care institutions.

“We have 15 more days to alert the feds to how Texas intends to spend the rest of these dollars, or they have to be sent back,” Howard said. “There doesn’t seem to be any real dialogue that’s in place right now to have these kinds of discussions, because the Legislature has not been able to meet during the interim. We’ve been handicapped in terms of really having these discussions and doing the deep dives, asking the questions and having some oversight to the process.”

Housing advocacy groups have also argued that the money should be used to help renters in need, given that a moratorium on evictions ends Dec. 31, and rent assistance programs sometimes have been insufficient or slow.

“Our state’s leaders have to prioritize providing people who need help with direct cash assistance to pay the rent, pay the mortgage, pay the light bill and put food on the table,” said Christina Rosales, deputy director of Texas Housers. “Smaller local jurisdictions haven’t received their fair share of these funds to meet the needs in their communities. The governor’s office should be paying attention to what’s happening around the state and give local communities the tools and resources to serve the many who are worried about rent and basic needs.”

In the meantime, larger cities and counties are also preparing to spend the rest of their funds. Dallas, for example, had used $190 million of its $234 million as of Monday and plans to use all the funds by the deadline.

“It’s been critical for the city of Dallas and for other cities because of the pandemic,” said Elizabeth Reich, chief financial officer of the city of Dallas. “There are a lot of expenses that we have incurred because local government is where people turn when they need immediate assistance. We are the most direct source and point for folks to turn when they’re at their most vulnerable.”

Reich said the city would have probably had to dig into its reserve funds if the funding hadn’t been approved. City officials are hoping that a new stimulus package will keep helping so they can avoid having to spend their reserves in the next year.

“We know that coronavirus does not end on Dec. 30,” Reich said. “It’s critical that cities receive additional funding so that we can bounce back and we can grow and get the economy back on track.”

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

“$600 is not enough”: Progressives in Congress left unhappy with COVID relief deal

Democratic and Republican congressional leaders late Sunday reached an agreement on a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package that would send $600 direct payments to many Americans, boost unemployment benefits by $300 per week, and provide billions of dollars in funding for vaccine distribution, rental assistance, and other programs.

Announcing the deal on the Senate floor Sunday evening, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—who has repeatedly stonewalled additional relief since the summer, when he said he had “not yet felt the urgency” of passing more aid—declared, “We can finally report what our nation has needed to hear for a very long time: More help is on the way.”

With tens of millions of Americans in desperate need of financial assistance, the House and Senate are expected to approve the relief package as early as Monday, just days before dozens of emergency programs are set to expire. The deal would extend soon-to-lapse unemployment programs for 11 weeks and keep a CDC eviction moratorium in place through January 31.

Progressive lawmakers criticized the final agreement as badly inadequate given the severity of the nation’s ongoing public health and economic crises, which have shuttered tens of thousands of businesses, thrown millions into permanent unemployment, and taken hundreds of thousands of lives. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus pushed for direct payments of “at least” $2,000, while a small group of senators led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded checks of $1,200 per working-class adult and $500 per child.

“More help for who?” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) asked in response to McConnell’s remarks Sunday night. “How are the millions of people facing evictions, remaining unemployed, standing in food bank and soup kitchen lines supposed to live off of $600? We didn’t send help for eight months. This is not leadership. There is no compassion, just politics of greed and power.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said that while he intends to vote yes on the package because it is an “urgent lifeline,” the final deal is “far less than we need, and far less than we could have gotten earlier this year.”

“Eight million have fallen into poverty since June,” Khanna noted. “If we hadn’t made this deal today, 12 million Americans were going to lose unemployment benefits. But, again, this is not nearly enough for people.”

“This is a survival bill, not a progressive one,” the California Democrat continued. “Bottom line: we’re going to come back in January and keep working on this in the new Congress.”

Rep.-elect Cori Bush (D-Mo.) also weighed in:

As of Sunday evening, the text of the relief package had not yet been made public, a delay that angered lawmakers who will soon be expected to vote on the sprawling legislation.

While specific details of the agreement are still emerging, the package will reportedly leave out hazard pay for frontline workers while including a tax break for corporate meal expenses sought by Republican lawmakers and the Trump White House.

“Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It’s unconscionable,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, told the Washington Post, which first reported the inclusion of the tax break.

According to the Post, Democratic leaders agreed to allow the tax deduction for business meals “in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low-income families and the working poor in the final package.”

In a joint statement late Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) touted the inclusion of additional provisions aimed at assisting struggling Americans, including $13 billion for nutrition aid, an extension of paid sick leave benefits, $25 billion in rental assistance, $82 billion for schools, and $10 billion for childcare.

The final legislation would not provide retroactive unemployment insurance, and only those who earned $75,000 or less in the 2019 tax year would receive the full $600 direct payment, plus an additional $600 for each child.

“The emergency relief in this agreement, the second largest in history only to the CARES Act, is an important first step that Democrats look forward to building on under the new Biden-Harris administration to meet the remaining needs of the American people during this historic health and economic crisis,” Pelosi and Schumer said. “The House will move swiftly to pass this legislation immediately, so it can quickly be sent to the Senate and then to the president’s desk for his signature.  With the horrifying acceleration of daily infections and deaths, there is no time to waste.”

As heavenly bodies converge, many ask: Is the Star of Bethlehem making a comeback?

On Dec. 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will cross paths in the night’s sky and for a brief moment, they will appear to shine together as one body. While planetary conjunctions like this are not everyday events, they also are not particularly rare.

This year’s conjunction is different for at least two reasons. The first is the degree to which the two planets will be aligned. Experts predict that they will appear closer during this conjunction than they have in nearly eight centuries and also brighter.

But the second factor, and the one that has thrust this event into the spotlight, is that it will occur on the winter solstice, just before the Christmas holiday. The timing has led to a speculation whether this could be the same astronomical event that the Bible reports led the wise men to Joseph, Mary and the newly born Jesus – the Star of Bethlehem.

As a scholar of early Christian literature writing a book on the three wise men, I argue that the upcoming planetary conjunction is likely not the fabled Star of Bethlehem. The biblical story of the star is intended to convey theological rather than historical or astronomical truths.

Leading light

The story of the star has long fascinated readers, both ancient and modern. Within the New Testament, it is found only in the Gospel of Matthew, a first-century account of Jesus’ life that begins with the story of his birth.

In this account, wise men arrive in Jerusalem and say to Herod, the king of Judea: “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.” The star then leads them to Bethlehem and stops over the house of Jesus and his family.

Many have read this story with the presupposition that Matthew must have been referencing an actual astronomical event that occurred around the time of Jesus’ birth. The astronomer Michael R. Molnar, for example, has argued that the Star of Bethlehem was an eclipse of Jupiter within the constellation Ares.

There are at least two issues involved in associating a specific event with Matthew’s star. The first is that scholars are not certain exactly when Jesus was born. The traditional date of his birth may be off by as many as six years.

The second is that measurable, predictable astronomical events occur with relative frequency. The quest to discover which event, if any, Matthew might have had in mind is therefore a complicated one.

Beliefs about the star

The theory that the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn may be the Star of Bethlehem is not new. It was proposed in the early 17th century by Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer and mathematician. Kepler argued that this same planetary conjunction in or around 6 B.C. could have served as inspiration for Matthew’s story of the star.

Kepler was not the first to suggest that the Star of Bethlehem may have been a recognizable astronomical event. Four hundred years prior to Kepler, between 1303 and 1305, the Italian artist Giotto painted the star as a comet on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.

Scholars have suggested that Giotto did this as an homage to Halley’s Comet, which astronomers have determined was visible in 1301, on one of its regular flights past the Earth. Astronomers have also determined that Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth in or around 12 B.C., between five and 10 years before most scholars argue that Jesus was born. It is possible that Giotto believed Matthew was referencing Halley’s Comet in his story of the star.

Attempts to discover the identity of Matthew’s star are often creative and insightful, but I would argue that they are also misguided.

The star in Matthew’s story may not be a “normal” natural phenomenon, and Matthew suggests as much in the way that he describes it. Matthew says that the wise men come to Jerusalem “from the East.” The star then leads them to Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. The star therefore makes a sharp left turn. And astronomers will agree that stars do not make sharp turns.

Moreover, when the wise men arrive in Bethlehem, the star is low enough in the sky to lead them to a specific house. As physicist Aaron Adair puts it: “the Star is said to stop in place and hover over a particular lodging, acting as an ancient GPS unit.” The “description of the movements of the Star,” he noted, was “outside what is physically possible for any observable astronomical object.”

Theological underpinning

In short, there appears to be nothing “normal” or “natural” about the phenomenon that Matthew describes. Perhaps the point that Matthew is trying to make is a different one.

Matthew’s story of the star draws from a body of tradition in which stars are connected to rulers. The rising of a star signifies that a ruler has come to power.

In the biblical book of Numbers, for example, which dates to 5th century B.C., the prophet Balaam predicts the arrival of a ruler who will defeat the enemies of Israel. “A star shall come out of Jacob, [meaning Israel]…it shall crush the borderlands of Moab.”

One of the most well-known examples of this tradition from antiquity is the so-called “Sidus Iulium,” or “Julian Star,” a comet that appeared a few months after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Roman authors Suetonius and Pliny the Elder report that the comet was so bright that it was visible in the late afternoon, and that many Romans interpreted the spectacle as evidence that Julius Caesar was now a god.

In light of such traditions, I believe Matthew’s story of the star exists not to inform readers about a specific astronomical event, but to support claims that he is making about the character of Jesus.

Put another way, I argue that Matthew’s goal in telling this story is more theological than it is historical.

The upcoming conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is therefore likely not a return of the Star of Bethlehem, but Matthew would likely be pleased with the awe it inspires in those who anticipate it.

Eric M. Vanden Eykel, Associate Professor of Religion, Ferrum College

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

Bill Barr breaks with Trump over Russia

At a press conference on Monday, outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr became the latest senior official to link the Russian government to a massive and ongoing cyberattack against U.S. federal agencies, even as President Donald Trump downplays the hack and seeks again to shift focus away from Moscow.

Experts have specifically blamed the hack on a group known as APT29, or “Cozy Bear,” a Russian intelligence cyber unit that had targeted Democratic National Committee systems in 2016. Over the last week it was revealed that perhaps as far back as 2019, hackers hijacked an update in a piece of commercial software sold by Texas company SolarWinds to a number of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the Departments of State, Treasury, Homeland Security and Commerce, as well as the National Institutes of Health. Nearly 20,000 SolarWinds customers received updates containing APT29 malware.

Though the full extent of the damage is still unknown, Trump’s former head of Homeland Security, Tom Bossert, said last Wednesday that “the magnitude of this national security breach is hard to overstate” and requires a response in which “all elements of national power must be placed on the table.” On Friday, Trump’s U.S. Cybersecurity Agency warned that the hack posed a “grave risk” to national security, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pinned the responsibility on Russia that same day.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said in a radio interview on “The Mark Levin Show,” adding: “I can’t say much more as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified.”

The next day, however, Trump, who had still not commented on the cyberattack, undercut that assessment in a pair of tweets, claiming that he had been “fully briefed” and “everything is well under control,” and accusing the media of pushing a false narrative about Russia.

“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of ….discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!),” Trump wrote.

“There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. @DNI_Ratcliffe @SecPompeo,” he added, tagging Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Ratcliffe.

The tweets reportedly came as the White House prepared to issue a statement blaming Russia, and sent aides scrambling. Officials were reportedly told to stand down, and the White House still has not released a statement.

The next day, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he has “no reason to believe it’s China,” and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the president’s tweets came as no surprise, considering Trump’s “blind spot” to Moscow.

“The President has a blind spot when it comes to Russia, and so you can expect that that’s the response that he would have,” Romney said.

“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” the former GOP presidential candidate added. “This is the same sort of thing one can do in a wartime setting and so it’s extraordinary dangerous and it’s an outrageous affront on our sovereignty and one that’s going to have to be met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”

Barr, a formerly devout Trump loyalist who was fired via executive tweet last week, joined the chorus on Monday.

“I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment. It certainly appears to be the Russians, but I’m not going to discuss it beyond that,” the outgoing top prosecutor said.

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team said the next administration is weighing its options, which could include retaliatory cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, according to Reuters.

“It’s not just sanctions. It’s steps and things we could do to degrade the capacity of foreign actors to engage in this sort of attack,” incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

Experts say that it could take months or even longer before the government has a full grasp on the extent of the attack.

 

Trump has repeatedly refused to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin directly accountable for carrying out cyberattacks on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, and has deferred to him repeatedly in public. During Trump’s term, the real estate mogul has resisted retaliatory sanctions, at one point even firing back at Congress in a written signing statement, calling near-unanimous sanctions “seriously flawed.”

The Russian government has denied involvement in the hack.

 

 

A planetary conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn may account for the biblical “Christmas Star”

Stargazers are dusting off their telescopes to see a once in a lifetime celestial event on Monday night.

On the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice, Jupiter and Saturn will engage in a “great conjunction,” meaning that the two planets will be separated by only one-tenth of one degree. To put this in perspective, the width of the moon is 0.5 degrees, meaning that the two planets will be about one-fifth the apparent width of the moon. This close encounter of the two planets will look like one bright star to the human eye (especially those with poor eyesight) on Earth. It’s the first time humans have been able to see this great conjunction clearly in the last 800 years.

So-called “great conjunctions” are not unusual, though the relative apparent closeness of planets vary. And during tonight’s, the planets are very close indeed. “No two are exactly alike,” Kevin Schindler, a historian and public information officer at the Lowell Observatory told Salon in an interview. (Notably, the timing of the event, on the solstice, is merely a bit of kismet and is not the cause nor result of the conjunction.) “In 2020, it just happens to be that they’re going to be closer than they’ve been in 400 years,” Schindler added. 

Schindler noted that the last time that a similar “great conjunction” of Jupiter an Saturn occurred, one that was as visible and close, was “back in the 1200s.”

This year’s conjunction has been unofficially dubbed the “Christmas Star” due to its proximity to the holiday. Yet as those familiar with Christianity may recall, the Bible tells of a notably bright star that appeared in the sky when Jesus was born. Historians and astronomers have wondered for years whether that “star,” which appeared over 2,000 years ago, could have been a similar conjunction between two planets.

Indeed, this year’s conjunction has brought renewed interest in this historical, biblical and astronomical mystery.

According to the Book of Matthew, the “Star of Bethlehem” led the biblical “Magi” — colloquially, the “three wise men” — to baby Jesus when he was born. Matthew writes that a bright star appeared in the eastern sky, the wise men saw the star and followed it to Jerusalem to worship him. As the story is told by Matthew in the Gospel: “When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.”

For centuries, astronomers have discussed potential scientific explanations for the Star of Bethlehem. Some astronomers have theorized that it was a supernova, some believe it was a comet, and others believe that it could have been a similar great conjunction as the one that humans will witness tonight. Luckily, there are some theoretical clues that hint at what the star was. 

In 7 B.C.E., there was a similar great conjunction, but instead of happening once on the winter solstice it happened three times over a short period of time. Professor David Hughes, an astronomer from the University of Sheffield, published a review of the theories on the star in 1976, in which he concluded that the Star of Bethlehem “was probably a triple conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation of Pisces, the significance of which was only obvious to the Magi of Babylonia.” Hughes believes that “events indicate that Jesus Christ was probably born in the Autumn of that year, around October, 7 BC.”

Schindler was open to Hughes’ theory. “I think it could have been, but it’s hard to say,” Schindler told Salon. “We don’t even know exactly when Jesus was born, so without knowing the exact time, that makes it difficult to pinpoint.”

Separate research has suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was a comet that appeared in the sky in 5 B.C.E. German astronomer Johannes Kepler famously theorized that a supernova was the bright object that the Magi saw.

Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan told Salon via email that the great conjunction tonight will be “far more impressive” than anything they would have seen in 7 B.C.E.

“The planets will appear 10 times closer together in the sky than they looked back then,” Hartigan said. “From an observer’s perspective there was nothing at all special about the 7 B.CE. conjunction, we had a very similar one recently in 1981.”

However,  Hartigan said, observers may have “interpreted things differently back then.”

“It comes down to how you think they interpreted astronomical events,” he added.

Avi Loeb, professor of science and the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon via email that the event’s nickname “does not represent an actual star and the occurrence” and that the event happening this week is “pure coincidence.”

However, he agreed it’s “possible” that this “coincidence was also the origin of the star of Bethlehem,” noting that other explanations exist.

While we may never know the truth, tonight’s celestial event is not one to be missed. Schindler explained how to observe it.

“After the sun sets, start going outside and look toward the southwest, which is where the sun sets. Over the next hour the sky will be getting darker and darker . . . .  the brightest point of light over there is going to be Jupiter, and then right next to it is going to be Saturn,” Schindler said. “Then, after tonight and ensuing nights, if you go out you’ll see them getting further and further apart.” 

Schindler said that such events are a reminder of the linguistic origin of the word “planet,” which comes from the Greek word “planete” which means “wanderer.” Over the next few nights, “you can see how they wander against the background sky,” he added.

Best of 2020: Watching Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic briefings finally let me grieve my father

When Andrew Cuomo became governor of New York in 2011, my father said to me, “You’re related to him. You should go talk to him and see what he can do for you.” My father’s mother was a Cuomo, Esther Cuomo, and she was the product of a two Cuomo marriage, the union of John Cuomo and Sara Cuomo. (It was the old country.) John and Sara immigrated to the United States around 1897 from Nocera, the same part of Southern Italy that birthed the Cuomo political dynasty. So does that mean we’re related? Maybe. I think if you go far back enough the branches in our family trees probably cross somewhere. How far back? Too far back to ask for favors.

So this was kind of a dumb suggestion on my dad’s part, but nothing to get angry about. But I responded badly when he made it and every other time he brought it up until his death in 2018.

The reason I reacted badly had nothing to do with the governor and everything to do with my relationship with my father. My father loved his family, I am certain. He told us so often, if flatly and dispassionately like a priest who does too many weddings. “Oh, I love my family,” he would declare, apropos of nothing, and then move along, presumably to do something that interested him a bit more than we did. Where his money was concerned, he felt entitled to only what was left over after his children got everything they could possibly want. At the macro level of parenting, you couldn’t fault him. At the micro level, he broke my heart. He was distant and joyless and bafflingly uncurious about his children’s lives. Monotone declarations of love came easily and often; attempts at connection were rare.

To add insult to injury, I have one memory of my father being overcome by emotion and it had nothing to do with us. When Roberto Benigni accepted the Oscar for “Life is Beautiful,” my father wept a little. I was dumbstruck. I turned to my mother who shook her head wearily. “He didn’t see that movie,” she said, “he just likes seeing Italian men win things.”  

My brother made his peace with the strangeness, but I did not and it made for an ugly adolescence. Our father-daughter dynamic became like a child poking a hibernating bear with a stick. Teenage me preferred an explosive interaction to none at all.

But by the time my father started telling me to call the governor of New York for a favor, I was an adult. I had also, by then, had some success in my writing career, which led to a new strand of tension between us. When I got good reviews, my father sprang into action to have photocopies made and mailed to his relatives. It didn’t look to me like paternal pride, however. It seemed to me that his zeal to share my press was mostly about the pleasure of seeing his own name in print. He was a dour man as a rule, but he occasionally lit up—eyes glimmering, smile beaming—when he talked about himself. His Italian lineage! His service in World War II! He was forever coming at me with maps of Italy and notebooks detailing the minutiae of his war service and I was forever pushing him off because when had he ever shown interest in my minutiae?  

My father telling me to call Andrew Cuomo enraged me because it seemed to spring from two of his most maddening qualities: autobiographical narcissism and a lack of curiosity about the finer details of my life. I write plays and television. What exactly did he imagine the governor of New York could possibly do to make that path easier for me? So I not only rejected the suggestion, I banished it. And I banished it to a degree that unnerves me. I have exploited far, far thinner personal material for wit.

In 2019, the National Organization of Italian American Women made me a recipient of their annual award. After the ceremony in New York, a woman approached me and identified herself as the Director of Italian-American Affairs for Governor Cuomo’s office. She bore a boilerplate letter of congratulations and offered me her business card “in case there’s ever anything we can do for you.”  I thanked her and pocketed the letter. I said nothing.

Around the same time, my labor union, the Writers Guild of America, was lobbying furiously for a tax credit that would incentivize television shows that film in New York State to hire women and people of color. I traveled to Albany with the union on a lobbying mission. I wrung my hands in meetings about what it would take to get our bill passed. In a room full of writers, surely there was a joke to be made. Something about working it out with my cousin over Sunday dinner, maybe? Nope. Never even thought to mention it.

I missed those opportunities—opportunities for connection or merely for wit—because they came to me via my father. I had spent the entirety of my father’s golden years asserting that his Cuomoness was worth nothing to me. As a person of integrity, I felt I needed to hold firm to that position.

But I could not have anticipated the coronavirus.

I started watching the governor’s press conferences for the same reason most people did: I was scared. Overnight New York felt like a science fiction movie and, in the absence of a coherent message from the oval office, the speculation was nightmarish. I heard that the National Guard was out in HAZMAT suits preventing people from leaving New Rochelle. (Not true.) I wondered if I should take my kid and flee before they locked down New York City. But what if we left and they wouldn’t let us come back?

In this time of surreal terror, a gaping leadership vacuum opened and the governor of New York stepped into it with 111 straight days of daily press briefings. I can’t say I tuned in and immediately found what I was looking for because I was looking for Bill Clinton. I wanted deep, syrupy empathy and beautiful promises. Barack Obama would empathize in a moment like this, but he wouldn’t sugarcoat. And I needed sugar.

Andrew Cuomo offers no sugar. His resting expression is dour. When he speaks emotionally—and he often does—there is a distance, a clinical remove from the content of his words. He says devastating things with a flat affect, things like “you’re going to lose people. That’s life. That’s up to someone else. That’s above my pay grade.”   What he brought to the table in the absence of Clintonian empathy was, chiefly, math. He had graphs and tables and metrics illustrating the progress of the epidemic and he updated them daily. His language was the language of machines. Shutting down the economy was “throwing a switch in the basement.”  How soon could the city re-open? That was like reading a car dashboard, he told us. It would involve reading dials and meters that would inform the turning of valves. There were blunt sports metaphors (the economy would bounce back like a football, not a basketball) and car talk. So much car talk.

Cuomo’s mantra over the coming months would be “facts not emotions.” His was a “data driven response,” he told us repeatedly. It’s not that he didn’t acknowledge our collective anguish; he did. But he acknowledged it in flat, declarative sentences like “there is no doubt that this is a horrendous time to live through.” And he wasn’t averse to talking worst possible scenarios—flatly, unemotionally. Forget hope and comfort, he imagined disasters I hadn’t even considered. “Don’t be stupid,” he told us often. What would happen if we were stupid? The infection rate would continue to rise and transit workers might stay home to keep their families safe. And if transit workers stayed home and medical personnel couldn’t get to work?  Then, my friends, we would be in real trouble. My father did this, too—invited you to imagine the outer-reaches of catastrophe when what you were looking for was reassurance. When I told my parents that I wanted to have a baby on my own, my father’s response was, “If the child was born with problems, that would be very bad.” When I bought car insurance for the first time? He said, “I like to carry enough insurance that if I hit a school bus full of children, I would be covered.” Prudent, sure. But did we really have to go there?

My father never really got it when I tried to explain why this kind of response was unsatisfying. Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, got it, or at least to paid lip service to the critique, which was a start. His three daughters had made him aware of his “flawed communication modality,” he told us. And he told us this often. But he also ended his briefings everyday with the word “love.” Every day he told us that we had to be “New York tough” and then he asked us to also be loving towards one another. You can be tough and loving at the same time, he told us!  And how often he told us!  This point—the coexistence of toughness and love—seemed almost a fixation for him.

Andrew Cuomo looks like my father in his prime, if my father had hair. It’s the coloring and the deeply etched bulldog lines in the face, the default-to-dour resting expression. They share verbal cadences and odd mannerisms, like shaking both hands at you to indicate they’re about to change the subject even though they have so much more to teach you. I realized pretty fast that these press briefings were going to be a Proustian shit storm for me. It was uncanny and I could not look away.

They both do this annoying thing where they validate your pain by assuring you that it’s awful enough to stand the test of time. When I had a miscarriage, my father said, “You’ll remember this all your life.”  Cuomo was fond of telling us that the Coronavirus would guarantee us a place in the history books. Um… good?

They both employ the same maddening rhetorical device in the face of conflict. It goes like this: “You want to do x? That’s fine. But you have to do y.”  I did a lot of adolescent screaming at my father about his deficiencies and his response was always the same. “You don’t love me? That’s OK. You don’t have to love me. You do have to respect me.” (My father, no lie, once changed a light bulb while telling me this.) Cuomo uses this construction a lot. “You don’t want to wear a mask? You don’t think it’s cool? That’s fine. You still have to wear one.” And their delivery is the same! There’s a bright, self-congratulatory lilt when they’re embracing your flawed position. Then they drop the hammer. That nice little connection we just made? It doesn’t actually change anything.

And they both exhibit—not a criticism, guys, only an observation—a giddy narcissistic delight when they share something they like about themselves. Cuomo does this thing where he shares with his audience a quotation he finds especially relevant and profound. Then, with a glint in his eye, he says, “Do you know who said that? I said that. That’s me.”  Toward the end of my father’s life, he leaned in very close to me and smiled. He said, “Gina, I am so proud…” and, as I readied myself to accept his praise, he finished the sentence, “… of my war service.”

And how many days did I feel the pain of the Cuomo daughters? This, for me, is where this whole thing got weird. The more I watched Andrew Cuomo flail awkwardly at showing affection for his daughters, the more acutely I missed my father. Oh, Governor. When you unveiled the renovation of Terminal B at LaGuardia and compared it to the birth of your daughters? Then I missed my father. Giving your youngest daughter your watch as a graduation present? Very Sebastian Gionfriddo. I know she asked for something that had meaning for you, but by your own admission, “She won’t be able to wear it because it’s a man’s watch.”  I missed my father every time you took a stab at paternal empathy and mangled the moment awfully. To his daughter, Mariah, missing her boyfriend, the governor observed, “That old expression, if you love something, let it go and it will return to you. And if it doesn’t return, then it was never meant to be… Words to that effect.”

By 2020 I had come a long way toward forgiving my father for not being the dad I wanted him to be, but the place I found myself wasn’t exactly love. It was chilly acceptance that he did the best he could and gratitude for his financial generosity. Two years after my father’s death and four years after my mother’s, my eight-year-old daughter saw me ache for my mother in difficult moments. “You don’t miss Grandpa,” she said flatly. And she was right. I didn’t.

My father was no fun and he brought almost nothing to the table—to use a favorite Andrew Cuomo phrase—”on a personal level.”  But I would probably not have the life I have today without his financial generosity. He did not ask about my feelings, ever, but he paid for a hippie private school that did. I have no student loans. My father supplemented my teaching income when I was struggling for time to write my plays. When I went through a series of health problems in my twenties, he offered no words of comfort, but paid for any treatment I thought might work. Maybe I would be where I am today without my father, but probably not. A cursory googling of Andrew Cuomo tells me that he is viewed, in the political arena, as effective, but not liked. His father, Mario, was a philosopher, they say, whereas he is a mechanic. Also his former in-laws have accused him of not being fun.

I am very familiar with this particular configuration of attributes.

I’ve been at this essay for a while now and I resolved to put it away after today because, candidly, personal introspection essays do not pay my bills and I have been neglecting the writing job that does. I have a lot of murder television to write, so it’s time to end this thing. I was hoping that a coherent thesis would emerge and that hasn’t happened. But writing this has felt thrilling because it put me back in touch with the reason writers write: we think that if we keep hacking away at a thing that confounds us, we will break through to illumination on the other side. Not this time, apparently. The human psyche is a dense, unfathomable swamp.

This is the best I can do: In a time of personal and global terror, I took comfort in watching Andrew Cuomo because he reminded me so much of the father who never offered me comfort. He was not the balm I went looking for in my COVID spring, but for 111 very bad days, he was there, sharing scary facts and scarier projections after which he would empathize awkwardly and disappear to, presumably, go be the unlikable guy who makes your life possible. And sprinkled throughout these briefings were flights of bizarre autobiographical self-indulgence—projecting his mother and his daughters on screens behind him on Mother’s Day, for example—that were simultaneously so heartfelt and so tone deaf. It was in those strange moments I saw my father most clearly and was surprised to find that I missed him. I came to believe, over those 111 days, that Andrew Cuomo cared a lot, in spite of communication tics that suggested otherwise and I think that journey has made me willing to make that leap with my father. Which, I will give you, is way, way too much to put on gubernatorial press conferences, but there it is. It’s not rational; it’s some weird inner child healing thing. Don’t tell me Andrew Cuomo underfunds public education. This is not a data driven response.

And the irony is sweet. Nine years after my father told me the governor of New York could do something for me, he did

Carey Mulligan on “Promising Young Woman,” a feminist revenge story for the ages

There has been anticipation building in the film fan community for a darkly funny movie starring British actress Carey Mulligan, “Promising Young Woman,” set to release on Christmas Day. The thriller is brilliantly acted by Mulligan, who stopped by “Salon Talks” to discuss her role in the feminist revenge story for the ages. The film accosts the senses with great color, costumes, grit and art direction, and is part dark comedy, part noir romance with sobering underpinnings. Mulligan is matched with a cast of beloved comedic actors, including Alison Brie, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jennifer Coolidge, Bo Burnham and Molly Shannon, all playing straight.

The film is a tale for the #MeToo times, which follows Mulligan’s character Cassie as she gives payback to a never-ending list of men who’ve taken advantage of women sexually, and gotten away with it. Sound familiar after the last several years of headlines? It’s intentional. “Promising Young Woman” is not only about revenge, however, it’s also a love story, albeit not in the usual boy-meets-girl way one might expect, based on Cassie’s romantic adventure during the film. Her devotion to her best friend, in life and death, is both admirable and we’re led to believe, perhaps certifiably crazy. 

But Cassie is no cookie-cutter nut; she’s a brilliant former medical student seeking meaning, and justice. From her clothing, to her home, parents and mannerisms, Mulligan’s character and environment were carefully crafted. Written and directed by “Killing Eve” head writer Emerald Fennell, Cassie keeps viewers guessing. Fennell was very specific in her intentions for her characters, all of which are nuanced (except, perhaps, the bad-behaving male doctors in the story). Mulligan recalled rehearsing a scene when Brie, playing Cassie’s med school nemesis Madison, walks into Cassie’s parents’ home, and was genuinely both mesmerized and surprised by the set. “Emerald told her, ‘Do it just like that!'” Mulligan said.

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more from Mulligan on Cassie, how she found humanity in the character and why her performance is one you’ll remember.

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

I watched “Promising Young Woman” into the wee hours, which might not have been a great idea. It was gripping, unexpectedly funny and really, really dark, which I love. What about the storyline or character grabbed you when you first read the script?

I think it was the reading of the whole script in general. I just felt like I hadn’t read anything like it and I didn’t know where it was going. I think oftentimes scripts, even brilliantly written scripts, within the first 20 pages, half an hour, you know where it’s going. There was just something so exciting about not knowing what was coming at every turn and having all of my expectations thrown off. This character is just stuck in a way and also somebody who’s extremely loyal. It was important for me not to approach it as a revenge thing, I think this is someone who just absolutely loved her friend and is loyal to her to her own detriment. I thought she was fascinating.

That must’ve been really interesting to read too because even as we’re watching the film, without giving too much away, I think there’s actually a thought line that perhaps your character, Cassie, is imagining some of the things that are happening, at least that’s what my husband thought when we were watching. It was very cleverly done. Did you have that thought at all?

I didn’t, but I think that’s a really interesting reflection. What [writer and director] Emerald [Fennell] and I talked about a lot was that this was somebody who was in really deep pain. As someone somewhat akin to addiction, these ventures that she’s going on in the evening are something that in the moment she achieves that twist where the guy realizes that she’s sober, she gets this real hit of satisfaction that lasts for a short period of time and then wears off. For her, it feels like something proactive that she’s doing to be able to cope. Actually, it’s obviously not.

She is somebody who’s very much just in stasis, and has been like that for 10 years. This event happened a long time ago, and I think something I found so interesting about her is that this isn’t somebody who has fresh trauma, this is someone who’s lived with something for so long that it’s calcified within her and she’s just frozen a bit. That’s where you meet her at the beginning of the story, at least, I think things evolve quite a lot.

I’m a fan of “Killing Eve,” which Emerald is a writer and executive producer on. And with this film, I love the idea of noir, dark humor built into this very sobering story of pseudo addiction, of perhaps mental illness, and also of real true loyalty and true love.

Quickly after reading the script, Emerald sent me a playlist of music that had Paris Hilton, Charlie XCX, it had “Toxic” by Britney Spears in two different forms, and then meeting her rounded out the picture. I do think she’s just got a really unique perspective, and she’s incredibly funny, incredibly smart and sees things in a very particular way. Obviously her work on “Killing Eve” is amazing, she’s also an incredibly accomplished actor, but she’s this really difficult tightrope walk of blending these genres of thriller and horror and romance, and I think it’s such a difficult thing to pull off. I think it came from her mind and it had to be her. She was the one who could bring it all together because I do think it’s a real task.

“Promising Young Woman” feels like a feminist story for our times. With #MeToo, we have seen these rapey guys who unfortunately exist the world over and are very seldom called on their bad behavior, finally being called out recently. How did playing the alt-times heroine make you feel?

I think it’s a different experience now releasing the film than it was making it. I never really think big picture. Obviously Emerald does and was, and there’s a lot of religious iconography in the design and the cinematography of the film, portraying Cassie as somewhat of an avenging angel who is going out on behalf and is there to dole out punishment or forgiveness depending on how her subjects react. But for me, I just had to keep coming back to the really simple storyline of these two best friends. Doing justice for her friend, that was the center of it. I think there were two moments in the film that really, well a number actually. Probably one of them, it’s a spoiler, so I won’t go there.

There was a couple of moments in the film where I was speaking about my friend, Nina, in the film and speaking about her, but because of the conversations that we’ve heard over the last couple of years and everything that I had read, and it felt in those moments much bigger than me, and much bigger than this film, and much bigger than this character. Because we are talking about so many people’s personal experience, and that comes with a hefty amount of responsibility of being as honest as we can. It was just really important to try and be truthful and to be honest with how we’re doing all of this, which I think Emerald does through the film and to the end of the film in the way that it’s written.

The film is often described as a revenge story, which you touched on, and it is in so many ways, but it’s also a love story as I saw it. Not in the boy meets girl way that you might expect based on your character’s romance during the film. What do you think makes it both?

Well, I think there is that aspect of it, there is the brilliant Bo Burnham who comes in and charms the socks off everyone, but this story was a lot about love for me. From the beginning, it was about the love of a family and how people react when they don’t know how to reach somebody. I think one of the most moving parts of the film for me really is her parents’ inability to reach her. The scene particularly between Clancy and Cassie, where he’s trying to reach his daughter again, and of course at the center of it, her love for her best friend. I think that’s something that we seldom see in cinema in the same way is this sisterhood, particularly when you’re a teenager and a young woman. In my experience, increasingly so, those relationships are so important and you are fiercely loyal to your closest friends.

I think Emerald pointed out that historically, we’ve probably been more inclined to fight on behalf of our friends as opposed to ourselves in some way. That relationship is really key. It was interesting, I was doing an interview the other day where somebody asked about Cassie and said, “Well, she’s nuts, right? Would you say by the end of the film she’s nuts?” I thought that was so interesting because I thought we’ve seen so many films where men have gone on a warpath on behalf of their sister, daughter, wife, I suppose daughter and wife more commonly, or girlfriend or whatever, and I don’t think we would ever say, “Well, he’s just gone crazy.” Because that’s something that we’re so comfortable with as a genre and an idea, but we’re somehow so unfamiliar with this that it seems crazy. That was just interesting. I think a lot of this is just about our expectations of women on screen, and I love that Emerald’s so interested in writing characters that feel real, female characters that feel honest.

Absolutely. That’s great analysis. The analogy between how men are treated and allowed to behave and how women, in life and in character, it’s almost like Freud’s hysteria. It’s like, “Oh, well, she must be crazy, and yet he’s just doing the right thing.” Forget that. We can let that one go now. When you’re reading scripts for new and upcoming projects, even as we’re stuck here in the moment, have you seen an increase in the theme of female empowerment in any scripts you’re reading or projects you’re perhaps collaborating on since male aggressors and rapists in and outside of Hollywood have finally started being called on some of the bad behavior?

Well, I think in a way, women have just been really doing it for themselves for the last five years or so. There’s definitely been a huge change, and I think that that’s in large part because of women getting stuff made. Actors who’ve just decided that they’re going to create their own content. I think there has been a lot more interesting writing for women, interesting projects, and I think that has been largely led by women. The amount of brilliant work for women in the last, however many years, with “Big Little Lies,” and starting probably with “Olive Kitteridge” around then when Frances McDormand had put that production together. Women have been creating their own interesting work and that work has been really successful commercially. I think the industry pays attention to that. Then you have “Fleabag” and “Killing Eve” and all these shows with female writer, directors, creators who are putting the stuff out into the world and it’s getting this enormous response.

I think that has started something in a real way where there’s an understanding now that these stories are relevant to everyone — they’re not just for women. Men love these shows as much as women do. Now there’s an appetite for it in a really exciting way and we’ve got all these brilliant people putting this work out. People like Margot Robbie, who produced this film, her production company, LuckyChap, their mission is to find stories about interesting and real women. All of that stuff feels very encouraging.

That’s so great. I want to take just a minute to appreciate the art direction in the film. We talked a little bit about the music, the costumes, the locations, what a dreamy and mixed-era approach to what I think was modern-day L.A., and I’m sure this was intentional. I loved Cassie’s parents’ oddly dated home, for example, as though they, like her, are stuck in time. Can you tell us about it and also what your favorite elements were? Your costumes were fabulous.

Nancy [Steiner], who did our costumes, is just so brilliant. The parents’ house was amazing. I remember the first time we’d shot a couple of things in there, Jennifer and Clancy and I, and then Alison Brie came to shoot the scene that she does in the house, and she walked into the set and she looked around, and Emerald went, “Do that. When you come in, do that.” Because it was exactly that reaction. She does it in the film, she walks in and she’s like, “What? Where am I?” Just stepped into a time machine.

Were there plastic covers on the couches? Because that’s the kind of thing you look for. Then the old intercom in the wall, did you have those in England?

Oh I’m sure. I feel like there was portraits of dogs. It was just amazing. That was such a hilarious set. I loved Cassie’s childlike bedroom, it looked like it was a 16-year-old’s room. The coffee shop obviously was such a great set. The pharmacy, I think, looks so stunning with the neon pink signage. But I think all of the set design was just so clever. Obviously, the costume was a huge part of the characterization because this is somebody who really understands the power of how to present oneself.

Emerald, when we first met said, “Look, this is not a woman in a gray cardigan staring out of a window. This is somebody who’s very much hiding in plain sight, and somebody who has a multi-colored manicure and wears pretty clothes. Doesn’t look like somebody who’s capable of destroying your life.” There’s something very intentional about the way that Cassie decides that she’s going to dress herself like this. Also, when you look like that, people think you’re okay. They think you’re functioning.

I think Gail’s pretty much one of the only characters who can really see that she’s not, and she has suspicions about that, But I think to the outside world, Cassie looks like she’s doing fine. I think if she didn’t put on makeup, if she looked the way that she feels, which is in great pain, she’d get way too much attention and she doesn’t want that, she just wants to shut everybody out. That was really interesting to talk to Nancy about. Obviously Emerald was involved in all of those conversations.

We don’t see you get dressed ever in the film, and yet you’ve got those incredible weaves, or that blonde wig that looked very heavy. It was a lot. There’s a lot going on! We have to wrap up soon, but before we do, I just wanted to say on a human note, we’re coming up on Christmas. As a mom of two young kids, the pandemic’s been really challenging for parents to manage, virtual school and work and maintaining sanity. What have you learned about yourself as a parent in the past eight months? Me, I’m tired of cooking dinner. How about you?

I have felt extraordinarily lucky to live outside of a city and have space, but there’s definitely challenges. We’ve got small children, but I do think we’ve been lucky, and to be in the minority that’s had a good experience in that life’s slowed down and became very small in a way, that was probably good. But that’s hard because there’s so much suffering going on. It’s been an incredibly odd year, but I think we’ve felt lucky to have this window of time of being away from everything in probably good way. But I’m certainly looking forward to getting back to work.

“Promising Young Woman” opens in select theaters on Christmas Day. 

Comedian John Mulaney enters rehab for alcohol and cocaine addiction

Comedian, former “Saturday Night Live” writer, and sometimes 19th-century philosopher John Mulaney has entered a 60-day rehab program for alcohol and cocaine addiction, reports The New York Post’s Page Six. 

Mulaney has been open about his past struggles with sobriety in both interviews and his critically acclaimed stand-up specials. “I don’t drink,” he joked in “New in Town” in 2012. “I used to drink, then I drank too much, and I had to stop. That surprises a lot of audiences, because I don’t look like someone who used to do anything.”

In a 2019 interview with Esquire, he told writer Jonah Weiner that he drank for attention. 

“I was really outgoing, and then at 12, I wasn’t,” he said. “I didn’t know how to act. And then I was drinking, and I was hilarious again . . . Then I tried cocaine, and I loved it. I wasn’t a good athlete, so maybe it was some young male thing of This is the physical feat I can do. Three Vicodin and a tequila and I’m still standing. Who’s the athlete now?” 

According to Weiner, Mulaney could pinpoint the day he stopped using cocaine in August 2005, and the day that he gave up alcohol that September. He was 23. 

“I went on a bender that weekend that was just, like, fading in and out of a movie,” he says. “It was just crazy . . . I didn’t kill anyone or assault anyone. But yeah, I was like, ‘You’re f**king out of control.’ And I thought to myself, ‘I don’t like this guy anymore. I’m not rooting for him.'” 

A source told Page Six that Mulaney’s fans know that he has struggled with sobriety. 

“Unfortunately he has struggled again during the pandemic,” they said. “He’s on board with his recovery, he’s not fighting against rehab.”

In early December, Mulaney alluded to some of the ways in which the pandemic was impacting his mental health during an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!.”  He recently became a staff writer on another late night show, “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” Mulaney described how he wasn’t thriving without the structure of a routine. 

“During quarantine, I was like, ‘Why am I going totally crazy and why am I suddenly telling my own wife my accomplishments?'” he said. “I really needed a job. One, I like having a boss and having assignments to do. When I’m in charge of something, not so much the best thing.”

He said that his psychiatrist was supportive of the move. “She said to me: ‘Without external structure, I don’t have any confidence in you thriving.'” 

Mulaney hosted “SNL “for the fourth time in October, which punctuated a successful few years for the comedian. He serves as the voice of Andrew Glouberman on the hit Netflix series, “Big Mouth,” which just premiered its fourth season. In June, he announced a deal with Comedy Central for two new comedy specials which will both be continuations of “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch,” Mulaney’s children’s musical comedy special released on Netflix last December. It was also announced that he will star alongside Andy Samberg in an upcoming reboot of Disney’s “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.” 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Mulaney was a staff writer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The story has been updated.
 

“The Ripper” is just another example of how true and scripted crime shows fail sex workers

The Yorkshire Ripper had already murdered four women when police announced he’d killed his first “innocent.” Unlike the serial killer’s other victims, 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald was not a sex worker, and to the Yorkshire Police and the British press this signalled a shift in the case. 

“For the first time, the national press were interested,” said journalist Christa Achroyd in the new Netflix docuseries, “The Ripper.” “Jayne was beautiful, she was 16 and, more importantly, the police had made a distinction between her killing and the killings of the other women.” 

She continued: “They described her as the first ‘innocent’ and suddenly everything that happened before had happened to prostitutes, and here was an ‘innocent’ victim.”

The Yorkshire Ripper was the name given by the press to Peter Sutcliffe as an allusion to the 19th century serial killer Jack the Ripper. Both men specifically targeted lower-class women, sometimes sex workers, and often mutilated their victims’ bodies. While Jack the Ripper has never been identified, Sutcliffe managed to evade police for over five years, making it the longest murder manhunt in British history.

This case has received a flurry of new attention following the 2019 BBC docuseries, “The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story,” which detailed the many ways in which misogyny and the stigmatization of sex work dominated law enforcement’s investigation, from following false leads to dismissing pertinent evidence, as well as Sutcliffe’s death from COVID-19 in November. 

Netflix’s “The Ripper” attempts to both capitalize on the renewed interest in the 45-year-old case, as well as offer “a sensitive examination of the crimes within the context of England in the late 1970s.” Unfortunately the victims’ voices are still lost along the way — an illustration of the way scripted and true crime continue to fail sex workers in their portrayals. 

The first episode opens on the death of Wilma McCann, a mother of four whose body was found in 1975 on a playing field in the Chapeltown district of Leeds. Initially, this was viewed as a one-off act of violence, until three other women — Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson and Patricia Atkinson — were killed in a similar fashion over the next several months. 

The police weren’t able to collect much physical evidence from the scenes, other than some boot and  tire prints, but they developed an internal theory about the killer’s M.O. that soon went public: these murders were committed by a man who really hated sex workers. 

Through modern-day interviews and a wealth of well-edited archival footage, “The Ripper” creators Ellena Wood and Jesse Vile create a vivid sense of life in 1970s West Yorkshire, which is not so much a backdrop for Sutcliffe’s crimes as a character in the story. Several industrial titans had left the area, meaning that jobs were scarce and economic stresses were skyrocketing. Some women turned to sex work to make a living, but when faced with violence were reluctant to go to the police for fear of potential arrest or futher assault. All of this was punctuated by a rising national interest in feminism. 

The death of Jayne MacDonald — and law enforcement and media’s insistence upon her innocence in comparison to Sutcliffe’s prior victims — brought all these tensions to the foreground. Ackroyd, who was a young reporter at the time and serves as a sort of moral compass of this retelling, said that this forced the police to move beyond telling women that “didn’t have many boyfriends that they were fine.” 

“The Ripper” methodically showcases the ways in which misogyny colored the response to the killings. Women were given an informal curfew, and sex workers were encouraged by police to leave town. Victims whose backstory wasn’t deemed consistent with Sutcliffe’s motives (meaning that they weren’t sex workers) were cast aside as accidents or attributed to different killers. 

The series was poised to serve as an example of how modern true crime media could rectify the genre’s villification or erasure of sex workers and other marginalized communities, but it gets stopped up by its own contemporary talking heads, like “Yorkshire Post” journalist Alan Whitehouse.

When describing the police’s response to the killing of MacDonald, he states “this was the moment when West Yorkshire Police themselves were pulled up a little bit short, because until now they’d been dealing with a certain kind of woman following a certain kind of lifestyle.” Now, “a perfectly innocent girl, from a very ordinary family, is dead,” he said. 

The series toggles between archival interviews about the cases where law enforcement’s contempt for sex workers is apparent, and current interviews with men like Whitehouse whose comments are still stained with shades of derision. Where the creators of “The Ripper” may have been wanting viewers to come away saying, “Wow, that’s horrible, but I’m glad times have changed,” they didn’t set up the dichotomous views they intended. There’s no interrogation of the ways in which the continued criminalization of sex work perpetuates physical and sexual violence. 

This isn’t a huge surprise. 

As Audrey Moore wrote in her 2016 essay, “Why I’m Fed Up Of The Way TV Portrays Sex Workers,” when you look for television shows where sex workers aren’t mocked or murdered, you’re left with very few options. Even comedies like “30 Rock” toss in lines like, “This is where we used to hold retirement parties. The balcony below is probably still littered with stripper bones.” 

“In the vast majority of their programming, sex workers are treated one of two ways: as punching bags or punchlines,” Moore wrote. “Our lives are almost always sneered at, or pitied, or used as a symbol of inevitable tragedy. If you’ve ever watched police procedurals, or crime dramas, or thrillers, you’ve probably been offered a salacious glimpse of violence enacted on one of our anonymous bodies. Rarely given any agency or backstory as characters, we’re merely used to demonstrate the high-concept murderous impulses of a serial killer, or treated as collateral damage in the mission to save the morally ‘good’ characters.” 

To its credit, “The Ripper” does not endeavor to humanize Sutcliffe, and it attempts to put names to its victims’ faces — literally. The names of the women Sutcliffe killed and attacked are printed frequently on the screen in big, blocky font next to static images of their faces. But ironically, through the series’ attempt to draw attention to how they were defined by their profession, they are still over and over reduced to just that. 

It could learn a lot from “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” the HBO docuseries about Michelle McNamara’s best selling book of the same name on The Golden State Killer. As Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote, the series was haunting in its portrayal of the very human details left in the wake of the crimes.

“When you think of the details around a case like the Golden State Killer, maybe you know about a recording of an ominous obscene phone call,” she wrote. “Maybe you visualize a disturbing police sketch of a cold-eyed suspect. But do you think of an anguished brother-in-law cleaning up a crime scene? Do you think of bits of food left out on a kitchen counter? Or a father struggling to work out what to tell his child?” 

While “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” does, these are precisely the details left out of “The Ripper” and often totally ignored by true crime media when the cases in question involve sex workers. Who is waiting for them to get home? What about their children? What do their families think? 

In the case of “The Ripper,” we have some idea. Several days before the series released on Netflix, family members of Sutcliffe’s victims petitioned for the network to change the title of the series, several saying they had been interviewed under the impression that the show would be called “Once Upon A Time in Yorkshire,” which is far less salacious. 

“The moniker ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’ has traumatised us and our families for the past four decades,” they wrote in an open letter. “It glorifies the brutal violence of Peter Sutcliffe and grants him a celebrity status that he does not deserve.” 

While the series “The Ripper” attempts to dismantle some of that celebrity, instead putting police incompetence in the spotlight, it still neglects to truly center Sutcliffe’s victims. Perhaps it’s time to retire both the moniker and the same tired retellings of stories where sex workers are portrayed as one-dimensional or culpable in some way for the killer’s crimes. 

“The Ripper” is currently streaming on Netflix.

Fox News, suddenly worried about a defamation suit, forced to debunk its own false election claims

Fox News and Fox Business just aired multiple segments debunking false election claims made on their shows for weeks after the voting technology company Smartmatic recently threatened to sue the network — along with fellow right-wing cable channels OANN and Newsmax — for defamation.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Fox News hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro aired the same segment debunking false claims that Smartmatic was involved in a scheme to switch votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden over the weekend. The segment comes in response to a new lawsuit threat from Smartmatic over several segments in which Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and the hosts pushed the baseless conspiracy theory even though the company was not involved in any elections in the contested swing states.

Powell, who reportedly met with President Donald Trump on Friday amid discussions about naming her a special counsel to investigate unfounded allegations of voter fraud, has for weeks pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez had Dominion create software to flip votes that was later used in the 2020 election to flip votes from Trump in a scheme funded by China, Cuba, and others. There is no evidence to back her claim and the company has threatened to sue her for defamation. Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized Powell on air for failing to provide any evidence to back her claim.

Giuliani issued a statement distancing Trump’s legal team from Powell after she claimed that Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and the CIA were involved in the scheme despite holding a joint news conference with her days earlier. Giuliani also advised Trump against appointing Powell as a special counsel, according to The New York Times. But he has likewise pushed a conspiracy theory about voting machines, even requesting that the Department of Homeland Security seize voting machines in certain states, which it refused to do, according to the Times report.

Giuliani has falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion was actually a “front” for Smartmatic, even though the two companies appear to have no ties.

The two attorneys repeated these baseless allegations on the air, as did Dobbs, prompting Smartmatic to demand a retraction and threaten to sue, according to The Washington Post.

“Fox News has engaged in a concerted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic. Fox News told its millions of viewers and readers that Smartmatic was founded by [the late Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, that its software was designed to fix elections, and that Smartmatic conspired with others to defraud the American people and fix the 2020 U.S. election by changing, inflating, and deleting votes,” the company’s attorney said in a letter to the network, calling for corrections to “be published on multiple occasions” during prime time shows to “match the attention and audience targeted with the original defamatory publications.”

Fox News pointed Salon to the segment aired on the three shows but declined to comment further.

The segment featured Eddie Perez, a voting expert at the OSET Institute in Palo Alto, a nonpartisan election technology research and development nonprofit, who was not informed about the nature of the segment before being interviewed.

“There was nothing in any of the preliminary conversations that I had with Fox News that gave me any indication that Smartmatic would be a matter of conversation,” Perez told CNN. “It was never mentioned that this was going to be a discussion about Smartmatic or even claims about private vendors. I was anticipating a broader discussion about the debate around the election, election integrity.”

Perez said it was “important” to discuss the topics on Fox because its hosts made allegations “that are speculative and not based in fact, many of which are harmful to enhancing public confidence in the legitimacy of election outcomes.”

Perez explained in the segment that Smartmatic is “for all intents and purposes” a completely separate company from Dominion and refuted Giuliani’s claim that the company sends votes overseas to be tabulated. Smartmatic, he explained, created software that was used only in Los Angeles County and none of the states where Trump has challenged the results based on unfounded claims of fraud.

Smartmatic, which was founded by Venezuelan engineer Antonio Mugica, also sent similar lawsuit threats to Newsmax and One America News Network, which have repeatedly amplified Trumpworld’s baseless allegations.

Mugica told The New York Times’ Ben Smith that the conspiracy theory was so “absurd” he thought it was “not going to have legs” but the claims quickly went from social media fodder to being amplified by the president’s lawyer and conservative hosts on national television.

Smartmatic has been mentioned on Fox News and Fox Business at least 118 times and Dominion was mentioned 792 times, according to Smith.

Mugica retained attorney Erik Connolly, who won the largest defamation settlement in history after getting a payout of at least $177 million to a beef producer who sued ABC News for describing its “lean finely textured beef” as “pink slime” but now targets “red slime,” lies spread by Republican officials, according to Smith.

“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Connolly told the outlet.

Dominion has also retained prominent libel lawyer Tom Clare and threatened to sue the Trump campaign and Powell if they do not retract their “false statements” and “damaging falsehoods” about the company.

Longtime First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told Smith that the lawsuits threats from the two companies were “extremely powerful.”

“The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both,” he said, adding that it was “too early” to predict how the cases will end but “it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”

Mugica argued that the false claims were dangerous to his company too since it could affect its business.

“This potentially could destroy it all,” he said.

OAN has not commented on the lawsuit. Newsmax said in a statement to Smith that the network “has never made a claim of impropriety about Smartmatic, its ownership or software” and that it was just providing a “forum for public concerns and discussion,” but a host did “clarify” the network’s coverage on Monday.

It’s unclear whether the Fox segments satisfied the lawyers’ demands. Asked if he would settle for an apology from the networks, Mugica demurred.

“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he told Smith. “Then I could be satisfied.”

Public health doctor on pandemic holiday travel: “It sucks, but cancel your plans”

The COVID-19 pandemic’s massive toll did not need to be this bad. This is what Dr. Seema Yasmin, who has served as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expressed to me recently on “Salon Talks.”

Yasmin stated bluntly that President Donald Trump’s lack of a “cohesive, strategic response to the pandemic” caused infections to spike and has resulted in widespread suffering for Americans. And while much of the country may be looking to spend time with extended family and friends for holiday celebrations this week, Yasmin, who also serves as a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, is advising everyone to stay home.

“People are traveling. They are gathering. They’re getting fed up,” she said. “Then we’re hearing these really heartbreaking stories of people on their ICU beds on their death bed saying, ‘Oh, I wish I’d stuck out the restrictions a bit more. Tell people to take this seriously.’ So please don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”

Yasmin and I also discussed how misinformation surrounding the virus, which oftentimes comes directly from Trump, has contributed to the United States having one of the highest mortality rates for COVID-19 of all the developed countries. And if you’re curious about how the various COVID-19 vaccines work differently scientifically and which one could be right for you, watch or read our interview below. While they all show great promise, Yasmin noted that these vaccines are only effective if approximately 70 percent of the country agrees to be vaccinated so that our nation reaches herd immunity.

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

We’re seeing COVID cases explode right now, even worse than in the summer. What can you share about why that is happening?

That’s actually pretty straightforward. The reason we’re seeing escalating cases and now record-breaking numbers of infections, deaths, and the number of Americans in hospitals higher than it’s ever been in the pandemic is because we haven’t really had a cohesive strategic government response to this pandemic. States were left in the lurch from the spring and the tests weren’t finalized. We didn’t have a good testing strategy.

Then also, I study epidemics I also study misinfo-demics, which has all the misinformation and disinformation that circulates. And that’s been overwhelming. I’ve talked to really well educated, rational people who’ve told me verbatim conspiracy theories and hoaxes that they fallen for because there’s so much misinformation out there.

People are finding it really difficult to separate the fact from the fiction, especially when you have people at high levels, high office in the country, sharing things that are completely false. It really throws a spanner into the works in terms of getting viral transmission under control. Those are a few of the reasons why we are seeing what we are seeing now, which is the record-breaking numbers of Americans infected contagious, but also dying from this disease every day.

If we had a different president in office when this happened, one that was responsible, one that didn’t mock mask wearing, one that didn’t skew misinformation like Donald Trump objectively did, could this have been different for us as a nation?

I do think so. Cornell University researchers analyzed 38 million English language articles about COVID-19 and through their analysis of those, they determined that the single biggest driver of false information about COVID-19 was President Trump. So that in and of itself, even if you’re in a resource-poor setting, you don’t have the best testing, you don’t have all the best hospitalization equipment and all that capacity, sometimes you can be very effective by just really efficient, clear information, telling people what to do right. Telling them how to stay safe. We didn’t even have that in the U.S.

I’m not saying that every other nation in the world got this right. You will see in that Europe, there are countries that are struggling right now. But you look at our death rate from COVID here in the U.S. And you take it as a rate, per million people. Ours was around 700 deaths per million Americans at one point. Then you look at places like Vietnam, it’s 0.36 per million people. So yeah, it’s a smaller country, much smaller, but even when you account for that massive change in population, there were countries that were just way on top of this. America now has the worst epidemic of COVID-19 in the world. And one of the highest COVID-19 mortality rates of any developed nation, specifically.

It’s horrific to hear that when we’re compared to other countries and you lay it out there for us, that it did not have to be this bad. Americans didn’t have to die. I’ve lost four friends, including one I just learned about today, a comedian. The death toll is upticking, we’re seeing numbers of over 2,000 a day. When will we hit the worst of it in this country? Could it be three months of this?

Yeah, because if you were to look, there’s a lag between the infection rates and then the hospitalization rates, and then deaths. Two to three weeks off in between those. Everything is rising and at the moment, there’s no indication that anything will decrease. What could happen differently, we’ll get to talking about a vaccine in a moment. But realistically, to achieve safe herd immunity through a vaccine, you’d need to vaccinate upwards of 200 million Americans. On the one hand, you’d have to have Emergency Use Authorization of a vaccine.

Then you’d also have to figure out the logistics of manufacturing 400 million doses at least, since everyone’s likely going to need two doses of vaccine. And on top of that, you have to have public buy-in. Vaccines don’t end epidemics, people choosing to get vaccinated, that’s what ends an epidemic. And right now, many of the surveys are showing us that not enough Americans are saying that, yes, they will pull up their sleeve and get a vaccine. And without that a vaccine won’t help us.

We’re in the midst of the holiday season right now. People naturally want be with their family. What do you tell them about doing it safely or is your advice don’t even do it?

As a public health doctor, we correct people when they say the word “safe” because we like “safer.” Everything’s on a spectrum. We know that people won’t always do what we tell them to do, so what are the things that you can do to try and limit the harm in an activity? Still having said that, I’ll start off by saying, I’m sorry. It sucks, but cancel your plans.

Thanksgiving should have just been canceled. We shouldn’t have had Senator Ted Cruz saying on Twitter, “We are not willing to give up Thanksgiving and we won’t be willing to give up Christmas in December.” That kind of sentiment is really deadly. We’re trying to limit gatherings. We had about five to 10 million people go through TSA screenings. And I say that range because depending on which dates you look at. Over Thanksgiving week, it was less. It was fewer people than traveled last year for Thanksgiving, but that’s way too many during a pandemic.

People are traveling, they are gathering, they’re getting fed up. And then we’re hearing these really heartbreaking stories as well of people on their ICU beds on their death bed saying, “Oh, I wish I’d stuck out the restrictions a bit more. Tell people to take this seriously.” So please don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Tulane University has been testing a lot of its students in New Orleans and they said that nine out of 10 students who test positive for the coronavirus have no symptoms, no fever, no cough, not even saying they have any fatigue. And yet they’re testing positive and they’re going to be contagious. So that’s what you’re up against. Yes, you want to fling open the door and welcome your loved ones and give them hugs. We just can’t do that this year. We’re going to have to stick it out, wait until next year. That’s the most important thing.

People are trying to get around this by doing lots of testing. I’m not loving this because I don’t think the U.S. still has adequate capacity of testing. You may have heard some nurses in the news recently, really outraged saying, “Hold on a second. These pro athletes and some Hollywood stars are getting access to really high-frequency testing.” But then nurses they’re not able to get the test that they need. I think that’s starting to overwhelm. I would want to say to everyone, “Yes, get a test once a day.” But that capacity isn’t available.

People fall into a false sense of security when they get a negative test. And I think people let their guard down too much when that happens. Not realizing you can test negative for this coronavirus in the morning and be infectious by the evening. There’s a crossover point at which the virus is in your body, but not high enough levels to be detected by a test. And then at some point that is enough virus to be detected by a test. And negative test result is just telling you your status as a snapshot of one moment in time. Please bear all of these things in mind, as you’re deciding what to do over the holidays. You do not want to need a hospital bed in the next few months. Do everything you can to avoid that scenario, because there may not be space for you.

The COVID-19 vaccine is here. People have a lot of misconceptions. What is the difference between this vaccine and others and what are the differences in COVID-19 vaccines across different companies?

The one that got approved in the UK, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it works in a similar way to another vaccine. You may have heard about the Moderna vaccine, both of these do something really clever, I think in terms of biotech. Instead of giving you a tiny chunk of the virus, not the whole virus, but not even giving you a tiny chunk. What they’re doing is using messenger RNA that goes into your body. It’s basically a recipe that your cells read. And then they use that recipe to generate just the spike protein of the coronavirus. Your body’s not making anything infectious, but it’s receiving from the vaccine these instructions to make a tiny piece of the virus so that your immune system is like, “Ok, seen it, know what to expect, know what to look out for going to start building antibodies so that if we get exposed, we can fight this.” So that’s how those two vaccines work.

The University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is different. It uses a chimpanzee virus that’s been modified so that it can’t make humans sick. And into that virus, they’ve actually added a small chunk of the coronavirus, but just the spike protein. So not the whole virus by any means. It can’t give you COVID-19, but it gives your immune system that little primer that, “Hey, this is the thing that you need to look out for.”

What about people’s concerns about side effects? I’m sure each vaccine is different, but what should people look for if they have an option between which of the vaccines to take, to ensure it’s right for them and safe for them?

We’ll be looking at the guidance that comes from not necessarily the drug company or even the regulators, but the independent boards of scientists and vaccine experts who look up all that data on our behalf, on the public’s behalf. They’re not tied in any way to drug companies or to regulators. Most of them don’t get paid for a lot of the work that they do. They’re reanalyzing the raw data from the vaccine trials to say, not just is the vaccine safe or not, but “Hey, this is a vaccine that might do better in those over the age of 55, or this is a vaccine that we might want to use in this particular scenario.” I, for sure, be looking for guidance from them.

Right now it still feels a little bit early to make a call on those things because I think very much, we’re kind of living science by press release. Press releases are really marketing tools. We still need to see some more of the data, but we have seen really promising signs, especially from the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna trials of 95 percent efficacy against COVID-19. I think that’s a lot higher than many of us expected.

You mentioned you would need a booster shots for some of these vaccines. Does that mean when you get the first shot, you’re not immune at all, until you get your second booster shot?

It might vary from person-to-person and also from particular age groups to another, because our immune system does evolve over time as we get older. But if you recall… Anyone watching this who has kids, or maybe you recall from your own childhood, but especially when kids are just babies or a few months and two years old, you’re taking them, I hope to the doctor again and again for more vaccines. Right? That’s because for many vaccines or many diseases, a one-shot approach isn’t enough. It doesn’t give your body enough protection. We have a saying in vaccine science, prime-prime-boost.

Meaning that first shot you get kind of tells your immune system, “Hey, wake up. This is the thing you need to be prepared for.” And your immune system might start making a little bit of antibody. Then you get the second shot, and then that might boost it a bit more. Then you get that third booster shot for some diseases. It varies. You get prime-prime-boost. That final one will really ramp up your immune system’s preparedness level to fight any particular pathogen.

Johnson & Johnson in the case of COVID-19 is currently testing out a one-shot vaccine in about 60,000 people. We don’t have a lot of data from that yet, but all of the ones we’ve talked about, the Pfizer-BioNTech, the Moderna and the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. All of those are two doses, mostly because you need your immune system to have that second booster shot to really mount a solid response. We haven’t had enough time yet to say on top of that, you’ll need another booster in five years or 10 years. We don’t know that yet. That might be the case.

Let’s say you get the two booster shots in the vaccines that you need. How long then after are you close to being immune as you can. You’re saying 95 percent of the potential rate there. So in the real world, what does this mean?

We don’t know yet. I want to be really honest about uncertainty. Never trust a doctor that acts like they know everything, that’s when you leave the clinic. Nobody wants a “know-it-all” doctor. It’s just too soon to say, Dean.

I have a lot of questions about the press releases from the early data that’s been published, especially from the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. That is the one that actually kind of on paper, I was most excited about early on. It did not use that messenger RNA approach. It used that chimpanzee’s fake virus with a little tiny bit of a spike protein, that approach to vaccinate us. I was excited about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, because I don’t know whether you saw that the British tabloids were calling it a “vacca-chino,” saying that basically it costs less than a cup of coffee. It was about two to $3. You compare that with Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, you’re talking about 20 to 40 bucks a shot. Right? I was excited about Oxford/AstraZeneca one for the cheapness. And also because you can store average temperature, the other ones need to be frozen. The Pfizer-BioNTech needs to be frozen at really, really cold temperatures to the point that many facilities won’t even have freezers that can keep it that cold. So I was excited about that.

But there’s been a number of blunders with the Oxford/AstraZeneca trial. That’s really, really frustrated me. On the one hand as a scientist, because I’m like, “Come on, get your stuff together and do the trials properly.” But also as somebody who studies the spread of misinformation and anti-vaccine movements and someone who’s always trying to tell people how vaccines work, how to understand the trials. I think the Oxford/AstraZeneca debacle hasn’t started to erode trust in the vaccine makers, even for those who trusted them to begin with. They’ve made mistakes. They’ve tried to call them useful mistakes and serendipitous. They don’t think that you don’t do in vaccine fires. It’s lumping together data from the British crowds and the Brazilian trials, even though they were kind of designed differently and shouldn’t have been done that way. Right now AstraZeneca and Oxford, aren’t rushing for approval. In fact, in the U.S. They’re seeking guidance from the FDA asking, “Should we submit for approval just yet?” I wonder if their response will be, “No, we still need some more information from you.”

The history of vaccines has taught us that often the first one that comes along for a particular disease isn’t the best one. [It] isn’t the one that sticks around the longest. Or a better one could come along. But if we do imagine it as a race, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and the Oxford/AstraZeneca ones are furthest ahead. And now I feel like the Oxford/AstraZeneca one is lagging behind because of these mistakes and unanswered questions.

Will the vaccine have widespread access in the late spring, early summer for anyone in America who wants to get it? After that, when does it really become that we can go back to not wear a mask, not social distancing and return to our lives?

Yeah, I feel like when people are asking me, “When will the vaccine be available?” Mostly what they’re really asking, but not saying is, “When can life go back to some kind of normal. When can I not wear a mask?” So two things about this. I’m not going to believe any promises, if anyone is making promises about widespread availability by spring. And here’s why we calculate what proportion of people need to get vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity, and you get different numbers for different diseases depending on how contagious they are.

Measles is so contagious that you need like 93 percent of the population to be immunized in order to get a herd immunity. With COVID-19 it looks to be somewhere maybe say 70 or 75 percent. That’s three out of four Americans. And currently in the surveys, around half or less than half, depending on which ones you look at, I say they won’t get it.

If we do somehow get public buy-in, how are we going to make that much that quickly? Even once you’ve produced it with the Pfizer-BioNTech, $20 a shot, needs to be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Who has those freezers? Not any lab I’ve worked in. You can thaw it, and then it only lasts for five days in the fridge and then it goes bad. Then, it’s only just transported in particular numbers of vials in a particular shipment, meaning it may get to some counties that don’t even need that much or has to thaw all of it, because that’s the way it works. You get about five doses per vial, and then there’s going to be an amount that’s wasted. I know I’m getting really into the weeds here, but it’s because those are the things that will matter at the end of the day, in terms of rolling out enough vaccine for everyone who needs a shot to get the shot in order for us to get herd immunity.

In the meantime, like you said earlier, once vaccines do start to become available, which could be by the end of this year for some groups, such as healthcare workers, for some people in nursing homes. I worry that people will say, “Ta-da, we’ve crossed the finish line.” And actually where we’ll be at is getting near the finish line — the point in a race where you’re looking around and you do not slow down. You keep up your momentum.

What I am worried will happen is people will drop their guard and be, “Well, vaccines are coming. Right? So we can do parties. We can celebrate New Year’s as normal. [We] don’t have to wear a mask,” and all of that. But we do until there’s herd immunity, until a significant proportion of people have been vaccinated. Until then, we still have to keep up those safety measures. We’re still trying to understand whether the vaccines will keep you from getting sick, but do they stop you from spreading the virus to others? In which case, if that’s not going to happen, you’ll need to wear a mask, even if you’ve been vaccinated so that you’re not spreading your germs to other people. There’s a lot to think about here.

It’s clear that there is no way to give it a day or even a month. We’re going to see how this plays out.

Before you go, you’re also an author, in addition to being a doctor. Tell us about your new book, “Muslim Women Are Everything.”

It’s a book packed with stories of amazing women who are Muslim — they’re astronauts, they’re ballerinas, they’re Formula One racecar drivers. Women who’ve been told that they can’t do stuff because they wear a hijab. Or women who’ve been told that you’re not Muslim enough because you don’t wear a hijab. It’s that “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” And they’re just really inspiring women, who’ve kind of jumped over these obstacles that have been put in their way and been determined and that’s try to live their best life.

The thing that I love about it is that as Muslim women, we’re always kind of pigeonholed or told we need to be one way or another. And these are women who are everything from transgender to disabled to military strategists, not necessarily peace-loving. They are kind of shattering this idea of Muslim women are one thing. Actually, no, we are many things. And oftentimes we don’t even agree with one another, that how varied we are, we’re not a monolith. So I hope people pick it up and feel inspired.

I’m working on a book, “Muslim men are mediocre.” It’s going to be a great.

[Laughs] I think that could be a bestseller.

Your next book coming out in early January is called “Medical Myths And Why We Fall For Them.“

This is a book you won’t believe, but it’s been five years in the making. I’ve been writing it for a long time. Because I always get asked these questions. “Do vaccines cause autism? Can you cure this? Can you cure that? Are chemtrails from planes in the air, are they toxic? Should I buy the flat tummy teas that are sold on Instagram?”

This book answers some of the most commonly asked questions, but also does a deep dive into why is it that conspiracy theories persist. I grew up in conspiracy theories. So I talk about why it is that we believe what we believe and why is it that sometimes, something that’s patently false feels much more believable than what’s actually the truth.

Barr rejects Trump’s demand for special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden on his way out

Outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr said on Monday that he would not appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden or President Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims before leaving office later this week.

Barr, who announced he would step down before Christmas after refuting Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud, made the comments at a news conference two days before he is set to leave the Justice Department. Multiple news outlets have reported that President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter, a frequent target of the president’s attacks, has been under investigation by U.S. attorney’s offices in Delaware and the Southern District of New York since at least 2018. Hunter Biden has said he learned of the investigation earlier this month, and has denied any wrongdoing.

The news prompted Trump to consider appointing a special counsel to investigate the younger Biden, according to the Associated Press.

“I think to the extent that there’s an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally,” Barr said of the probe on Monday. “To this point I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave.”

The comments came after Trump criticized Barr, who was reportedly aware of the investigation, for not disclosing the probe publicly before the election.

“Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden. Joe was lying on the debate stage that nothing was wrong, or going on — Press confirmed” the president tweeted last week. “Big disadvantage for Republicans at the polls!”

Barr also broke with Trump on the recent cyberattack on federal agencies, telling reporters that it “certainly” appeared to have been carried out by the “Russians,” echoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump over the weekend disputed that the attack was from Russia and attempted to downplay its impact.

Trump has also complained that Barr publicly rejected the president’s baseless voter fraud claims earlier this month. Barr said that while he is “sure” that there was some minor fraud during the election, the Justice Department has found no evidence of widespread fraud that might have changed the result.

“I’m sure there was fraud in this election, but I was commenting on the extent to which we had looked at suggestions or allegations of systemic or brace fraud that could affect the outcome of the election, and I already spoke to that, and I stand by that statement,” Barr said. He added that there was “no basis” for the federal government to seize voting machines to examine them, as some Trump loyalists have urged.

The attorney general’s comments came after The New York Times reported that Trump has considered naming attorney Sidney Powell, who has pushed a baseless and bizarre conspiracy theory alleging a foreign-backed plot by a voting machine company to flip votes from Trump to Biden, as a special counsel to investigate the unfounded voter fraud claims. Powell, who was ousted from Trump’s legal team after claiming that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, was involved in the plot, reportedly brought her client Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser recently pardoned by Trump, to a White House meeting. Flynn has recently suggested that Trump could invoke martial law to “rerun” the election, although the president has no legal or constitutional authority to do such a thing.

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and other top advisers strongly pushed back on the idea of appointing Powell, according to the report, but Trump and Giuliani have discussed issuing an executive order to seize voting machines in various states.

Giuliani separately called Ken Cuccinelli, a top Trump appointee who was illegally installed as acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, to ask DHS to seize the voting machines. Cuccinelli explained that the department did not have the authority to do so, according to the report.

Barr disputed Powell’s conspiracy theory earlier this month.

“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results,” he told The Associated Press. “And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

Though Barr pushed back against using special counsels to investigate Biden or voting irregularities, he announced last month that he had appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as a special counsel in order to continue his investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.

“I wanted to provide him and his team with assurance that they’d be able to finish their work, and they’re making good progress now, and I expect they will be able to finish their work,” Barr said Monday. “And I am hoping that the next administration handles that matter responsibly.”

Trump announced that Barr would be replaced by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who did not participate in the news conference on Monday and declined to answer questions from Reuters about whether he would appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden or election fraud. Rosen has also declined to say whether he agrees with Barr’s assessment that there was no widespread fraud.

“If Trump is unable to pressure Rosen to appoint a special counsel he could replace the acting attorney general with someone more likely to carry out his wishes,” the AP reported. “He asked his team of lawyers, including personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, to look into whether the president has the power to appoint a special counsel himself.”

Rosen said at his 2019 confirmation hearing that he would push back against any improper pressure from the White House, arguing that criminal investigations should “proceed on the facts and the law” and be “free of improper political influences.”

“If the appropriate answer is to say no to somebody,” he said, “then I will say no.”

Trump’s coup goes beyond a grift: The president is desperately seeking any path to stay in power

For weeks now, Donald Trump’s hopes of stealing the 2020 presidential election from the winner, Joe Biden, have been fading. Nonetheless, the dumbest and worst president in American history continued sending out fundraising appeals to his endlessly gullible supporters, giving birth to the theory — to which I, personally, subscribed — that Trump’s coup is little more than another one of his many schemes to defraud people. After all, the Trump campaign spent very little on the actual legal efforts to challenge the election and redirected most of the cash into what is likely going to be used as a slush fund for Trump and his family. 

And yet, as Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported in the New York Times on Saturday, Trump is deep in talks with an increasingly unhinged cast of characters, all of whom believe there must be a way to steal the election even though the Electoral College made Biden’s win official last week. The president invited conspiracy theorists like his former lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn to the White House on Friday to discuss a potential declaration of martial law as a last-ditch effort to force a second vote in some swing states. That suggestion came from the disgraced Flynn, who has been involved in violently oppressive work on behalf of Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan 

The group also discussed “an executive order to take control of voting machines to examine them,” though it’s unclear what that would accomplish. There’s no reason to think the voting machines were hacked and it’s unlikely that Trump’s team has the technical know-how to alter the machines to generate vote tallies more pleasing to Trump. 

The chattering politicos of Twitter responded to news of such a bizarre spectacle by arguing about the odd placement of the article on page A28 in the New York Times print edition, with one side arguing that the president considering a military coup is major news no matter what, and the other side arguing that because Trump isn’t going to pull it off there’s no reason to get fussed about it. The latter group is wrong, of course, as Trump is still incredibly successful at undermining democracy, even if he’s failing to steal the White House.

The story isn’t just alarming because Trump is flirting with violence, either. It’s alarming because it’s proof that Trump is continuing to push these idiotic conspiracy theories because he really, truly does think there’s still a way for him to steal this election. 

That isn’t to say this coup is not a fundraising grift. Of course, it is. With Trump, everything is a cash grab. This one is apparently a desperate effort to stay one step ahead of the creditors he’s quite likely up to a billion dollars in debt to. But the fact that he’s actually taking meetings with wild-eyed conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell, the head of his coup operations, and otherwise putting effort into this suggests that Trump really does think there’s a “Get Out Of Democracy Free” card, and it’s just a matter of finding the person who has it. 

Similarly, Anita Kumar and Gabby Orr at Politico published a piece detailing Trump’s weeks of making phone calls to various Republican officials, hoping they would just clear up this nagging “lost the election” problem for him, only to be rebuffed. (Not because these officials wanted to rebuff him, to be clear. It’s just that there was no way for most of them to help him without opening themselves up to legal consequences.) Orr and Kumar document 31 different state and local officials Trump leaned on to steal the election for him — and that’s not counting the House Republicans Trump pressured into signing an amicus brief supporting a petition to the Supreme Court to simply throw out the results in three swing states that went to Trump. 

“There was always this feeling of supreme confidence that no matter how it looks it’s all going to work out for him,” Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP operative who is close to Trump’s team, told Politico. 

In particular, Trump’s relentless abuse of Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, suggests he really does believe that it’s just a matter of applying the right combination of bribes and blackmail before someone finally ‘fesses up and admits that they actually do know how to make that nasty election just go away. 

“Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump told the crowd at a Georgia rally. “So far we haven’t been able to find the people in Georgia willing to do the right thing.”

Where Trump got this idea that there’s always a guy who knows his way around the rules isn’t a mystery. Trump’s mentor was the inarguably evil but definitely skilled lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn really did have a talent for leveraging bribes and blackmailing anyone to help his clients, like Trump, evade the law or other obstacles. It’s likely no coincidence that Trump’s business went from successful to bankrupt after Cohn died. Cohn’s influence is also seen in Trump’s strategy to cheat in the election by leaning on the Ukrainian president for help using threats to withhold U.S. military aid. 

But even Cohn didn’t have the power to make an election just disappear with a few well-placed phone calls. Trump is just unburdened by Cohn’s intelligence. He is not bright enough to see that this isn’t one of those “I know a guy who can fix that for you” situations. 

Of course, as neuroscientist Dr. Seth Norrholm told Salon’s Chauncey DeVega, a huge part of the problem here is that Trump is surrounded by enablers. “The worst thing one can do for a malignant narcissist or an abuser like Donald Trump is to tell him or her that they are correct or to otherwise validate the lies and false persona,” Norrholm explained. 

It’s clear from the reporting that Trump has a nice, soft cushion of people around him — such as Rudy Giuliani or Michael Flynn — feeding his lies and encouraging him to believe that the magic wand Trump can wave to stop Biden’s presidency is out there, somewhere. 

Why does it matter whether Trump actually believes he can win? Well, it makes him more dangerous. If this was just a grift, it would be enough for Trump to keep sending fundraising emails and tweeting, but otherwise retiring to the golf course. But he’s still actively looking for buttons to push — and entertaining violence as a way to get his way — and he still has many weeks left in office in which he can use his existing power to continue undermining democracy.

Celebrating the holidays, the Gullah way

My favorite childhood holiday memories are filled with large gatherings, laughter, and many, many overlapping voices. This holiday season, to fill that void, I’ve decided to be even more deliberate about how I celebrate, decorate, and preserve traditions.

Holiday traditions in my family have always centered around my Gullah heritage. Preserving our Gullah Geechee culture—rich in West African influences on everything from cuisine, farming, and fishing traditions to beliefs and practices—has always been a key component of our heritage, with customs passed down through generations of family.

As a Lowcountry native, for me one of those values is a strong connection with land and nature. When I was growing up, my grandfather had a hog farm, and today, my father grows vegetables on the same family land, which has supported our family in so many ways, providing nourishment and enjoyment. This connection with the land, along with the temperate winters we enjoy in South Carolina, meant outdoor celebrations were the norm. They were also often necessary due to the size of my large family. I couldn’t imagine things any other way.

* * *

Today, the Gullah Geechee people largely live in Georgia and South Carolina, the Sea Islands of the American South, but our presence here dates back to the 18th century, when the land across these states was transformed into rice fields by our ancestors, who came from the Rice Coast in Africa. These farmers brought over their cultivation and irrigation experience, making rice farming a viable, valuable industry in America. After emancipation, these African farmers, and especially the women, were able to continue to grow and cultivate the rice for their families.

Today, the Gullah diet is still based heavily on rice, and no holiday meal is ever complete without it. In most parts of the South, collard greens and cornbread is a staple of a holiday meal, but in the Lowcountry, I grew up eating collard greens with rice. The best holidays were always when Dad grew his own collard greens on our family land and reserved the best batch for us, following the first frost.

With rice as a key ingredient, holiday dishes that regularly make an appearance are oyster perloo, red rice with sausage, and sautéed shrimp and rice. Other dishes showcase foods from the coastal area, including fresh fish and shellfish, game, and grits. Black longshoremen have a long history, from well before the Civil War, when Black men were allowed to take jobs on the docks and wharves. My own family has a history of being longshoremen and working on the water, and fishing and crabbing are still how many of our people feed and support their families—and create memories over the water.

Growing up, I watched my family cook Lowcountry favorites, with all the smells, sights, and sounds that made the holidays so special. There is nothing quite like sweet potato bread pudding at Thanksgiving. Or hummingbird cake and homemade biscuits for Christmas. I have so many memories of meals being prepared in my grandmother’s and great-aunt’s kitchens, where I would try to sneak a peek into the kitchen, even though the golden rule was to stay out of the room while the women were cooking. And making trips to my Aunt Shug’s home in Berkeley County, South Carolina, and getting her special okra soup and sweet potato pie that she always had available for her favorite great-nieces and nephews to devour.

* * *

With kids of my own now, I’ve taken on the role, previously assumed by my elders, of passing on some of these traditions, like showcasing our cultural experiences as a part of my holiday decorations. I love adding elements of sweetgrass baskets, for instance—an ancient craft with direct roots in traditional basketmaking in Africa—to my home decor, whether that means displaying heirloom pieces or finding representations in stationery or art collections, even in the Christmas wreaths I have this year.

Handmade crafts and art have always been an important aspect of Gullah culture. They don’t just perform the role of preserving Gullah history; they’re also an accessible place for those outside the community to engage with the culture. I choose to collect Gullah art, books, and stationery as a way to preserve my heritage and to have heirlooms to pass on to my kids as they make their own traditions into adulthood.

I love bringing the color indigo into my holiday decor, mixing it with different patterns: orange or pink for Thanksgiving or plaids for Christmas. Indigo was a significant cash crop on the Sea Islands and remains a staple for decor in the region, all of which traces its roots to the Gullah community. Indigo is also important to me personally because my father, just like many other Gullah men and women, joined the Navy. Military service has a rich legacy in the Gullah community, starting all the way from Congressman Robert Smalls until today, with Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs being a staple at South Carolina State University. I have fond memories of watching my father and his fellow cousins who joined the Navy connecting over leaving the Lowcountry, but always coming back home for the holidays, their families, and the food.

The holidays may look very different this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t “gather” with friends and family. When I was growing up, the backdrop was always our family property, with food grown on our farms, and most importantly with our elders and the next generations present to find ways to keep the traditions alive. This year, technology will play the medium, but we will still find ways to keep traditions alive. At my own home, we will be rewatching the holiday special of Gullah Gullah Island, my favorite childhood show. And like every year before it, there will be good food, even if it means just dropping it off on the porches of family or begging some of my aunts to share their secret chicken bog or crab and grits recipes to make together—even as we stay apart.

Trump’s border wall and a “three-martini lunch”: What the GOP fought to save in a second COVID bill

Congressional leaders on Sunday said they reached an agreement on a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief bill just days before many of the programs in the first round of stimulus passed in the spring were set to expire amid a nationwide spike in infections.

The bill includes $600 direct payments to most Americans, a temporary revival of the federal unemployment boost at $300 per week, and nearly $300 billion in forgivable small business loans, according to bill summaries obtained by The Washington Post. The bill would also extend the federal eviction moratorium through January and provide billions in funding for vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing, schools, transportation systems and live music venues. About $429 billion of the $900 billion total is from unused funds the Cares Act, which was the first round of federal funding passed earlier this year, provided for emergency lending programs from the Federal Reserve. Ultimately, the bill includes less than $500 billion in new funding.

Significantly, the deal does not include any aid to state and local governments, many of which are facing massive budget shortfalls due to severe declines in tax revenues and tourism. Economists have warned for months that failing to provide state and local relief would result in mass layoffs in the middle of the pandemic. Democrats agreed to drop their demand for state and local funding after McConnell agreed to drop his demand for broad lawsuit protections for businesses. The deal will also include $1.4 billion in new funding for Trump’s border wall, according to the Post.

Republicans also pushed to expand a Trump-backed tax deduction for business meals, which critics labeled the “three-martini lunch” tax break, in exchange for including expanded tax credits for low-income families and the working poor that Democrats demanded.

“Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It’s unconscionable,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said during negotiations.

The bill text has not been released to the public as of Monday morning but Congress is expected to vote on the compromise proposal as soon as Monday. Both parties said they struck a deal on Sunday after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., rejected a $3.4 trillion and a $2.2 trillion bill approved by House Democrats months earlier and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., shot down McConnell’s $300 billion and $500 billion offers. Economists say the U.S. needs at least $2 trillion to $3 trillion in relief to get through next year’s mass vaccine distribution plan. Lawmakers have said that they expect to push for another round of relief once President-elect Joe Biden takes office and before many of the extended relief programs are set to expire in March.

The new deal came together after Democrats backed a bipartisan proposal from a group of senators including Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Mitt Romney, R-Utah. Unlike the bipartisan proposal, however, the deal reached by congressional leaders reportedly provides $600 direct payments to every adult and child in households earning up to $75,000 ($150,000 for couples) with lower benefits on a sliding scale for those earning up to $99,000. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., unsuccessful last-minute push for $1,200 payments, as were included in the Cares Act in March, appears to have helped revive the idea of direct payments at the final hour.

The bill will also include payments to families that have at least one undocumented member, unlike in the Cares Act, but will not include payments for about 13.5 million adult dependents. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the payments will begin to go out as soon as next week.

The deal will also include $300 per week federal unemployment boosts, half of the rate included in the Cares Act. Congressional negotiators reduced the length of the extension from 16 weeks to 11 weeks to include the direct payments. The previous unemployment boost expired in July.

The bill would also extend the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which provides unemployment to self-employed and gig workers, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which provides unemployment for people who have exhausted their regular benefits.

There’s an additional $284 billion in new funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, which provides forgivable loans to small businesses to keep their employees. The deal expands eligibility for loans for nonprofits, churches, and news outlets, allowing for $15 billion to independent movie theaters and cultural institutions and $20 billion for targeted grants through the Economic Injury Disaster Loans program. Some PPP funds are reserved for “very small” businesses, according to the Post. The changes were added after the PPP was criticized for disproportionately aiding larger companies.

The bill also extends the eviction moratorium  — but only through January 31, meaning that Biden would have to extend the deadline as soon as he takes office. It provides $25 billion in emergency assistance to renters, though it is unclear how that money will be distributed.

Another $20 billion is allocated to buy COVID vaccines, $8 billion to distribute vaccines, and $20 billion for testing. It also includes $82 billion to help schools and colleges upgrade their ventilation and $10 billion for child-care assistance.

Democrats also secured a tax credit for employers that offer paid sick leave, $13 billion in expanded food stamp benefits, and $7 billion to expand broadband access. The bill also includes $45 billion for transportation, including an additional $16 billion for airlines, $14 billion for transit systems, $10 billion for highways, and funding for airports and Amtrak.

“We have now reached agreement on a bill that will crush the virus and put money in the pockets of working families who are struggling,” Pelosi said in a statement on Sunday. “This emergency relief bill is an important initial step.”

“This is just the first step. This is an emergency,” Schumer said at a news conference on Sunday. “We need a second bill to continue dealing with the emergency and to start stimulating our economy so we get back to where we were. That will be job No. 1 in the new Biden administration.”

Biden has repeatedly called the $900 billion deal a “down payment” on a larger package.

“I am heartened to see members of Congress heed that message, reach across the aisle, and work together,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “But this action in the lame-duck session is just the beginning. Our work is far from over.”