Spring Sale: Get 1 Year, Save 58%

Can progressives save Biden from disastrous economic policies?

Since the 1970s, U.S. real wages have largely stagnated. After a century of real wages rising every decade, that stagnation changed the lives of the U.S. working class in traumatic ways. Likewise, since the 1970s, labor productivity grew steadily, aided sequentially by computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. The combination of stagnant real wages and rising productivity lowered labor’s share of national income in favor of capital’s. Profits consequently soared and took the stock markets with them. Income and wealth were redistributed sharply upward.

The post-1970 trauma of the working class was worsened, as traumas often are, by being minimally recognized and even less discussed in the media, among politicians, or in the academy. Workers thus encountered the end of the century of rising real wages individually as a mysterious evaporation of the American Dream or loss of an earlier American Greatness. They also reacted individually. More members of households (especially adult women) undertook more hours of paid labor outside the home to compensate for stagnant real hourly wages. Households also compensated by borrowing more heavily than any working class anywhere had ever done. Workers wanted so desperately to hold on to that American Dream.

Capital obliged: mortgage and auto debts spread more widely and deeply throughout the U.S. population. Credit cards were newly promoted to consumers who filled millions of wallets with many of them. Toward the end of the 20th century, capital added massive student lending that now exceeds total U.S. credit card debt. Capital thereby supplemented its profits from production (boosted by stagnant wages) by adding interest on consumer and student debts (undertaken because of stagnant wages). No wonder the U.S. stock market boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. No wonder that the Clintons and other centrist Democrats celebrated that debt boom for their political advantage instead of attending to its immense risks and disruptive social costs.

Late 20th-century U.S. capitalism boomed until it could no longer support rising debt levels. Households stressed, families dissolved, and individuals exhausted by ever more hours of labor added severe anxieties to their burdens as rising debts exceeded capacities to service them. Deepening loneliness, divorce, opioid and other addictions, and suicides were among the social costs. Three crashes of U.S. capitalism in the 21st century (2000, 2008, and 2020), each far worse than its predecessor, brought home to the U.S. working class how far its social situation had deteriorated. Individual responses no longer sufficed for millions. They were ready to participate in social movements to express their accumulated anger, bitterness, and rage. They needed such populist movements to do something—or at least to support politicians—to reverse the downward economic and social spiral so many felt trapped in and by.

Donald Trump opportunistically tapped enough of the U.S. working class’s bitterness to swing the votes needed to win the presidency in 2016. However, the interconnected finances and ideologies of the centrist Democrats who had taken over the party after the 1970s shared with Republicans the responsibility for that bitterness. They led the Democratic Party into increasing dependence on donations from the capitalist class. They likewise drifted ever further from the working-class base that had rallied for the Democrats during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The neoliberal turn in U.S. capitalism under Ronald Reagan had two key impacts on the U.S. working class. First, neoliberalism endorsed capitalist globalization and the export of jobs—especially the better-paying, more-unionized jobs—after the 1970s. Second, by accelerating the deregulation of industries and markets, neoliberalism facilitated automation and weakened or removed various labor protections. In short, the neoliberal turn was and remains a major cause of the U.S. working class’s decline and its resulting bitterness and anger.

With progressive leaders, Democrats might have shown the working class that its distress followed from how capitalism functions. Capital flows to where the profits are greatest (where wages are far lower and regulations far fewer than in the United States, for example). Capitalists fund politicians like Reagan to turn policies toward neoliberalism. However, centrists in the Democratic Party shied away from such explanations. The centrist leaders of the Democratic Party were those closest to the party’s capitalist donors (and vice versa). Centrist control of the party blocked it from offering a powerful voice to mobilize working-class opposition to neoliberal job exports, deregulations, attacks on unions, etc. The centrists wanted and depended on capitalists’ donations; that dependence only increased as the party’s working-class support ebbed.

Workers turned away first from activity in and for the Democratic Party; eventually many stopped voting for its candidates. For them, the Democratic Party had failed to advance beyond the New Deal’s achievements. Worse, the party had failed even to protect workers against the multiple ways that neoliberalism undid the New Deal. Many workers felt betrayed. In protest, often unspoken, some began to cross over to vote Republican. Unions increasingly had to downplay or reduce their traditional links to the Democratic Party because growing portions of their members had shifted toward the GOP.

The Republicans, traditionally the employers’ party, had long tried to counter the Democratic Party’s appeal to workers as the traditional employees’ party. Republicans dared not use economic issues, and so they used religion, regionalism, and racism. They could pry portions of the working class away from the Democratic Party by appealing to such noneconomic concerns among workers. Their prime targets included evangelical Christian and other religious fundamentalists portrayed as victims of secularists, the South’s and other regions’ sense of unfair treatment by Washington and coastal elites, and white supremacists portrayed as threatened by rising Black and Brown populations including immigrants.

The centrist Democrats countered by trying to carve out other portions of the working class: women, Black and Brown people, immigrants, and various other minorities. Trump went further than previous Republicans in prying workers away from the Democrats. Joe Biden went further than previous Democrats (including Barack Obama) in focusing his campaign and his new administration on those portions of the working class Democrats prioritized. In these ways, each party’s strategy provoked more extreme versions of the other party’s strategy. Hence the increasingly harsh and rageful tones of major party discourse and behavior generally.

Both major parties, following the dictates of the Cold War, together eviscerated the class-based politics stressed from the 1930s to 1945. An integral part of the undoing of the New Deal was canceling a politics where Republicans confronted Democrats as representatives of employers versus employees. Instead, class conflict quickly faded from both parties’ statements and thinking. They focused instead on carving up the same working class into different, competing portions. Employers are chief funders of both parties, who then limit themselves to minimal references to class issues except for occasional, fleeting campaign rhetoric.

However, the class silence of the major parties created the need and the opportunity for a revival of what they had repressed. Progressives such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a growing number of others across U.S. politics are riding the wave of protest against all that was lost when centrists took over the Democratic Party. That takeover presumed the undoing of the New Deal, the repression of the strong communist and socialist parties built in the 1930s and early 1940s, and the neoliberal turn that came to dominate public policy. Many (not all) of today’s progressives—inside and outside the Democratic Party—want to reconstruct U.S. politics as once again a class politics.

Both major parties are now stuck with their commitments to a system that has failed spectacularly. Private and public sectors were unprepared for and could not contain a deadly virus handled far more successfully in many other countries. U.S. capitalism likewise failed to prepare for or contain the social damage from the latest in its regularly recurring cyclical crashes. These new failures compounded earlier, ongoing failures to overcome global warming and the crisis of U.S. race relations. These and other systemic failures are eroding mass support for those parties just as the mounting sufferings of the working class seek political expression and solutions.

Trump’s right-wing Republicanism solved none of the United States’ basic economic problems; it did worsen income and wealth inequalities. Yet it spoke to millions of working-class people who feel betrayed by the Democrats and attracted by the usual Republican references to religion, region, and race. Obama’s regime had likewise solved nothing in the United States’ basic economic problems while worsening income and wealth inequalities and barely overcoming the 2008 capitalist crash in ways that set up the next one. Obama did speak to millions of working-class people gathered around issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Biden gives every sign—in conditions of even worse economic and political decline—of repeating these oscillating failures. In so doing, he prepares the way for the next Trump.

The key question then revolves around progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party. Do enough of them have the needed clarity of understanding, courage to act, and wisdom to see their deficit in terms of strong organization? Can those who do seize the opportunity to ride a return of class politics into U.S. society? Will they effectively resist both major parties’ efforts to silence and destroy them? Meanwhile, the establishment Democrats and Republicans will continue their oscillating failures as the U.S. system’s mode of decline.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Can Joe Biden’s America figure out how to stop creating terrorists?

Joe Biden will take command of the White House at a time when the American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past — based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.

In Afghanistan, Biden opposed Barack Obama’s 2009 troop surge, and after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their war policy in other countries as well. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.” 

In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning the large-scale deployment of U.S. forces, and relying instead on airstrikes, drone strikes and special operations “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting and holding of territory.

In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to al-Qaida. The forces they unleashed are still fighting over the spoils nine years later. 

While Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, at the time he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Col. Moammar Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State College in October 2011 on the very day Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.” 

While Biden has since washed his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was in fact emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war backed by airstrikes that he supported, and which he has yet to disavow. Biden still says he supports “counterterrorism” operations, but he was elected president without ever publicly answering a direct question about his support for the massive use of airstrikes and drone strikes that are an integral part of that doctrine.

In the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing major cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians. When Biden said America “didn’t lose a single life” in Libya, he clearly meant “American life.” If “life” simply means life, the war in Libya obviously cost countless lives, and made a mockery of a UN Security Council resolution that approved the use of military force only to protect civilians.  

As Rob Hewson, editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP as the U.S. unleashed its “Shock and Awe” bombardment on Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” The same obviously applies to people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and wherever American bombs have been falling for 20 years.  

As Obama and Trump both tried to pivot from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump administration has branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War, the war on terror has stubbornly refused to exit on cue. Al-Qaida and Islamic State have been driven from places the U.S. has bombed or invaded, but keep reappearing in new countries and regions. Islamic State now occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Other al-Qaida affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to 11 countries in West Africa. 

After nearly 20 years of “war on terror,” there is now a large body of research into what drives people to join Islamist armed groups fighting local government forces or Western invaders. While American politicians still wring their hands over what twisted motives can possibly account for such incomprehensible behavior, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. Most fighters are not motivated by Islamist ideology as much as by the desire to protect themselves, their families or their communities from militarized “counterterrorism” forces, as documented in this report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict. 

Another study, titled “The Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment,” found that the tipping point or “final straw” that drives over 70% of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by “counterterrorism” or “security” forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling policy that fuels an intractable cycle of violence by generating and replenishing an ever-expanding pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities and countries.

For example, the U.S. formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with 11 West African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into it. In a recent report from Burkina Faso, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that confirm how 15 years of U.S.-led “counterterrorism” have only fueled an explosion of terrorism across West Africa.  

The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that the 1,000 violent incidents involving militant Islamist groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the past year amount to a seven-fold increase since 2017, while the confirmed minimum number of people killed has increased from 1,538 in 2017 to 4,404 in 2020.

Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location Event Data), told Turse that, “Focusing on Western concepts of counterterrorism and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.”

Indeed, even the New York Times has confirmed that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. A 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.

Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these abuses are the main factor driving the Fulani to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo. “So many people have been killed — assassinated — but there has been no justice.”

Since the inception of the Global War on Terror, both sides have used the violence of their enemies to justify their own violence, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of chaos spreading from country to country and region to region across the world.

But the U.S. roots of all this violence and chaos run even deeper than this. Both al-Qaida and Islamic State evolved from groups originally recruited, trained, armed and supported by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Syria since 2011.

If the Biden administration really wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism in the world, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in destabilizing countries, supporting terrorism, spreading chaos and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been well documented since the 1970s by Col. Fletcher Prouty, William Blum, Gareth Porter and others. 

The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone program and protected CIA torturers, to be his director of national intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and yet it is vital. 

The new Biden administration needs to take a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and the insidious role the CIA has played in so many of them. 

We hope Biden will finally renounce harebrained militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions, and that he will instead invest in humanitarian and economic aid that really helps people to live more peaceful and prosperous lives. 

We also hope that Biden will reverse Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War and prevent the diversion of more of our country’s resources to a futile and dangerous arms race with China and Russia. 

We have real problems to deal with in this century — existential problems that can only be solved by genuine international cooperation. We can no longer afford to sacrifice our future on the altar of the Global War on Terror, a New Cold War, Pax Americana or other imperialist fantasies.

CDC director reportedly asked staff to destroy evidence of Trump administration meddling

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asked members of his staff to discard an email from a Trump-appointed political figure seeking to manage the public health agency’s COVID-19 reports, according to a senior official.

During a private interview on Monday, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) editor Charlotte Kent spoke with investigators as she shared details about the email she received from Paul Alexander, the former scientific adviser to Health and Human Services (HHS) representative Michael Caputo.

According to Kent, the Aug. 8 email was an attempt by Alexander to dilute the publication’s report and manipulate it to align with President Donald Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic. She also confirmed she was told to delete that particular email.

“I was instructed to delete the email,” Kent told investigators. “I went to look for it after I had been told to delete it, and it was already gone.”

In response to the claim, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, penned a letter addressed to Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as he warned about the illegalities and legal consequences of destroying federal records.

“Federal employees have affirmative obligations to preserve documents, and destruction of federal records is potentially illegal,” Clyburn warned in a letter to Redfield and Azar. “Federal law also provides for up to three years of imprisonment for willful destruction of federal records.”

Despite heightened scrutiny from House Democrats, Redfield previously waved off speculation of political interference in his agency’s handling of the pandemic.

“I just want to assure you and the other senators and the American public, that the scientific integrity of the MMWR has not been compromised,” Redfield told a Senate committee on Sept. 16. “It will not be compromised on my watch.”

“Wild Mountain Thyme” review: John Patrick Shanley delivers the year’s most demented rom-com

There are people who will tell you that John Patrick Shanley‘s “Wild Mountain Thyme” traffics in bumper-to-bumper Irish stereotypes, but those people will be a bit off the mark — “stereotypes” is a wildly inadequate word for how this fable-esque romantic comedy renders the quirks and customs of life in the verdant farmlands of Ireland’s County Mayo. This sometimes enchanting (but always demented) soda farl of banter and blarney couldn’t be a broader caricature of Irish culture if it were written by the Keebler elves and directed by a pint of Guinness.

We’re talking about a movie so in love with its own lucky charms that it makes “Waking Ned Devine” feel like “In the Name of the Father” by comparison. Think that’s overstating the case? The National Leprechaun Museum of Ireland responded to the trailer by tweeting “Even we think this is a bit much.” That was after seeing only two minutes of it; this critic has seen the other 100 as well.

Shanley, whose script for “Moonstruck” suggests that he once had a slightly tighter handle on this sort of thing, brings his play “Outside Mullingar” to the screen like he’s trying to fill every close-up with enough whimsical enchantment to reach the back row of a Broadway theater. The lethal intensity of this effect cannot be overstated; the only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of “Wild Mountain Thyme” dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute. Needless to say, nobody got hurt.

Read more Indiewire: Patty Jenkins ‘Tossed Out’ Joss Whedon’s ‘Justice League’: It Contradicted ‘Wonder Woman’

And yet, for a movie that often feels like a feature-length infomercial for Aer Lingus and builds to what might just be the single most absurd reveal in the history of narrative fiction (I couldn’t explain it if I tried, and even Shanley himself appears to be unsure as to whether or not its worth taking seriously), “Wild Mountain Thyme” is awful hard to hate. How do you completely dismiss something so guileless and unrestrained that it makes Richard Curtis seem like Raymond Carver? Something that invites Emily Blunt to turn up the lass-next-door charm so high that it breaks the knob clear off the dial? Something — and this is important — that opens with emerald green aerial shots of the Irish coast followed by voiceover narration of Christopher Walken cheerily declaring: “Welcome to Ireland, my name’s Tony Reilly, and I’m dead!”?

Anyone who manages not to spit out their Bailey’s right then and there might find themselves absorbed in the saccharine nonsense that follows, if only to learn the mystery behind why Jamie Dornan’s handsome farmer has resigned himself to a lifetime of unhappy bachelorhood. The truth will shamrock you to your bones.

If “Wild Mountain Thyme” is the fun-loving “Hillbilly Elegy” of the Irish farmlands — and it absolutely is — then Tony Reilly is its Mamaw. A plucky, hardscrabble widower who’s been tending to “the sweetest rise of land you ever saw” for his entire life, all Tony wants is for his weird and sexy son Anthony (Dornan, charming in an aggrieved sort of way) to find some happiness in this world. And since this is at its core a romantic comedy, “happiness” is just another word for “marriage.” Indeed, Tony won’t pass down the family farm to his only child unless Anthony finds himself a wife.

The good news is that a beautiful and extremely eligible bachelorette named Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) lives right on the other side of the gate, and she’s been in love with Anthony from the time they were wee. And not just in love, but the kind of mad, inexplicable, pathological love that you typically only find in fairy tales and the DSM-V. The bad news is that Anthony is broken inside for some reason. The “why” of it never clicks, but the secret nature of his affliction is so intense that the one woman he whispers it to laughs so hard that she falls off a stone wall and nearly plummets to her death. It’s not a sex thing (I don’t think?), and it’s nothing supernatural, but… well, the climactic scene where the truth finally comes out is one for the history books.

Despite his eccentricities, however, Anthony still radiates a dour and earthy sort of charm. He and Rosemary are bound by the smartly brusque stage banter that can only exist between two oblivious souls that are destined for each other, and her raging obsession with him is enough to keep the fire alive for them both. When Anthony walks away after ranting about how he’s stuck on the farm like a tree and why Ireland is “a terrible place for a decent person,” Rosemary turns to the nearest horse and laments that such monologues are “why she must have him.”

Read more Indiewire: ‘Funny Boy’ Review: A Gorgeous Queer Coming-of-Age Tale Set in a Divided Sri Lanka

She’s willing to wait 100 years if that’s how long it takes for the boy next door to realize that he’s worthy of love, but not everyone shares her incredible patience. It’s because the ailing Tony can’t satisfy his hunger for something to happen that he calls in the calvary from far and away and threatens to bequeath the farm to his capitalistic American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm, spared an accent), who flies into County Mayo and immediately flags Rosemary as its finest crop. Hamm plays the square-jawed and straightforward Yankee with all of Don Draper’s swagger and none of the charm, but he goes after what he wants (albeit in a flashy, finance bro sort of way), and that might be enough to win over the various people who’ve been holding their breath for Anthony to take action.

However ridiculous Shanley’s depiction of rural Ireland might be (it turns out that “Wolfwalkers” isn’t the only Irish cartoon being released this weekend), the fish-out-of-water business is clever enough to get a rise out of anyone who isn’t too offended to laugh. Hamm brings some real “where’s the nearest Starbucks?” energy to his quaint and rustic ancestral homeland, and Anthony is such a dull enigma that Adam poses a genuine threat to our sympathies even if he seems like the kind of guy who drinks Soylent and dabbles in some light eugenics during his free time.

We certainly understand where he’s coming from when he raises an eyebrow at two-dimensional caricatures like Bad News Cleary (an old man named Cleary who always delivers bad news and spreads semi-believable rumors about Anthony falling in love with his livestock), and looks at Rosemary like he wants to rescue her. One relatively subtle bit of funny business involving a white raincoat finds Shanley at his best, and allows Hamm to split the difference between his stiff exterior and goofball underbelly — it’s enough to appreciate the movie that “Wild Mountain Thyme” might have been had it settled on a more grounded tone and scaled the humor down to human levels.

But Shanley, God love him, seems to regard stories as a receptacle for all of the magic that’s missing from real life, and he’d sooner cut off his head than take it out of the clouds. The sight of Anthony combing his farmland with a metal detector in search of some missing family lore feels like a fitting metaphor for Shanley’s creative process. If “Wild Mountain Thyme” isn’t really about anything deeper than its own forced sense of romance, the film comes dangerously close to self-awareness whenever its characters start musing about the double-edged nature of their dreams.

Read more Indiewire: Taraji P. Henson to Make Directorial Debut with High School Comedy ‘Two-Faced’

“The kind of dreams kids have make adults miserable,” Adam declares, offering a harsh counterpoint to a film in which the rest of the characters have spent their whole lives chasing rainbows without a pot of gold to show for it. Of course, every aspect of “Wild Mountain Thyme” — from Stephen Goldblatt’s richly saturated cinematography to Amelia Warner’s stirringly traditional score — is hellbent on proving Adam wrong and rewarding the sense of wonder that Anthony and Rosemary have suffered from since childhood, but Shanley fails to transform their curse into a blessing. If Anthony is a tree, he isn’t rooted in reality, and the only magic here is found in Blunt’s ability to conjure a flesh-and-blood woman out of a pouty male fantasy.

That miracle is enough to make the damp spark between Anthony and Rosemary seem flammable enough to sustain the long, theatrical dialogue scenes that dominate the film’s third act (even as they devolve into a heated competition to see if anyone can top Cameron Diaz’s “Gangs of New York” performance for Most Irish Accent). But Shanley’s foundation isn’t strong enough to support the big “twist” that’s coming, and the whole thing implodes in the kind of head-scratching mess that leaves you feeling like some dreams just aren’t worth sharing with the world.

Grade: C-

Bleecker Street will release “Wild Mountain Thyme” in select theaters and on VOD on Friday, December 11.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the safety precautions provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

“Minari” review: Steven Yeun Stars in Lee Isaac Chung’s immensely moving immigrant story

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it in virtual cinemas on Friday, December 11, with a theatrical release to follow in 2021.

Told with the rugged tenderness of a Flannery O’Connor novel but aptly named for a resilient Korean herb that can grow wherever it’s planted, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical “Minari” is a raw and vividly remembered story of two simultaneous assimilations; it’s the story of a family assimilating into a country, but also the story of a man assimilating into his family.

Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (“Sea Fog” star Yeri Han) emigrated from Korea together in the early ’70s, but — after nearly a decade of scraping by as chicken sexers in California — they arrive at the Arkansas trailer home he bought for their family in separate cars. Monica drives the kids: A stoic pre-teen girl named Anne (the natural and grounded Noel Cho), and a precocious seven-year-old boy named David (newcomer Alan S. Kim, delivering one of the most crucial and transcendently honest child performances since Jonathan Chang in “Yi Yi”). Jacob drives the truck, which is full of its own precious cargo.

Read more Indiewire: How ‘The Godfather Coda’ Allows Francis Ford Coppola to Redefine His Biggest Disappointment

As he pulls up to the five-acre plot of disheveled Ozark farmland, stridently unaware that it defeated the last man who settled there, Jacob’s eyes glint with a hellbent kind of happiness; it’s the look of a man who’s about to literally plant his roots in foreign soil. He sees this raw earth as a Garden of Eden that’s waiting to be grown. A practical woman concerned about raising a son with a heart murmur in a town that’s an hour away from the nearest hospital, Monica isn’t quite convinced. How can they build a foundation for their family in a house on wheels? She glares at her husband in a way that implies a thousand unheard arguments, or the same argument a thousand times: “This isn’t what you promised.”

Gentle as the stream that flows through the Yi’s property, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving — and immensely lovable — immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other. Jacob is too proud to settle for somebody else’s terms; he’ll do anything to prove that he’s leading his family to the promised land, even if no one else shares his vision of success. As clenched and corporeal here as he was loose and elusive in “Burning,” Yeun is spellbinding as the engine driving the Yis into a new home so unstable that a tornado could pick it up and fling it across the country (production designer Yong Ok Lee does a brilliant job of gradually filling the once empty trailer with a rich sense of personal history over the course of the film).

By day, Jacob works at a coop where he assesses chicken genitals with the intensity of a Nascar pit crew. By night, he buries Korean produce in his farm, and wills the land into submission with some help from the eccentric Pentecostal next door (Will Patton). Jacob doesn’t appear overly interested in blending in — he and Monica speak to each other in Korean at home, and a tentative Sunday morning at the local church doesn’t seem to stick with him the way it does with his kids — but one way or another he’s going to make this country his own.

Read more Indiewire: ‘Happiest Season’: How Clea DuVall Made the Queer Holiday Rom-Com the World Needs Now

Jacob is usually seen in a white tank top and a red hat with a cigarette pursed between his lips — he’s the distillation of a man, like the way a young boy might commit his dad to memory. To that end, “Minari” often feels like it might be David’s story most of all. Much like his dad, this ridiculously cute little kid has to assimilate on at least two different fronts.

Born in America and seamlessly bilingual, David lives on Mountain Dew and loves to watch wrestling on TV. He wets his bed and gets into other puckish trouble, but most of the time he tries to keep things even-keeled, if only for the sake of the hole in his heart. But when Monica invites her widowed mother to come live with them, David can feel himself pulled in two directions at once for the first time in his life.

A playful and vulgar old woman with an impish sense of humor, Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) is the coolest grandma a kid could ever ask for, but David is reflexively disgusted that she doesn’t line up with his Americanized understanding of what a grandma should be. She doesn’t bake. She “smells Korean.” She’s his perfect foil, even if he isn’t yet perceptive enough to realize it. The many scenes between these two wonderful characters are warm and wistful in equal measure, as they ricochet from sage wisdom to the kind of hilarious gross-out humor that wouldn’t be out of place in a Farrelly brothers movie. Youn is nothing short of extraordinary in the role; from the start she personifies the elegant way that Chung keeps “Minari” suspended between naturalism and melodrama, and towards the end she triggers an incendiary climax that forges the Yi family’s entire future in a single moment of truth.

Read more Indiewire: ‘Bob Hearts Abishola’: Hollywood Agents Encouraged Folake Olowofoyeku to Change Her Name

From the opening notes of Emile Mosseri’s ethereal piano score to the way that Monica keeps tugging Jacob back to reality, Chung’s immaculate memory play is always poignantly in flux between shared recollections of the past and conflicting visions of the future. This beautiful film posits family as the ultimate journey, only to explore how difficult it can be to agree on a destination. Is Jacob trying to prove what’s possible for himself, or is he doing his best to build something for the next generation? Is there any way those two goals might be able to overlap before Monica has to pull the ripcord?

If the finale registers as uncharacteristically intense for a movie that otherwise trades in quiet observations and expressive grace notes — a hole in the clouds at the end of a brutal stretch of farming; the Yi family arranging themselves across the trailer in a single wide shot that makes it feel like a home — “Minari” is held together by how it always feels like a daydream.

At one point, eager for David to stop wetting his bed, Monica gives her son some advice. She tells him that the next time he goes to pee, he should stand at the toilet, pull open his cheeks, and ask himself: “Is this a dream? Is this a dream?” We can only assume that David will outgrow that damp tendency one day, and yet — by the end of this unforgettable movie — dreams and reality have seldom been more indistinguishable from each other. Through Chung’s eyes, that’s precisely what makes them both seem possible.

Grade: A

“Minari” premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. A24 will release it in theaters later this year.

Thinsplaining is real: Science says permanent weight loss is rare, and thin people don’t get it

Holly Christine Brown has struggled with her weight for a long time. When she was thinner, people in her circle would tell her they were proud of her; when she gained weight back, some friends acted as though it were a personal failure. One boyfriend told her that he ended their relationship because she was “too fat” to have sex with. Others simply pulled away when she started gaining weight again. The cruel comments and social rejection made Brown feel anxious and depressed — which, in turn, drew her to food for comfort.

“Everybody expects that it’s easy, that once you lose weight you can just keep it off,” Brown, a professional writer, told Salon. “Anybody who has struggled with their weight knows that’s not true because it’s not like your relationship to other things that you might have an addiction to.” Brown likened it to “an addiction,” but noted that food wasn’t like most truly “addictive” substances. “It’s not a thing that you can cut out of your life entirely.”

I understand how Brown feels all too well. As someone who has gained and lost large amounts of weight throughout his life, I have also experienced the shame of being judged by loved ones and strangers alike. There is a common narrative that if you can’t lose weight and keep it off, it must reflect poorly on your character. The neologism “thinsplaining” refers to the situation in which people who have never struggled with their weight assume they are still qualified to give advice to, or pass judgment on, those who do. Both Brown and I reflected on our shared observation that this is one of those things a person can’t really understand unless they have experienced it themselves.

There is a considerable amount of science backing up our point of view. If anything, the people who say that losing weight is simply a matter of possessing enough willpower to consistently eat right and exercise are the ones who ignore scientific fact.

“It has very little to do with will power,” Dr. Nicole Avena, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical School and a visiting professor of health psychology at Princeton University, told Salon. She explained that neuroscientific research has proved that “many foods are being found to be able to produce a state in the brain that is very similar to what you would see with an addiction to something like drugs or alcohol. And so our primitive brain is being activated by many of these processed foods that are on the market that many people enjoy and indulge in.”

Like Brown, Avena liked the term “thinsplaining.” “It’s still like a drug addiction. Unless you or someone you’re close with has struggled with addiction, people often will default with ‘Well just stop using it, or why don’t you just stop?'”

Lindo Bacon, PhD, is a scientist and author who has extensively studied the science behind losing weight. Bacon agrees that “science shows that losing weight is not about willpower, and not about exercise and diet.”

As Bacon pointed out in an email, studies have found that “the vast majority” of people who lose weight wind up gaining it back even if they maintain their diet and exercise programs. Bacon said that a lot of this has to do with the way the human body goes out of its way to physically resist permanently losing weight; for instance, the body produces a hormone called leptin that inhibits hunger and decreases fat storage.

“When we examine the scientific mechanisms, it’s clear why few people sustain weight loss,” Bacon explained. “Dieting triggers compensatory mechanisms, like a drop in leptin as an example. Less leptin contributes to the urge to eat and to quit one’s diet; it also drives a decrease in metabolism that can compensate for eating less.”

Traci Mann, PhD., a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota who has run an eating lab there for over 20 years, explained to Salon in an email that you can draw a direct line between the physical mechanisms that make it difficult for people to either lose weight or keep it off — including “changes in people’s metabolism, hormones, and attentional processing” — and the psychological obstacles that also arise.

“After calorie deprivation, people’s attention changes, so that they are more likely to notice food if it is present, and they become preoccupied with thoughts of food,” Mann wrote. “If you have to eat fewer calories to get the same weight loss, and if you feel hungrier than you normally would, and if you can’t stop thinking about food, that makes it a whole lot harder to keep dieting.”

As Bacon noted, “studies show that one-third to two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets. Methodological problems have been identified that suggest that these studies likely underestimate the extent to which dieting is counterproductive and if we could do better research those numbers would look even worse.”

Virtually every other reliable statistic you will find about losing weight and keeping it off reveals the same thing. A 2010 study by Penn State College of Medicine researchers found that roughly one out of six Americans who have ever been overweight or obese permanently lose their excess weight. In 2015 the American Journal of Public Health found that in a given year the average obese man has only a 1 in 210 chance of returning to a normal weight; for women the odds are just slightly better, 1 in 124. (The study did not include people who had received bariatric surgery.)

The numbers are somewhat better for people who have bariatric surgery — a 2010 study found that only about half of the people who have had that type of surgery wind up regaining some or all of the weight they lost — but those surgery can lead to complications like intestinal blockages and long-term malnutrition. What’s more, the Obesity Action Coalition reports that many people who successfully lose weight in the long-term after bariatric surgery wind up transferring their previous addiction to other substances or behaviors, indicating that the underlying psychological problems which drove them to obesity have not been addressed.

The bottom line is that the mind and body are intimately linked, and when it comes to weight issues, it is necessary to appreciate how emotional issues can cause obesity and make it more difficult to effectively address.

Ben Baker, a newspaper publisher who runs the southwest Georgia periodical “The Wiregrass Farmer,” shared some of the emotional issues that he has experienced in his own struggles with his weight.

“A lot of people see food as a comfort item,” Baker told Salon. “They eat because food makes them feel good and food has literally never let them down. They’re let down by people.” He added that, while people who try to give them advice often have good intentions when they do so, “the fat people take it as a personal attack and it hurts their feelings and they go try to find something to make them feel good and they go eat.”

He also commented on how he has been hurt by the judgments people make about him because of his weight.

“People make fun of me all the time,” Baker reflected. He commented that “there are other people who look at me and see that I’m fat, and they just write me off automatically as being lazy, possibly less intelligent, all kinds of things.” It is as if, Baker mused, “they see being overweight, especially morbidly overweight, as a case of a person who has no self-esteem and they judge people on that. They say, ‘Well, if you think you’re worthless, I think you’re worthless too.'”

In some cases, the perception of obesity emerges from medical conditions that will not dissipate with dieting. Just ask Crystal Willis, a publicist, marketing professional, influencer and entrepreneur who suffers from a condition called lipedema. The disorder, which affects up to 11% of women, causes enlargement of the legs because of the way fat is deposited beneath the skin.

“My legs were bigger ever since I was a kid, and doctors always told me I was obese and just needed to lose weight,” Willis told Salon. “It wasn’t till I was about 27 when I found out there was actually a medical reason why I was having trouble doing that.”

Like Baker, Willis described to Salon how she has been regularly mistreated because of her weight.

“The main struggle has always been bullying and people looking at you and assuming that, because you’re overweight that you’re not trying hard enough or that you’re not fit or that you don’t live a certain healthy lifestyle,” Willis told Salon, noting that she exercises regularly and maintains a healthy diet. Despite her many career successes, Willis says that she still routinely observes professional colleagues targeting her weight and her legs in order to put her down.

“I do believe I’ve experienced my fair share of discrimination as it relates to just opportunities that I get professionally or in dating,” Willis told Salon. She also noted that her condition makes it difficult for her when it comes to buying clothes; for instance, she has never been able to wear boots, and when it comes to some of the most popular types of jeans and pants out there, “they’re not made for women with body shapes like mine. They’re not made for women with larger legs.”

She has made it her mission, as she told Salon in an email, to show women with lipedema that “sexiness is a state of mind.”

So what should you do if you love someone who is overweight or obese, and don’t want to thinsplain?

“You really need to approach it more from the fact of trying to better understand what that person is going through, what their struggles are, where they find their successes, where they find their weaknesses, so that you can get a better understanding of what it’s like to live in their shoes and to go through what they’re going through,” Avena told Salon. “And then when you do have that information, maybe you can offer some helpful insight. If you don’t take the time . . . to try to understand why they’re struggling and what are the hurdles for that, then your information is really just not going to be very helpful.”

How to make those viral hot chocolate bombs you keep seeing all over TikTok

While some people like to drink hot chocolate year-round (the polar opposite of iced-coffee-365-days-a-year folks, I guess) we can all agree that this classic beverage is extra-special during the holidays. If you’ve been looking to spice things up in the festive drinks department, prepare to be dazzled by the hot chocolate bombs taking over social media’s best baking accounts.

A twist on the winter beverage you know and love, hot chocolate bombs are basically a hollow chocolate sphere filled to the brim with hot chocolate mix plus marshmallows, candy, bits of cookies or whatever else your sweet tooth desires. When you drop a hot chocolate bomb into a mug and pour warm milk over it, the ball melts, revealing the sweet delights inside and creating the perfect cup of cocoa. All you have to do is stir it up and enjoy!

Read more StyleCaster: Slow-Cooker Cookbooks With Awesome Recipes That You Won’t Find on Pinterest

While hot chocolate bombs aren’t anything new, they’ve recently been in the spotlight thanks to users on Instagram and TikTok, who have been posting them like crazy. Foodies on the app have been showing off how these hot chocolate bombs work, whether they’re pre-made ones that they purchased or homemade recipes they’re sharing with their viewers. TBH, the hot chocolate bomb trend is kind of like the bath bomb trend from a few years ago—only better, since you can drink them.

There’s just something so comforting about enjoying a warm mug of hot cocoa in footie pajamas while you watch “Home Alone” or some other cute holiday movie and embrace that oh-so-cozy feeling. Turning your treat into a hot chocolate bomb makes it a whole new ballgame! (Ball pun totally intended!)

Read more StyleCaster: Chrissy Teigen’s Holiday Gift Guide Is Literally My Dream Night In

If you want to get your Martha Stewart on and try your hand at making your own hot chocolate bombs, we’ve got seven tasty hot chocolate bomb recipes below to choose from. If you’d rather take the easy route and buy them (as Ina Garten always says, store-bought is fine!) you can pick up this amazing snowman-shaped hot chocolate bomb by Kate Weiser Chocolate or even this little unicorn one(screams!) from ItzMyPartyCakery on Etsy.

Read more StyleCaster: Every Millennial Should Own at Least One of These Cookbooks

Either way, put those footie pajamas on and get ready for hot chocolate bomb coziness. ‘Tis the season!

1. Holiday Hot Chocolate Bombs

A hot chocolate bomb recipe that will satisfy any sweet tooth—just add any crushed toppings you like. You can freeze these babies before you’re ready to use them, too, so you can make a big batch to enjoy all winter long.

2. Icing-Topped Hot Chocolate Bombs

This DIY hot chocolate bomb recipe uses a squiggle of melted white chocolate as icing on the top. So good!

3. Festive Hot Chocolate Bombs

Feel free to get creative with decorating! This festive hot chocolate bomb recipe features gingerbread man and snowman-inspired balls for a little extra Christmas magic.

4. Dairy-Free Hot Chocolate Bombs

This hot chocolate bomb recipe can be made with either coconut or almond milk, if you’re looking for a dairy-free option. Why should dairy-lovers have all the holiday fun?!

5. Peppermint Hot Chocolate Bombs

If you’re obsessed with peppermint like I am, this is the hot chocolate bomb recipe for you. It’s made with white chocolate and crushed-up candy canes for an added minty taste.

6. Boozy Hot Chocolate Bombs

For an adult version of the hot chocolate bomb trend, try this boozy hot chocolate bomb recipe, which uses Bailey’s and Peppermint Schnapps.

7. Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate Bombs

Peanut butter-lovers will appreciate this sweet and salty twist on regular hot chocolate! Just make sure no one at your holiday party has an allergy before you whip these up.

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.

Cookies make the best holiday gifts: Here are a top pastry chef’s tips for shipping your baked goods

After she graduated from New York’s celebrated French Culinary Institute under the guidance of legendary Dean Jacques Torres, Salon resident pastry chef Meghan McGarry started a new tradition that allowed her to share her talent for baking with the people in her life who championed her career move from a budding Wall Street financier into the owner of her own spirited desserts brand Buttercream Blondie.

And so the story went: Every holiday season, McGarry transformed her home into a one-woman dessert factory. At its peak, more than 1,000 cookies a year were shipped from McGarry’s workshop in care packages to family and friends.

“I felt like I was running Santa’s workshop, except it was even more magical, because I was drowning in sprinkles and spirits instead of toys,” McGarry tells Salon. “You don’t realize how many cookies can actually fit into fill a large tin, but I made thousands over the years.”

McGarry refers not only to her signature use of rainbow sprinkles but also to her creation of spirited sweets. The list of recipes she’s developed over the years is as carefully curated as a wine list written by a studious sommelier. Her secret ingredients come from her bar cart, and they add an unrivaled amount of flavor to her desserts.

As the years passed, McGarry became increasingly inundated with questions from readers about how they could purchase her cookies and other desserts online. When she found herself suddenly at home like the rest of this year, McGarry finally had the space to create the first-ever Buttercream Blondie shop, which launches online next week with a signature cookie collection.

RELATED: These sprinkled and spiked butter cookies melt in your mouth — and they make the best holiday gift

McGarry’s first product line is built as much upon her expertise as a trained culinary chef and seasoned recipe developer as the joy she received from sending care packages filled with cookies every holiday season to her family and friends. One core ingredient remains: love. 

“My favorite thing has always been to send people care packages,” McGarry tells Salon. “I think there’s something special about showing someone just how much you care about them through the act of creating something with your own two hands.”

RELATED: Win the holiday baking swap with this spirited new take on classic raspberry thumbprint cookies

The holidays look a little different for all of us this year, no matter where you live. You may be unable to travel to see your loved ones, your wallet may be tighter than usual or possibly both. Now, more than ever, the best and most cost-effective gifts are the ones you can bake at home with love. If you can’t get together, you can still experience a box of cookies at home together with the special people in your life over the phone or video. That’s why cookies are the top item on Salon Food‘s gift list for 2020.

Preparing for nationwide delivery of the first-ever Buttercream Blondie cookies means McGarry is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge when it comes to shipping desserts. Below are her top cookie recipes for shipping, her advice for baking cookies at home, and her check-list for ensuring smooth delivery. Consider this your one-stop shop for expert cookie advice:

Getting started: Read these no-fuss cookie recipes

  1. Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

  2. Holiday Confetti Cookies

  3. Raspberry Almond Thumbprints

  4. Spiked Mint Milanos

  5. Sprinkled And Spiked Confetti Cookies

Tip One: Leave the delicate cookies for Santa

The best way to ship cookies is in a tin, where they’ll be packed together fairly tight. Thus, you should avoid recipes that yield delicate cookies. Also skip cookies with creme fillings, and be careful about the icing you choose for decorating. Instead of mailing these types of cookies to friends and family, save them for at-home guests like Santa Claus. 

These five recipes from Salon Food all have McGarry’s seal of approval for shipping: apple cranberry oatmeal cookies, holiday confetti cookies, raspberry almond thumbprints, spiked mint milanos, and sprinkled and spiked confetti cookies. Each one of these recipes reimagines cookies from holidays past, upping the nostalgia factor as much as enhancing the flavor. If you can’t have cookies with your loved ones this year, you can help them recall the fond memories of doing so on holidays past.

One thing to remember: If you do make the thumbprints, pack them last on the top so the other cookies fin the tin don’t mistakenly find their way into the jam filling. 

Tip Two: Personality is key

McGarry’s biggest recipe for success with shipping? Instead of picking a tin that speaks to your own personality, select ones that make you think of the unique individuals who will be opening them after they arrive in the mail. If you’re making cookies for your kid’s teacher, for example, a tin with pencils and erasers on it may be the perfect choice.

If you choose a Baby Yoda cookie tin ready to send to your Uncle John, who is a “Star Wars” fan, in California, make sure to add some oatmeal cookies, because they’re his favorite. Pick two or three cookies tailored to Uncle John’s palette rather than overcomplicating things by taking on too many recipes. Narrow your focus, and make it personal. 

Tip Three: There’s no reason to stress

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts, because baking is an organic way to eliminate stress. To make your baking experience as chill as your dough, McGarry offers her Golden Rules. First, set designate a special day for holiday baking. If Sunday is the day you’re firing up your oven, dub it “Cookie Day.” Second, make all of your doughs ahead of time. If Sunday is “Cookie Day,” plan to power up your stand mixer on Saturday. Mix your sprinkled and spiked cookie doughs, and then refrigerate them overnight. This not only gives your flavors time to set but also has you ready to roll them out (literally) on the big day. 

Tip Four: Keep things cool 

Another advantage of letting your dough chill overnight is that it has time to cool, and your cookies will bake more evenly if they hit the oven chilled. Also, under bake cookies by about 30 seconds, because they will continue to “cook,” or firm up, as they cool down. 

Temperature is also something you want to keep in mind when it comes to packing. If Sunday is “Cookie Day,” and you bake in the morning or afternoon, wait to pack your cookies into their designated tins when the sun goes down. Warm cookies tend to be more fragile, so wait until they’re completely cool to pack them up. After everything’s wrapped, you can drop your packages off at the Post Office on the way to work the following morning. 

Tip Five: Use a cookie scoop

McGarry recommends using a cookie scoop when to scoop out your dough to not only ensure that all of your cookies come out of the oven the same size but also that they bake evenly. 

Tip Six: Go easy on yourself

It’s OK if some cookies break during delivery. Why? If you bake any of McGarry’s tested recipes, they’re going to come out of the oven tasting delicious every single time. It’s the thought that counts, and at the end of the day, flavor remains supreme.  

Follow the instructions on this handy shipping checklist:

  1. Make sure the tin you select is safe for food, and you line your tin with a piece of parchment or wax paper before you pack any cookies inside. 
  2. When you begin to pack cookies into your tin, you want to make sure they’re snug enough so that they won’t move around but also spaced enough so that you won’t suffocate them. Give your tin a light shake to test: The goal here is to decrease movement.
  3. When you pack your tin into a box for shipping, bubble wrap it to further keep your precious cargo safe and reduce the impact of excess movement during transit (or a dropped box). 
  4. Safely nestle your tin in seasonal crinkle paper to add extra support in the event of unexpected impact. 
  5. All of McGarry’s recipes have a good shelf-life, and they taste even better on day two. That being said, professional shippers are busier than ever this time of your, so be sure to opt for a priority mail option to ensure your cookies aren’t stuck in transit for too long before they arrive. 

You don’t have to be a skilled decorator to make these cute, flavorful holiday shortbread cookies

When it comes to baked goods, I am not a skilled decorator. That’s a thing that I’ve been slowly trying to change, especially during my increased at-home time during the pandemic. I took a virtual challah braiding workshop, I’ve scoured YouTube for how-tos and spent a lot of time playing around (read as “failing again and again”) with using piping tips to make buttercream look like a pot of succulents. 

That said, as the holidays approach, I’m still far from bakery-level precision, so I’ve been on the lookout for kitchen accessories and ingredients that create beautiful baked goods without having to navigate fondant and frosting bags. 

I’ve found a few options. There are some absolutely stunning cookie stamps and engraved rolling pins on the market. There are also recipes like Sarah Kieffer’s Neapolitan Cookies, which are made with striking food coloring. But my favorite — and I recognize this is a little cliché – are sprinkles. 

Sprinkles became my pandemic obsession shortly after I first saw a video of them being made. They start as hefty blocks of a sugar-laden cornstarch dough that’s been saturated with vibrant edible dye. Those are then pushed, Play-Doh Fun Factory-style, through an extruder, where spaghetti-like strands emerge and flop onto a conveyor belt below. They’re then deposited into what essentially looks like a big clothes dryer where they roll around until they are broken into uniform bits. It’s like printing magic. 

While some people have ASMR, I have videos of sprinkles being made on-loop. 

They weren’t always solely decorative. In the 15th century, comfits — a predecessor of the modern sprinkle — were made from dried fruits, nuts, seeds or spices that were lacquered with melted sugar. These were sold and consumed for common medical ailments, like headaches and nausea. Eventually, these gave way in the 18th century to nonpareils, which look like sleek little sugar pearls that were used to decorate French pastries. 

By the 19th century, American cookbooks started to call see American cookbooks call for sprinkles in recipes and offer suggestions on what color would be most appropriate for certain occasions — so red and green for Christmas, for instance. 

In this simple and flavorful shortbread recipe, however, I use pistachios and dried cranberries to provide the red and green (augmented by the addition of golden raisins), and call for golden sprinkles instead. It’s like edible glitter and really pops against the cookie’s dark chocolate coating. 

***

Recipe: Red, Green and Gold Christmas Shortbread 

Makes 24 cookies 

Dough

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour 
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup unsalted butter, softened 
  • 3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 2 egg yolks
  • 1 tablespoon grated orange zest, or more to taste
  • 1/2 cup sweetened dried cranberries, chopped
  • 1/2 cup golden raisins, chopped 
  • 1/2 cup of shelled, roasted pistachios, chopped 

Decorations

  • 1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips 
  • 2 tablespoons of vegetable or canola oil
  • Golden sprinkles, crushed pistachios 

1. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla extract and egg yolks. 

2. Fold in the flour, baking powder and salt and mix until just combined, then mix in the orange zest, cranberries, and pistachios until a cohesive dough is formed. 

3. Create two equal-sized logs out of the dough, and wrap them in plastic wrap. Let the dough chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. 

4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and, once chilled, cut the dough into 24 equal-sized rounds (12 from each log of dough) and place the shortbread cookies on a parchment paper-covered baking sheet. 

5. Bake the shortbread until just golden, but not browned, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove them from the oven and allow them to cool on the pan for 10 minutes before moving them to a wire cooling rack. 

6. Once the cookies are fully cooled (seriously, let them cool all the way or they will crumble too easily to decorate), place the dark chocolate chips and vegetable or canola oil in a small saucepan. Melt it over low heat, stirring constantly. 

7. Allow the mixture to cool just slightly, then dip half of each cooled cookie into melted chocolate. Place them on parchment or wax paper, and decorate with golden sprinkles and crushed pistachio pieces.

Texas AG Ken Paxton says Trump will go “state by state” next in attempt to overturn election

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Sunday outlined President Donald Trump’s path to victory after the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 election.

During an interview on Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo asked Paxton if he had a “Plan B” for contesting the election results.

“Going forward, I think the Trump campaign is taking our arguments that we tried to get in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, they are now going to take those, I think, state by state,” Paxton explained. “Because I think they are legitimately good constitutional arguments that don’t depend on actually proving every little instance of fraud.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUlBezDrmsE

Watching Newsmax, the Fox News challenger: Like home shopping TV for dangerous far-right fantasies

Home shopping networks exist beyond the critic’s purview. They just sort of do what they do with low production value, living or dying on the charms of their hosts. Plus, it’s widely understood that despite announcers’ assurances that what they’re selling is solid and true, the real deal, much of what they’re hawking is of questionable quality.

Absorbing hour after hour of Newsmax made me contemplate the great American appeal of home shopping consumerism and its strong attraction to the emotionally vulnerable, people seeking out that unknown item to fill some gap in their life they cannot name. Newsmax mimics that approach, only instead of dealing in sleeved blankets and cut-rate gemstones, it sells concentrated alarmism and far-right extremist fantasy.

What is it about this TV catalog masquerading as a right-wing news outlet that has hundreds of thousands of shoppers feverishly buying the most recent versions of its product? Simple: its unflagging support of Donald Trump’s alternate universe. In Newsmax’s America, as in Trump’s, the pandemic is a hoax, Trump won the election, the Bidens are liars enabling widespread voter fraud and a second term for the 45th president is but one court case away.

Trump has been plugging Newsmax for some time now, giving the channel his heartiest endorsement after Fox News stopped consistently telling him what he wanted to hear whenever he wanted to hear it.

After Fox became the first network to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden on Nov. 3, Newsmax was ready to welcome defectors who refused to believe the result with open arms. According to a recent New York Times story on the channel, Newsmax’s prime-time ratings averaged 58,000 before election day, but catapulted to 1.1 million for a recent hour hosted by Greg Kelly, one of the channel’s popular voices.

Ever since it has been plying its viewers with the insistent lie that Democrats stole the election, that anyone who isn’t for Trump is a corrupt radical. Saucing this departure from the truth has been its hosts’ passionate insistence that Trump and Republicans still have a path to overturn election results that have been certified and re-certified for Biden several times over in multiple states.

Some version of this fantasy led the headlines of its primetime opinion shows last week, each with a unique take on the channel’s excursions into a wonderland awash in baseless assertions and conspiracy theory.

Hosts Greg Kelly and Grant Stinchfield stoked the dying flames of false hope with various versions of pitch that nearly every other headline about the election’s outcome is wrong, that other news outlets and the amorphous nemesis known as the radical liberal left don’t want you to know “the truth.” They want Donald Trump to prevail, and they believe he will. They can’t explain how or why; belief is enough.

Trump and his Republican allies have lost 58 lawsuits attempting to change election results at statewide levels, with the most blistering rejection arriving from the Supreme Court on Friday night. The justices tossed out a bid by Texas’ attorney general to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won. Newsmax’s hosts were very enthusiastic about the Texas suit earlier in the week, making their refusal to admit defeat after the highest court’s hammer shattered their dreams completely on brand.

“We have the order issued just a few minutes ago,” Kelly told his viewers. “I’ll read it for you but I want to emphasize before I do, we have the situation in Pennsylvania that has not been settled, we have Georgia that has not been settled, we have Michigan that has not been settled, independent of this lawsuit from Texas.” All of this must be news to people living in those states who have a grasp on reality.

Kelly then read the Supreme Court’s order verbatim: “Texas v. Pennsylvania, et al. The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

“It’s not over. It’s not over,” Kelly repeated to his viewers on Friday.

Many legal experts have been saying it — as in, the 2020 presidential election — is very much over. It has been over for many weeks now.  Joe Biden is not only the President-elect but, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he’s Time magazine’s Person of the Year. 

People who would point to these inconvenient facts are not Newsmax shoppers. Newsmax shoppers want broken mirrors that reflect distorted, invalid reasons as to why they’re not getting what they want and accuse half the nation of stealing their MAGA paradise out from under them. Fortunately for them the channel provides several models that achieve this. 

“The Kelly” reflecting device resembles a serious-minded newsman convinced that the Trump crusade to retake the White House has momentum despite escalating evidence to the contrary. Kelly previously served as a co-host on “Good Day New York” and weathered an allegation of sexual assault; he was never arrested or formally charged.

“The Stinchfield” assumes a more militaristic approach; since the host previously worked for NRATV, that tracks. The host refers to his fanbase as the Stinchfield Army and rallies them to a number of causes — the first being Trump, but he has other hobbies too. 

Variety being the spice of life, Stinchfield took time during one of his shows last week to perpetuate a debunked claim published in Johns Hopkins University’s student-run newspaper (and later retracted) that claimed the COVID-19 pandemic is not responsible for any excess deaths in the United States in 2020.

I can’t believe I have to spell this out but: That is demonstrably false. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the death toll in this country is approaching 300,000. Director Robert Redfield said on Thursday that for the next 60 to 90 days, “we’re going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor.” Do not expect Stinchfield to correct himself; I suspect that goes against his beliefs.

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, another Newsmax host (and a very bad one, which is saying something) is a known quantity. Lying is his schtick. So is being a living, breathing joke … until he slid into Newsmax’s version of reality. Now he is a real live news boy for real people, a truth crusader who stays away from hard numbers but is fine with asking folks not to believe what they’re seeing or the world as they experience it, away from their televisions.

In the time I spent with Newsmax I noticed few to no references to the nation’s escalating COVID infection rates, but who needs that? Its hosts have an election to deny and, as of this week, new details about an investigation into Hunter Biden to drool over. Vaccines were discussed, but there was little to no coverage of the extent or severity of the pandemic’s spread across the country.  

What’s puzzling is that none of this aroused much in the way of emotion in me. To be clear, I don’t expect purveyors of fact-based information to thrill or entertain, although quite a few take that role upon themselves. But Newsmax is not actual news. Much of it doesn’t even approximate fact-based reporting, Fox News’s stock-in-trade. This is a network with terrible production values and slapdash editing whose programs could easily be mistaken for parody shows within scripted series. Even the sets look like high-gloss Zoom backgrounds.

With that in mind I had hoped for some truly eyebrow-lifting sideshow hokum to aid the bamboozlement in going down easier. Anything would help explain why and how Monday evening’s telecast of “Greg Kelly Reports” beat Fox’s “The Story with Martha MacCallum” in the 25-to-54 target demographic, with the Newsmax host averaging 229,000 viewers to MacCallum’s 203,000.

“It couldn’t be entirely based on right-wing election delusion, could it?” I asked myself, only to discover upon further and very painful examination that yes, it is entirely just that — a reflection of feeling, interspersed with commercials hawking bedroom linens, memory-support supplements and opportunities to contribute to the GOP’s post-election grift in multiple forms.

The dull repetitiveness and lack of subtlety has a stupefying effect, and that’s precisely what makes its programs successful. One segment was nothing but a supercut of the 13 times Georgia Republican Senate candidate Kelly Loeffler referred to her Democratic opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, as a radical liberal during the recent televised debate. “I play it like that to pound it into everyone’s head that he is a radical liberal!” the host boomed, in case we didn’t pick up what he was putting down.

Another segment featured slowed-down footage of Rahm Emanuel speaking … about what? Who knows, since the audio was muted. Kelly simply wanted the viewer to notice his purported glee at shutting down the economy with COVID restrictions. I’m no fan of Emanuel, but this was ludicrous.

Newsmax reaches 75 million U.S. homes and is available on most major cable and satellite services. You can also watch it on demand on its website.

That its product line is redundant and limited in quantity may challenge its viability in the near future. Over the longer term, however, its narrow scope may strengthen Newsmax’s potency as a disinformation source. Look at it as a running experiment that’s testing the limits of the “illusion of truth” effect, which holds that repetition of a statement tends to make said statement be perceived as true even if it is not. This is how Fox persuaded millions of viewers that it is fair and balanced despite its obvious skew, and that was before its primetime lineup’s slide into the land of outright nativism and prevarication.

Newsmax’s narrowing of its focus to the election-fraud lie and little else, and the consistency with which it pounds out its refrain of false hope and anger, places it in a prime position to permanently siphon off the hardest core of Trump’s faithful into its viewership ranks. This should frighten you.

Newsmax and its weirder cousin One America News are not harmless refuges for a few odd tinfoil-hat wearers. To get a sense of how dangerous their growing popularity is, turn your eyes toward Michigan, whose secretary of state contended with armed protesters amassing outside her home and harassing her family.

Look at the death threats election workers have contended with in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states named by Kelly as places where the election has not been settled. (It has. Each of those states has certified its election results, and although Trump is still mounting legal challenges to the Wisconsin recount, its electors meet on Monday and Congress is expected to accept their votes for Biden.) 

Misinformation is poisoning the social fabric even in states that aren’t battlegrounds. Last Wednesday in Washington state, a man walked into Spokane County Democrats’ office threatening to detonate a bomb if the workers who were there didn’t read and widely share his manifesto. He was later arrested, but not before setting a fire inside the office.

Newsmax’s hosts didn’t reference this while I was watching. But I did see Kelly praise Danny Presti, the Staten Island, New York, bar owner who violated the state’s pandemic restrictions by staying open, and rammed into a sheriff’s deputy with his car when the official attempted to arrest him. To Kelly, and therefore to his viewers, Presti is a hero. (Fox’s Sean Hannity also draped laurels upon Presti — not the deputy he assaulted with his automobile.)

On Jan. 20, 2021, the Biden administration will officially begin. Whether Newsmax’s hosts acknowledge that doesn’t matter, because they can keep the fraud lie’s drama churning for the next four years.

How this impacts Fox News’ strategy and American society itself it is too early to say. Fox has expressed confidence in its wider reach, evidenced in the fact that it commands four times the viewership Newsmax musters on any given day. Fox, MSNBC, CNN and every other major mainstream news organization have deeper pockets and far more extensive connections and resources than their much smaller competition at Newsmax and OAN. For now, Fox is likely taking comfort in that.

Newsmax, meanwhile, continues to prove how lucrative selling dangerous stories far removed from reality can be. The channel’s CEO, Christopher Ruddy, isn’t shy about the fact that he’s simply meeting demand with supply, packaging the affirmation of unsubstantiated belief as a product.

That the goods are bad for us, and dull at that, doesn’t matter. People are buying, and business is booming.

Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that Newsmax’s 1.1 million audience was reached for one popular program. That number does not reflect average primetime viewership. 

Fear and loathing as colleges face another season of red ink

When the University of California’s Board of Regents got a close look at the numbers in September, it was the visual equivalent of a thunderclap. The massive university system, with 10 campuses and more than 285,000 students, was hemorrhaging money — $2.2 billion in lost revenue and additional costs, mostly due to the pandemic.

While some of those losses came from medical centers that temporarily gave up high-paying elective procedures in order to treat COVID patients, the bigger picture was as vexing as it was simple: In the age of pandemic-induced remote learning, the campuses were largely deserted. And when students aren’t living on campus, schools stop making money. Fast.

“Colleges and universities get very high premiums on their housing. It’s a big revenue space for them,” said Dr. Jorge Nieva of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “But for many, many schools right now, they just can’t operate in person.”

When they try, the outcomes have often been dire. A New York Times rolling survey of roughly 1,900 colleges and universities has tracked more than 321,000 viral infections on campus among students, faculty and staff, with at least 80 deaths. Most of the fatalities occurred in the spring, and hundreds of schools have since opted for either 100% remote instruction or severe limits on how many students may be on campus.

Those decisions, driven by administrators’ understanding that it’s nearly impossible to contain the spread of COVID-19 in classrooms, dormitories and cafeterias, are prudent and comply with local and state health protocols. But as schools attempt to finalize plans for the winter quarter or spring semester beginning next month, a sense of dread has crept in. Absent student housing and dining money, budgets again will be blown.

The expected arrival of a coronavirus vaccine is welcome, but at many campuses, students are unlikely to pay for room and board again until the fall — and, even then, perhaps in reduced numbers. Larger schools and private universities with significant endowments will almost certainly get through it, but after that, the picture gets cloudier.

“We’re fully anticipating that some of the smaller schools will not make it,” said Patricia Gandara, a research professor of education at UCLA. “Some of the liberal arts schools, especially, are struggling to stay afloat. It’s a really terrible problem.”

Indeed, a recent model created by a Boston education company, Edmit, estimated that more than a third of the private four-year colleges it studied may need to merge or close in the next few years. New York University professor Scott Galloway, meanwhile, has identified more than 90 colleges that fall into the “low value, high vulnerability” quadrant of his analysis, meaning they’re already in trouble financially and may be pushed to the edge by the budgetary effects of the virus.

The national figures are mind-boggling. In a letter to Congress in October, the American Council on Education said it had estimated that the pandemic would cost colleges and universities at least $120 billion. In every category of university operation, the council wrote, “revenues are down and expenses are significantly increased.”

At many large school systems, those losses are compounded by state budget crises that also loop back to COVID-related economic downturns — and they follow a decade in which state funding was already significantly shaved. California reduced its general-fund contribution to the UC system for 2020-21 by $472 million, and federal relief is uncertain with a likely divided government, said education consultant Ben Kennedy.

Smaller schools are more vulnerable to an immediate threat. This summer, tiny Wells College, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, pondered closing its doors permanently. “If we don’t have room and board revenue, we won’t have enough revenue to operate the campus next year,” said President Jonathan Gibralter. The college ultimately decided to open this fall, with students living in the residence halls; it went into a “pause” in November, suspending in-person instruction and advising students to essentially stay in their dorm rooms, after positive cases of COVID began to rise at Wells. Students ultimately left the campus at Thanksgiving break and, as Wells had planned months earlier, will finish the semester remotely.

For Wells and other small schools, collecting even part of a semester’s worth of housing and dining fees is critical. According to research by the College Board, room and board costs rose faster than tuition and fees at public two- and four-year institutions over the past five years. In 2017, the Urban Institute found that room and board costs had more than doubled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Some of this has to do with the way the college pricing game is played. Schools often post sky-high tuition rates, then offer to knock them down — often by 50% or more — via grant or scholarship. The profit margins on housing and dining services make up the difference in the budget.

At UCLA, an in-state student in campus housing would pay $13,239 for tuition and $17,599 for room and board this school year, according to the school’s estimate. Out-of-state and foreign students pay an additional $29,754 in “supplemental tuition,” a premium that many schools raised aggressively over the past decade to recover funding deficits after the recession of 2007-09.

The University of Florida charges state residents $6,380 in tuition, but $10,590 in room and board. At Dartmouth College, students of families with incomes under $100,000 can expect a scholarship covering the $57,796 retail tuition, but room and board add $17,022.

Campus lockdowns have been devastating. From March to August, UCLA lost nearly $185 million in canceled housing and dining programs and “lost enrollments,” part of a system-worst $653 million overall revenue decline. Despite UCLA’s losses, overall the UC system’s enrollment levels remained flat.

Remote instruction will continue at least through March in the UC system, with on-campus housing again serving only those students with no other options. The residence halls at UCLA were about 10% occupied this fall.

Schools around the country generally operate within the health and safety guidelines of their cities or counties. As the nation plunges into its worst phase of the pandemic, that means few opportunities for a return to campus until a vaccine becomes available for college students, which may be well into the summer.

Still, there are some differences. While USC has followed Los Angeles County’s very cautious approach to reopening, New Jersey’s Princeton University went the other way, announcing that all enrolled undergraduates would be offered campus housing in the spring, even as classes remained mostly remote. (Room and board at Princeton for the spring semester comes to $8,910, according to the university’s statement of fees.)

With an endowment valued at more than $5.7 billion, USC can survive an extended time of reduced housing and dining revenue, as can the UC system, whose collective endowments total $15 billion.

But as the pandemic rolls on, the pressure on schools that are relatively underfunded — or were already leveraged — will only increase. When MacMurray College in Illinois announced its closure this spring after 174 years, its president noted that 2020 was MacMurray’s third consecutive year in deficit, part of a longer pattern of students gravitating toward larger schools and their amenities.

“If an institution wasn’t running a structural deficit with dwindling reserves pre-COVID, they should be OK now,” said Kennedy, the education consultant. “If they were already two to four years away from an existential crisis, then COVID has brought them, likely, to the point of no return.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

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

Karens are everywhere. Where are the Kens?

We all know a Karen. We’ve seen them in America’s tree-lined, manicured suburbs asking to speak with the manager because the grilled chicken on their Caesar salad is too cold. Sporting Kate Gosselin’s haircut circa 2009, the most benign Karens lambaste part-time Home Depot employees for having the wrong shade of taupe paint; the worst Karens leverage their white privilege to harass people of color. Entitlement, whiteness, privilege, always having to be correct — and being a woman — embody the idea of the “Karen,” a pejorative that was coined in online discourse in the late 2010s but became prominent in 2020. Sarah Miller, writing in the New York Times, defined Karens as “middle-aged white moms who are always asking for the manager and calling the police on perfectly fine pool parties and wondering why kids are so obsessed with their identities.”

Like any cultural phenomenon, much Karen name-calling and Karen-shaming is waged online. In articles, memes, and artifact-ridden JPEGs posted on Twitter and Facebook, Karens asking to speak with the manager run rampant across our laptop screens and beyond. The concept of the “Karen” has entered the popular lexicon to the extent that it is making its way into public policy. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the “CAREN Act” (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) in July, an allusion to the pejorative. Women with the name Karen are reportedly less likely to get dates online because of the stereotypes associated with their name.

While the origins of the Karen meme are unclear, some believe it originated from a Dane Cook comedy special that aired in 2005. Yet the term also has connections to the phrase “Miss Ann,” a term was used by African-American slaves to refer to a condescending European-American woman, as André Brock, a professor at Georgia Tech, told CNN. As Karen Attiah further explained in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “Becky and Karen memes and jokes should be understood in this context, part of a long tradition to use humor to try to cope with the realities of white privilege and anti-blackness.” Indeed, the pejorative’s history is rooted in the many horrible ways white privilege can be weaponized by white women. 

Recently, the term has begun to transcend gender. Anyone can be a Karen, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, if their appearance is feminized and amended with the Gosselin bob. Last month, when Musk seemed to misunderstand how his COVID-19 test worked, a scientist mocked him and called him “Space Karen.”

But as the Karen meme entered the mainstream, it mutated. Specifically, it’s gone from being hyper-specific to a slur that has become synonymous with merely “bad,” “shrill,” “a woman I don’t like,” or perhaps “a man who acts like an entitled woman.” 

Much as the word “socialism” has become meaningless to much of the right, spouted as a catch-all slur for anyone or anything on the left they don’t like, a certain (mostly male) subset has begun Karen-baiting any women they don’t like — even if she doesn’t embody Karenesque traits.

Yet Karen-ifying everyone these days is often a dodge. In many cases, memes about Karens come off as instances of bald-faced sexism, disconnected from the original meme, distracting from the issues that made “being a Karen” a problem in the first place — problems that have nothing to do with Karen’s gender and everything to do with her behavior.

So if Karen has devolved into the go-to pejorative to describe anyone who makes a fuss about or questions anything, one wonders why isn’t there a man’s name — like Ken, Donald, Kevin, or (dare I say) Elon — that we can call white men when they’re demanding to speak to the proverbial manager, and acting like their needs are above everyone else?

Lest you think the call for a male or gender-neutral “Karen” is tantamount to feminism run amok, I should note that we had this cultural conversation about hurricanes decades ago. In the 1950s, the U.S. decided to give storm systems female names only. This had a peculiar trickle down effect: “Once these storms took on female names, weathermen began talking about them as if they were women,” Becky Little writes for History.com. “They used sexist clichés to describe their behavior—saying that this one was ‘temperamental,’ or that another was ‘teasing’ or ‘flirting’ with a coastline.” A feminist campaign to give storm systems male names too was won in 1979, leading to the gender-alternating system we have today.

Just as with hurricane naming systems, it’s not the name specifically that is sexist, but how it is being used—and who’s using it. Considering a woman with a blonde bob memed with the overlay “Felt cute. Might talk to the manager later,” it’s worth asking why men who exhibit similar entitlement aren’t subjected to the same kind of scrutiny. 

Indeed, many Karen memes depict said Karens as shrill, nagging — sexist stereotypes, disconnected from any larger racial or class discourse. These are merely the same misogynist stereotypes that have stuck to women for decades.

There is no shortage of white-male names that could serve as a male spin-off of Karen. But a male-equivalent of a “Karen,” standing alone throwing a fit at Walmart demanding to speak to the manager, is not something we have the recognizable stereotype of, nor is this meme popular.

Maybe it’s time to popularize “Ken,” Karen’s male equivalent. Or maybe this is just another story about how internet neologisms often devolve into sexist stereotypes.

The most memorable chicken recipes always have vinegar

As someone who develops and tests recipes for a living, it’s literally my job to describe how and why certain flavor pairings work. Usually, that’s a relatively attainable task, but sometimes, when faced with this particular why? I can’t think of a better answer than: Just, because!

Think about pork and brown sugar. And seafood and butter. And beer and sausage. And of course, chicken and vinegar. They just . . . work. These combinations have been around for a long time, in countless cuisines, yet are also constantly revived in new recipes.

Today, we’re exploring the last. What is it about chicken and vinegar? Let’s find out.

Chicken isn’t a fatty meat compared with, say, beef, but schmaltzy, well-salted, crispy-skinned chicken is still rich. And there’s no better way to cut fat and salt than with acid, be it freshly squeezed citrus or, arguably chicken’s favorite, vinegar.

Tangy, salty and sorta sweet, vinegar leaves me wanting more. It’s not only that I’m an acid fiend (though that’s not not a factor here); it’s about culinary harmony.

Chicken with vinegar appears in countless long-standing dishes. Poulet au Vinaigre, a French classic thanks to chef Paul Bocuse, calls for red wine vinegar to be reduced until thick and syrupy, then mixed with cream and seared chicken pieces. In Hawaiian Huli Huli Chicken, an acidic component is vital to the sweet sauce slathered on the chicken before grilling: In her cookbook “Aloha Kitchen,” Alana Kysar’s version calls for rice vinegar. This ingredient is also used in Amelia Rampe’s recipe for the classic Filipino Chicken Adobo, braising in a sauce with a whole head of garlic for maximum punch.

Contemporary dishes lean on the combination, too. Alison Roman’s Vinegar Chicken With Crushed Olive Dressing was the most popular recipe on NYT Cooking in 2019, and an adapted version of Kysar’s Huli Huli Chicken (calling for rice or apple cider vinegar) also made this list.

“Acid grants the palate relief, and makes food more appealing by offering contrast,” writes Samin Nostrat in “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” “While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them. By acting as a foil to salt, fat, sugar and starch, acid makes itself indispensable to everything we cook.”

The first time Nosrat made Poulet au Vinaigre, at the suggestion of a mentor, she was skeptical: “It hardly seemed appetizing.” However, Nosrat realized the vinegar mellows as it cooks. Her cookbook’s Chicken With Vinegar recipe calls for white wine vinegar, added to the pan along with searing chicken pieces, simmered until the meat is cooked through, and splashed in again to perk up the dish just before serving. “It heightened my appreciation for what acid can do for a rich dish.”

In his new cookbook “The Flavor Equation,” Nik Sharma talks about using vinegar in marinades for chicken. Characterizing his use of the condiment as a “flavor booster and also as a brining solution,” Sharma stirs vinegar into marinades for a grilled chicken salad, roast chicken thighs and chicken lollipops (Sharma’s are doused in a brick-red sambal oelek–based sauce). Of the salad, he writes: “Together salt and acid affect protein structure and increase the water retention capacity of the chicken breast. The result is a chicken breast that’s juicier and more tender.”

When I think of vinegar and chicken, my mind immediately jumps to Chicken Savoy, a dish native to northern New Jersey, where I grew up. Though the dish is simple (chicken parts smeared with an herby paste, baked hot and fast, finished with lots of vinegar), it’s attracted a cult following in Essex County. After first debuting at Belleville’s Belmont Tavern in the 1960s, the dish has turned up on menus at red sauce restaurants all around the area. And though the official recipe remains a tightly-kept secret, when I crave chicken and vinegar at home, I riff on Chicken Savoy. It’s the double dose of vinegar that brings the dish together: Both sweet balsamic and zingy red wine vinegar — a tip shared with me by Steven Amadeo, the owner and manager of Miele’s Restaurant in Verona, New Jersey — go into the pan with sizzling chicken. Before serving, I stir in another glug of each vinegar, because you can never have enough.

***

Recipe: Garlicky Chicken With Herbs & Vinegar

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 35 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

  • 3 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken legs and thighs
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 ounces Pecorino Romano or Parmesan (or a scant 1/2 cup pre-grated)
  • 5 large garlic cloves
  • 5 oil-packed anchovy fillets
  • 2 tablespoons dried oregano
  • 2 tablespoons dried thyme
  • 1/2-1 teaspoons red pepper flakes
  • 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
  • 3/4 cup dry white wine, chicken broth, or a mix
  • 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar, divided
  • 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, divided
  • Small handful fresh oregano and/or thyme sprigs
  • Freshly chopped parsley, for serving
  • Good Italian bread, for serving

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 450ºF. Pat-dry the chicken and season well on all sides with salt and pepper. 
  2. If not using pre-grated, cut the cheese into a couple pieces, place in a food processor and pulse until the cheese is finely grated (or, if using pre-grated, just add the cheese to the machine). Add the garlic, anchovies if using, herbs, red pepper flakes and 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Pulse until a paste forms. (This mixture can also be made by hand: Grate the cheese on the fine holes of a box grater. Finely chop the herbs and garlic before mixing with red pepper flakes and oil.) Season with a big pinch of salt and lots of pepper.
  3. Heat remaining tablespoon oil in a large oven-safe (stainless steel or cast-iron work best) skillet over medium-high heat. Nestle in half the chicken parts, skin-side down. Sear the chicken until it releases from the pan naturally and is well-browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Flip the chicken and let cook for another 8 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a sheet pan (or plate or platter) skin-side up, then repeat with remaining chicken parts. 
  4. Use a spoon or spatula to smear the cheese-herb mixture over the skin side of each chicken piece. 
  5. Pour the white wine or broth, and 1 tablespoon each of the balsamic and red wine vinegars into the skillet, and use a wooden spoon to loosen any browned bits stuck to the pan. Scatter sprigs of fresh oregano and thyme, then return all the chicken, still skin-side up, to the skillet. Transfer the skillet to the oven and cook until the liquid has reduced by about half and the chicken is cooked through, registering at least 165ºF on an instant-read thermometer, about 15 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a serving platter deep enough to hold the sauce. 
  6. Scrape up any browned bits in the pan and stir in the remaining tablespoon of both vinegars. Pour pan sauce over the chicken and serve topped with parsley.

Four stabbed after Proud Boys, told by Trump to “stand back and stand by,” descended on DC for march

At least four people were stabbed Saturday as supporters of President Donald Trump, including maskless Proud Boys in helmets and bulletproof vests, descended on the nation’s capital and clashed with counterprotesters—violence that some critics tied to the president’s pre-election directive to the self-described “western chauvinists.”

During a debate ahead of his loss in November, Trump had told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” which swiftly elicited criticism that he was inciting violence. Designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Proud Boys are known for their white nationalist, anti-Muslim, and misogynistic rhetoric as well as their presence at the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

The Washington Post reported late Saturday that “in smaller numbers than their gathering last month, they roamed from the Capitol to the Mall and back again, seeking inspiration from speakers who railed against the Supreme Court, Fox News, and President-elect Joe Biden. The crowds cheered for recently pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, marched with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and stood in awe of a flyover from what appeared to be Marine One.”

Singing “Jingle Bells” and chanting vulgar slogans, “a group of about 50 men in the Proud Boys’ black and yellow circled the perimeter of Black Lives Matter Plaza, where about 200 anti-Trump demonstrators were rallying,” according to the Associated Press. Following the daytime rallying, “downtown Washington quickly devolved into crowds of hundreds of Proud Boys and combined forces of antifa and local Black activists—both sides seeking a confrontation in an area flooded with police officers.”

After nightfall, at least four people were stabbed near Harry’s Bar, a Proud Boys “gathering point,” the Post reported. While the affiliations of those wounded were not clear, D.C. fire spokesperson Doug Buchanan said the victims were hospitalized and suffered possibly life-threatening injuries. The Metropolitan Police Department said 23 people were arrested.

Trump tweeted Saturday: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.”

Reporters and critics of the president, meanwhile, cited his comment from the debate. As former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson put it: “The message seems to have shifted from ‘stand back and stand by’ to ‘the fight is on.'”

“Trump told the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ and they listened to their Chosen One,” said New York Times contributing opinion writer Wajahat Ali. “This is all on you, Republicans. You have enabled all of this.”

The violence came just two days before the Electoral College vote and followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Friday night denial of a lawsuit filed by GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that aimed to block the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from casting their electoral votes for Biden.

After more than 100 Republican lawmakers declared their support for the suit, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) and others accused them of trying to to “demolish democracy” and argued they should not be seated for the next congressional session. Citing the 14th Amendment, Pascrell said that “men and women who would act to tear the United States government apart cannot serve as members of the Congress.”

Why Donald Trump is failing at making his dictator dreams a reality

Well before Donald Trump won the 2016 election, there were worries that his autocratic tendencies would threaten the future of our democracy. His lack of respect for democratic institutions, his predisposition to put self-interest over civic duty and his narcissistic disavowal of any rule of law all combined to suggest that, if elected, he would desire dictatorial powers.

Law professor Eric Posner, writing in Quartz back in March of 2016, wondered if Trump would be America’s first dictator. Even Michael Moore weighed in and suggested that if Trump beat Hillary Clinton he could be the last elected president of the United States.

It makes sense to worry. From the onset of his political career Trump displayed all the trappings of a would-be autocrat. It wasn’t just his disturbingly fascist style of populism, it was also his attacks on the media, strongman swagger, blatant cronyism and fondness for tyrants.

Then once he was elected, things got worse. There was the mounting evidence that Trump simply couldn’t function as the president of a democracy and that he consistently gravitated towards the behavior of a despot. “Trump’s behavior in the White House offered clear evidence that he places his self-interest above that of the American people,” stated Douglas H. Wise, former Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “whether admiring the Russian government, denying it attacked our political processes, or lavishing effusive praise on President Vladimir Putin, while directing harsh criticism toward the U.S. Intelligence Community and the FBI.”

The list of despot-like moves Trump has made is frankly too long to recount. From installing family members in high-ranking positions, to gutting federal agencies, to treating anyone who questions him as an enemy, keeping track of Trump’s slide into fascism has been exhausting.

To make matters worse, Trump’s dictatorial designs were disturbingly forthright and blatant. He kept publicly repeating that he wasn’t a fan of term limits and he openly admired world leaders who had subverted checks on their time in office like Chinese President Xi Jinping. He even ordered a military parade, dubbed a “Salute to America,” which ended up simply being a salute to himself.

So, it comes as no surprise that as Trump has refused to concede the 2020 election and has stoked rumors of election fraud, that we have seen a new wave of articles anxious over Trump’s increasingly obvious dictatorial aspirations.

The sheer fact that Trump won’t concede puts him in the company of tyrants. As The New York Times put it shortly after the race was called, Trump’s post-election tactics suggested the antics of a dictator, not a president of a democracy: “denying defeat, claiming fraud and using government machinery to reverse election results are the time-honored tools of dictators.”

But here’s the thing: Just because Trump wants to be a dictator, doesn’t mean he can be one. Waving his arms around, shooting off incendiary tweets, and launching lawsuits with no merit isn’t enough to keep him in power.

We often focus on the bluster and bullying of despots, but they don’t rise to power through sheer invective. They have to build their power and keep it. And that’s why Trump has little chance of actually becoming the autocrat everyone is worrying over. The only thing Trump knows how to build is his overinflated ego.

This is not to say that Trump isn’t dictator-like. It would take more space than I have here to list all of Trump’s autocratic affinities. He might admire Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. He might have engaged in some very troubling behavior that was openly fascist and unapologetically authoritarian. But a true power grab requires more than rhetoric and a culture of chaos; it requires the development of the pillars of support critical for anyone trying to seize and hold on to power. And, quite frankly, Trump sucks at building the sort of significant support required of a dictator.

Think of it this way: If Trump couldn’t even build a wall, can he build a repressive regime?

He’s terrible at building the sorts of alliances that are required to take over a government. This point was made clear by the revolving door of White House advisors and cabinet members that plagued his presidency. The Brookings Institute reports that turnover for “A Team” members of Trump’s administration was 91 percent as of December 4, 2020, with 39 percent of those positions undergoing serial turnover. Trump further had 11 turnovers in his cabinet. For comparison, Barack Obama had only three in his eight years in office and Ronald Reagan had six.

It wasn’t just that Trump summarily fired anyone who displeased him in any way; it was that he did it in the most humiliating way possible. Think of all of the times he Twitter-fired members of his administration. These sorts of antics might have made for good TV, but they don’t work in leadership, even when that leadership is tyrannical.

Research on how dictators rise and keep power is vast, but most experts agree that autocrats can’t hold power if they don’t control pillars of support. And, in case it wasn’t already obvious, Trump is too self-centered and delusional to actually develop the needed pillars of support.

We might broadly define the core arenas where an autocrat needs to exercise power as military, media, money and masses. Without at least some of these arenas of support a dictator will fail. Sure, autocrats like Putin go on firing sprees, but they know that they can only go so far if they want to stay in power. Strong leaders need strong pillars backing them.

So, just to allay your fears about Trump’s skills in mounting a successful coup, let’s briefly run down how badly Trump has been so far at grabbing power.

Military

Any serious effort to overturn a democracy and institute a dictatorship typically requires the support of the military. Sure, there was early cause for concern that Trump would court military backing when he packed his cabinet with generals. But the military generals that once surrounded Trump are long gone.

The generals didn’t just defect, so too did those in service. Prior to Election Day reports were coming in that Trump had lost significant backing among the active duty military, with Joe Biden leading over him in polls. And that was before The Atlantic’s reports that Trump called military dead in a cemetery in Europe “suckers and losers.”

So, a core pillar a dictator usually needs — the armed forces — Trump doesn’t have, and has no chance of getting. When you fire revered generals and constantly insult the military, they end up opposing you. And without them, no despot can make it for long.

Media

If the military is the front-facing source of power, information is the soft power all regimes require. Dictators depend on controlling the flow of information about their government. They rely on an artful combination of propaganda, censorship and repression of free speech.

Operating in a nation with a free press and strong First Amendment protections put Trump at a massive disadvantage when it came to controlling information. But let’s face it, Trump made an even bigger mess of his media coverage. Sure, he threatened to change libel laws, he attacked journalists, he spewed an endless stream of constant lies and created a chilling environment for the news. But most of it was bluster.

That bluster was covered in the mainstream media more often than not as the raving tantrums of a lunatic, a characterization that doesn’t help a despot-in-training hold the needed respect of the public. A study released in August 2020 showed that coverage of Trump on major broadcast networks was 95 percent negative.  

But Trump’s power over the media was even weaker because he couldn’t even hold onto the support of the right wing purportedly on his side. His repeated clashes with Fox News and his estrangement from right-wing spin master Steve Bannon left him on weak footing with mass media most likely to support him. Trump-friendly Newsmax and One America News are niche outlets that lack a major network’s reach.

When the outlet that is supposed to have your back (Fox News) projects that your opponent won a state (Arizona) first, you know you have lost the support of the media.  

Masses

It goes without saying that all tyrants need the masses behind them. And you do have to give Trump credit for getting more than 74 million votes in his race against Joe Biden.

There is no question that these numbers are troubling. That Trump’s openly xenophobic, racist and divisive rhetoric pulled that much support is a big wake up call.

But before we jump to conclusions that all 74 million voters would also support Trump as a potential dictator, consider the possibility that those who voted for Trump had lots of reasons why they did, not all of which translate into adoration for him. Sure, Trump tapped into mounting public distrust in government. He also did a good job freaking people out over Biden’s supposed socialist tendencies.

All true, but not the whole truth.

Many voters were fed up with the Democratic Party and they found Joe Biden to be a less-than-inspiring choice. Matt Taibbi described the choices in this year’s election as a “vomit milkshake” and refers to Biden as “democratic in name only.” As Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi writes, “The corruption, incompetence and downright reactionary disposition of the Democratic Party cannot be ignored when trying to make sense of these catastrophic numbers.”  

It makes more sense to consider that of the 74 million votes cast for Trump, among them are likely many votes against Biden and the Democratic party overall. And there are likely other reasons in there as well accounting for why Trump’s percentage of the popular vote ended up being higher than his approval rating would suggest.

Trump’s approval ratings overall are astonishingly low in comparison with his other democratically elected peers. One data set shows that Trump’s approval rating 1,240 days into his tenure was the lowest of the last 14 presidents.

Approval ratings that low don’t tend to translate into overwhelming enthusiasm or even acceptance of a budding dictatorship, especially when our would-be despot lacks other pillars of support.

Money

Dictators don’t just need resources to support their regimes, they need to please those who have it, and Trump hasn’t pulled this off either. Trump may like to brag about what he achieved for the economy and how successful he is financially, but on this point he has been a massive failure as well.

To be blunt, no one in the United States is seizing power or overturning democracy without the backing of Wall Street. Trump has lost this pillar for two key reasons: First, we have to recognize that the economic policies of a Biden presidency won’t measurably differ for Wall Street from those of a Trump one. That sad fact has underpinned the corporate Democratic policies that have been in place since Bill Clinton was in office.

The second point, though, may further surprise. Influential, elite business leaders don’t want Trump to pull this off. In a recent meeting of the Business Roundtable, an exclusive membership of CEOs from major corporations, executives discussed the measures they would take if Trump wouldn’t leave the White House if the election was found to be legally sound. The Associated Press reports they stated they’d act “to make sure that the Republican elected officials do their jobs.” And according to a report by a Forbes contributor, the CEOs discussed that there may “come a time when they would be forced to use their power and influence [to] take appropriate steps to quell any potential violent disruptions.”

As creepy as that should sound to you, it still supports my point that Trump doesn’t have the right kind of power shored up to stay in the White House after his term ends. 

We may have much to worry over in the coming days, but Trump successfully staging a coup to erase Joe Biden’s electoral victory isn’t one of them. This means that, even though Trump has “turned destructive and vindictive like all dictators,” as Brandy X. Lee puts it, he still isn’t one exactly, and he has no chance of becoming one. The best shot he has is playing one on TV.

David Perdue sold his home to a finance industry official whose organization was lobbying the Senate

Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., sold his Washington, D.C., home last year to a brokerage industry official whose organization is under the purview of a committee Perdue sits on.

The deal was made off market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.

Though an appraisal provided to ProPublica by the buyer found that Perdue sold for slightly under market value, four local real estate experts disagreed, telling ProPublica that the almost $1.8 million sale price Perdue garnered seemed high. Their estimates of the premium ranged from a few thousand dollars to as much as about $140,000. A fifth expert said the price was squarely fair market value.

Ultimately, congressional ethics experts said, their concern was that Perdue sold privately and to someone whose organization that he oversaw as a senator.

“Determining fair market value is always a gray area, unless the sales are done in a competitive open market,” said Craig Holman with the watchdog group Public Citizen. “Since the purchase and sale of this property by Sen. Perdue was not done on the open market, it raises serious suspicions as to whether the sale was in fact at fair market value.”

If the price was above fair market value, Holman said, “this would be a violation of his ethical obligations and an opportunity for those with business pending before Perdue’s committee to curry favor.”

A Perdue spokesperson said that the senator and his wife sold the townhouse at fair market price, and that the lender appraisal confirmed that.

“None of this had anything to do with the senator’s official role,” the spokesperson said. “The Perdues did not know any of the individuals, and they used the same realtor during the purchase and sale of the property.”

Perdue’s office provided a statement from the couple’s real estate agent, Justin Paulhamus: “Since inventory was so limited at the time of the sale, we priced it at market value and were fortunate to get an offer.”

Perdue’s spokesperson said the senator’s real estate agent “floated it off market first, and they would have put it on market, but got an offer at their asking price which was fair market value.”

Perdue is locked in a runoff campaign against Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff. Along with fellow Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler’s race against Raphael Warnock, his contest could determine which party controls the Senate and with it, whether President-elect Joe Biden can implement much of his agenda.

Perdue has faced multiple allegations that he has mixed his private financial interests with his official work. The most prolific stock trader in the Senate, he bought and sold shares in companies that the committees he sits on have jurisdiction over. Some of his trades came at fortunate times. Earlier this year, the Justice Department investigated him and other lawmakers for possible insider trading. Perdue denied the allegations. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to bring charges against him.

Perdue’s home buyer in October 2019 was Hillary Sale, a board governor for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a privately funded self-regulatory body for the securities industry. The organization falls under the purview of the Senate Banking Committee, which Perdue sits on. Earlier in 2019, FINRA was lobbying on a bill out of the banking committee that would have required the organization to establish a fund to pay investors bilked by brokers.

A FINRA spokesman said the organization has not lobbied Perdue specifically. In a statement, Sale said she learned of the home though her real estate agent and never interacted with Perdue. She provided ProPublica with an appraisal from her lender showing the home was valued at $1.8 million, $11,000 over the amount she paid. Samer Kuraishi, who leads a real estate agency in Washington, said appraisals are done after a price is agreed to, and that they typically are engineered to match the sales price.

Perdue may have saved thousands by not putting his house on the open market.

Kuraishi and other experts said that when doing off-market deals, sellers can negotiate to pay their agents a smaller commission.

“In that scenario, an agent spends less on staging, less on marketing, less on open houses, less on virtual tours,” he said. “It’s typically an easier sale.”

Perdue’s spokesperson said the senator paid broker fees, but did not respond to questions about whether the fees were discounted.

Perdue’s Capitol Hill home and many of those around it were built in the early 2000s by EYA, a developer that specializes in luxury townhomes that maintain the look and feel of historic buildings but come with amenities typically reserved for more suburban locales. They have individual garages and private courtyards. Perdue’s home featured a rentable separate unit, connected to the main house through interior stairs.

At the time of the sale, FINRA was lobbying the Senate, according to its disclosure forms, and earlier that year its lobbyists were specifically focused on a bill that would have required the organization to establish a relief fund to provide investors with arbitration awards that went unpaid by FINRA’s brokerage firms and brokers. The bill was authored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and fell under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Committee.

The committee had also held hearings that included harsh assessments of how well FINRA was policing its own. In 2018, an AFL-CIO official charged that FINRA was failing as a regulator because it was not forcing its members to pay the arbitration settlements.

Perdue’s office declined to answer questions about where the senator stood on the bill, which did not pass, or whether he took any actions on it.

Ethics experts are generally troubled when politicians enter into transactions with people who have business before them. The legality of this sale hinges on whether the home was purchased at fair market value. If it was Apurchased for more than that, it would be considered a gift. Gifts of significant value to senators are required to be publicly disclosed. Perdue did not disclose any such gifts.

Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., sold his Washington townhouse to a donor and powerful lobbyist who had business before him. Burr’s office said the lawmaker notified the Senate Ethics Committee before the sale. Perdue’s office declined to say if he took similar steps. The committee does not typically make such guidance public, and it did not respond to questions about whether Perdue sought advice in this case.

In order to avoid the appearance of a conflict, members of Congress who are buying or selling properties should do so on the open market to help ensure the price paid is fair and to avoid deals with people who have business before them, ethics experts say.

The five local real estate agents who reviewed the transaction for ProPublica had somewhat differing opinions about whether Perdue got an inflated price and, if so, how inflated. All cautioned that valuing a property is not an exact science.

One agent, assuming Perdue did not make significant improvements to the property while living there, priced the home at around $1,650,000. That would mean Perdue sold for about 8% over market. His office declined to say whether he had made those kinds of upgrades, but photos, the agent said, suggest he did not.

A second agent said the price also seemed high, but only about 2% over market value. The agent said prominent officials selling homes in private deals will often get a premium. “Buyers don’t haggle at that point. If it’s a senator, you’re not going to go back and say, ‘Actually, I’ll give you 1.7.’ They either pay the price or don’t buy it.”

A third agent said it seemed slightly above market. A fourth said the expected range for that property at the time would have been between $1.75 million and $1.785 million, a shade under Perdue’s $1.789 million sale price. A fifth agent said the price Perdue got was squarely at fair market value. All of the agents asked that their names not be used so as not to affect their ability to continue buying and selling homes in the neighborhood.

The agents said that the price Perdue purchased the home for in 2015, $1.6 million, was about market rate at the time. That sale was made on the open market.

In that case, Perdue bought from Bill Cheney, the outgoing president of the trade group lobbying for credit unions; Cheney is currently president of a California-based credit union. Perdue has received donations from the trade group and, as a senator, has helped loosen regulations on credit unions.

One of the real estate agents who spoke with ProPublica noted the short time the home spent on the market before Perdue bought it. The home was put on the market on a Wednesday and Perdue agreed to a deal to buy it that Friday before there could be a weekend open house. The agent said it was atypical for a seller to commit to Perdue without holding an open house to find backup options.

Cheney and his wife told ProPublica they had an open house for brokers only before the home was put on the market. Perdue got no special treatment, they said, and they had no direct contact with him.

Perdue’s spokesperson said the senator bought the townhouse above asking price.

“Absolutely nothing about the purchase or sale of the property had anything to do with the senator’s official role, since they did not know the buyers or sellers, there could be no conflict of interest whatsoever,” the spokesperson said.

Doris Burke contributed reporting.

TV’s first crop of queer Christmas movies range from saccharine fun to superficial flops

In 2000, the Hallmark Channel aired its first original holiday-themed movie, “The Christmas Secret,” about a professor who sets out to prove that reindeer can fly, and later meets Santa. In the 20 years since, other networks, notably Lifetime, have gotten in on the game, turning end-of-year programming into a nonstop marathon of tinsel, kisses and Christmas dreams coming true. 

But the genre hasn’t always brought good cheer to viewers, many of whom noticed a distinct lack of marginalized groups. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte pointed out last December, “running down this year’s schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It’s like watching ‘The Stepford Wives,’ but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.” 

Since then, TV’s holiday movie fare fortunately hasn’t been such a whitewashed Christmas, and that should be acknowledged and applauded. Moving past racial diversity, this year, the networks all apparently got the memo to try to queer up Christmas. It wasn’t until 2019’s “Twinkle All The Way” that a gay kiss was featured on-screen during the “It’s A Wonderful Lifetime” lineup, but only as part of a subplot. Several months later, Hallmark announced that “LGBTQ storylines, characters, and actors” would be included in their 2020 films. 

Now, ’tis finally the season! Salon took a look at what representation and inclusion on Hallmark, Lifetime and Hulu — which had the buzzy “Happiest Season” — looked like this holiday season. There are some high points, a few misses, and a little bit of the requisite schmaltziness. 

“Happiest Season,” Hulu

This much-hyped romantic comedy stars Kristen Stewart as Abby, a graduate student who plans on proposing to her girlfriend, Harper (played by Mackenzie Davis), on their Christmas trip to meet her conservative parents, the Caldwells. 

The catch? Harper lied to Abby about coming out to her parents, Ted (Victor Garber) and Tipper (Mary Steenburgen), and asks her to spend the next five days pretending to be her straight, orphaned roommate who simply tagged along because she had nowhere else to go. Anxieties are already heightened — both because of the holidays and Ted’s freshly announced mayoral campaign — and the characters all have to grapple with the tensions sometimes associated with wanting the acceptance of your family while being true to yourself. 

What’s good: This is a mild spoiler, but Harper’s family is largely awful (except for her sister Jane!), and when she’s around them, Harper becomes pretty horrible, too — more on that in the next section. So, what really keeps the narrative from becoming an infuriating 102 minute-comedy of errors buoyed by a healthy dose of gaslighting are the characters in Abby’s life who validate her and her feelings. 

There’s Riley (Aubrey Plaza), Harper’s swoon-worthy, stylish and empathetic secret ex-girlfriend — whom, it should be noted, was outed by Harper when the two were in high school. Her chemistry with Abby is such that numerous users were left wondering why the two didn’t run off together. Then there’s Abby’s best friend, John, a lovably acerbic book publisher (played by Dan Levy) who actually travels to retrieve Abby from the clutches of Harper’s family. 

What’s bad: There were two main criticisms of “Happiest Season.” The first being: Can’t LGBTQ audiences have a holiday movie where the main plot isn’t about mining the anxiety and trauma associated with coming out, being closeted and casual homophobia? Then there’s the fact that Harper really is just kind of the worst. After pushing Abby back in the closet, Harper ditches her in a town where she doesn’t know anyone to go drink with her ex-boyfriend until two in the morning, then proceeds to call Abby “suffocating” when called on it. It’s a pattern of s**ty behavior that is pervasive and present throughout the movie, so her redemption arc doesn’t feel super genuine. 

“The Christmas House,” Hallmark

Two brothers returning home for the holidays are roped into setting up their family’s  Christmas House, a tradition in which they turn their home into a megawatt yuletide wonderland inside and out. Mike (Robert Buckley) is an actor who’s hoping his cheesy legal drama “Handsome Justice” gets renewed for another season even as he’s reigniting the flames with his childhood crush, while sibling Brandon (Jonathan Bennett) and his husband Jake (Brad Harder) are waiting to hear if they’ll finally get approved for an adoption. Parents Bill and Phyllis (Treat Williams, Sharon Lawrence) put up a brave front, but they’re hiding a secret from their sons.

What’s good: Unlike with “Happiest Season,” Brandon and Jake’s main narrative isn’t tied to their identity of being gay. They’re allowed to be loving partners (with kissing!) who just want to add to their family. 

What’s bad: Their roles are secondary at best, which doesn’t really make it an LGBTQ movie. Why aren’t they allowed to be the leads? The brothers’ stories could’ve been easily flipped. Hallmark hyped up this movie having three stories, but really it’s just like any other movie with the main heteronormative couple and their satellite friends and family whose stories aren’t given any real dimension. And while it’s great to see Brandon and Jake be affectionate onscreen, the camera unsubtly pans down to show each time they hold hands, as if to say, “Look, they’re gay!” Find your chill, Hallmark. — Hanh Nguyen 

“The Christmas Setup,” Lifetime 

Hugo (Ben Lewis) is a tightly-wound Manhattan attorney who is vying for a partnership at his firm. He — along with his best friend, Madelyn (Ellen Wong) —momentarily escape the hustle and bustle to spend the holidays with his family in Milwaukee. Before embarking, Hugo warns Ellen that his mother can be a little over-the-top when it comes to Christmas: cut to Fran Drescher (!) having multiple Christmas trees delivered to her home, which is already dripping with decorations. 

Who is delivering the tree, you might ask? Well, that would be the distractingly handsome Patrick (Blake Lee), who was once the openly gay, popular boy that the then-closeted Hugo harbored a secret crush on back in high school. The two reconnect and (with a little help from Drescher’s character, Kate) begin to fall in love. 

But this development raises some big questions, like will Hugo give up his professional dreams to stay with Patrick? Will Patrick be forced to leave his close-knit community to join Hugo in the cold, impersonal Big City? And will the town’s historic train station — where the neighborhood holds their annual Christmas party — be saved from becoming a characterless mass-transit kiosk?

What’s good: So much, actually, if cheesy Christmas flicks are your thing! The casting of Lewis and Lee — who are married in real life — was a fantastic choice, as was putting Drescher in the role of meddling, over-the-top mother. Like “Happiest Season,” Hugo and Patrick’s love story is front and center, but the tension in the film comes from more decidedly more benign, if cliche, conflicts. It all feels very holly and jolly. 

What’s bad: Cliché here is a kind of a double-edged sword. “The Christmas Setup” is derivative of probably 80 straight-to-television holiday movies. You’ve got the stereotype of the workaholic whose life is radically changed when their proximity to Christmas spirit altered. That said, it makes for a really pleasant viewing experience. But at least none of the issues arise from the central couple.

The Big Takeaways

When compared to each other, “The Christmas Setup” is Salon’s pick for just straight-up, saccharine Christmas fun. It hits all the marks that have become standard in the straight-to-television holiday movie genre, from the over-the-top importance placed on community Christmas traditions to the tension between professional accomplishments and personal desires. The romance is believable, and you actually are rooting for the leads to work it out. The cast is great, too, though the performances from the star-studded “Happiest Season” are undeniably stronger. 

Through the lens of LGBTQ representation, however, the situation isn’t quite as sanguine. Hallmark’s “The Christmas House” is the weakest of the three; the inclusion of an LGBTQ storyline is superficial and takes a backseat to the other stories presented in the film. Again, Lifetime’s film had the best setup (so to speak) with genuine chemistry (the flirtation! the double entendres!) and affection coming from the main couple without the horrifying issues of the wretched “Happiest Season” narrative.

That said, at least Hulu’s film was one of the few rom-coms – ever, not just in this story – that features queer women. Most LGBTQ rom-coms tend to favor gay lead characters, with lesbian characters in a woeful minority. Usually, when lesbian romances are featured onscreen, they are fraught with misery or are set as a period film — look at “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “Carol,” and “Ammonite.” The result is often beautiful and poignant, but being in lesbian relationships aren’t always tragic and to depict them as such repeatedly feels like a judgment. Where is the joy? The last big lesbian rom-coms (with queer lead characters) are from ages ago — “Imagine Me & You,” “Saving Face” and “But I’m a Cheerleader — and it’s been far too long. 

Additionally, the gay characters depicted in this trio of movies are all white, despite all the networks making huge strides to diversify their talent. It’s baffling. It’s as if these networks feel they can’t present the story of a marginalized group without making them white (even Lifetime’s recent “Christmas Ever After,” which stars a disabled woman, defaults to white) as a sort of insurance to appeal to the majority. Whereas intersectionality would actually aid in producing richer, more authentic narratives to reflect America.

There’s clearly still a long way to go when it comes to better representation, and while Hallmark dipping its toe in is laudable, “Christmas House” should not be held up as a great example. Give that a pass. The other two are worth checking out though, even if it’s just to compare them. If one combines the star-power of “Happiest Season” with some of the schmaltz and joyful representation found in “The Christmas Setup,” you’d have a pretty perfect holiday film. Maybe the networks can get on that for 2021. 

Astronomers discover a “twin” planet to the mysterious, long-predicted Planet Nine

Of all the planets that humans have discovered in other solar systems, most of them orbit close and tight to their parent star. That’s partially due to the selection effect: the easiest-to-spot exoplanets (meaning a planet outside of our solar system) are those that are close enough to their star (or stars).

Hence, finding a planet that orbits really, really far from its parent star is a rare occurrence — so rare, in fact, that it’s hard to do even in our own solar system. Indeed, there is much evidence that points to the existence of a massive planet far beyond Pluto’s orbit, the theoretical Planet Nine; the problem is that it’s been nigh-impossible to find.

This week, the discovery of a massive exoplanet 336 light-years away, one that’s 11 times the mass of Jupiter, is renewing interest in finding Planet Nine and could hold some clues to its discovery. That’s because the existence of this exoplanet, named HD106906 b, proves that the positioning of distant, massive planets in a solar system is not just possible, but provides hints as to how it might happen.

In a paper published this week, astronomers examined years of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope on an exoplanet called HD106906 b. Astronomers first discovered the exoplanet in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. At the time, astronomers didn’t know about the planet’s orbit or its size.

According to the new paper, the exoplanet orbits its host stars (yes, that’s plural — it’s a binary star system) once every 15,000 human years. Hence, it also sits extremely far away from its host twin stars, 730 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. That’s about 18 times further than Pluto is from our sun. 

Another oddity about the exoplanet is how tilted it is in its orbit. To put in context: the sun and all planets in our solar system (and most solar systems) emerged from the same protoplanetary nebula, a swirling, disk-shaped gas and dust bubble, billions of years ago. Because they all formed from the same stuff moving in the same way, the planets in our solar system orbit on the same plane. (Imagine spinning a clay blob on a pottery wheel, and watching it spread out flat into a plate; that’s roughly analogous to happens in solar systems as they form from nebulae.) Thus, you could look at the solar system edge-on, and everything lines up.

But HD106906 b doesn’t follow that rule. Indeed, it has an “extreme orbit” that is very inclined and elliptical.

“To highlight why this is weird, we can just look at our own Solar System and see that all of the planets lie roughly in the same plane,”  Meiji Nguyen of the University of California-Berkeley, who led the study, said in a statement. “It would be bizarre if, say, Jupiter just happened to be inclined 30 degrees relative to the plane that every other planet orbits in.”

Its bizarre placement in its own solar system raises many questions, but also could provide answers to the hypothetical Planet Nine in our solar system.

As I’ve previously explained, so-called Planet Nine is a hot topic in the astronomy community. In the past decade, many astronomers have proposed that perturbations in Uranus and Neptunes’ orbits mean the existence of a world that has yet to be observed, or possibly some small, heavy exotic object like a micro-black hole. (Such a scenario would not be unprecedented: Neptune was discovered not through direct observation, but because astronomer Alexis Bouvard observed perturbations in Uranus’ orbit and predicted the existence of an unknown planet, which turned out to be Neptune.) But according to the new paper on exoplanet HD106906 b, the scenario behind its strange orbit could provide an explanation behind Planet Nine.

“Despite the lack of detection of Planet Nine to date, the orbit of the planet can be inferred based on its effect on the various objects in the outer Solar System,” Robert De Rosa of the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile who led the study’s analysis, said in a statement. “This suggests that if a planet was indeed responsible for what we observe in the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects it should have an eccentric orbit inclined relative to the plane of the Solar System.”

“This prediction of the orbit of Planet Nine is similar to what we are seeing with HD 106906 b,” De Rosa explained.

It’s possible that Planet Nine was created in the inner solar system and then Jupiter kicked it out far beyond Pluto—but this is just a theory.

“The planet’s orbit is very inclined, elongated and external to a dusty debris disc that surrounds it’s host stars,”  Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon via email. “In that sense, it resembles the orbit postulated for Planet 9 in the Solar system.”

In a recent paper with his student, Amir Siraj, they suggest that a hypothetical Planet Nine could be the result of star clusters.

 “They can capture planets that formed around other stars, especially if they have a companion star with them,” Loeb said. “The captured planets would then be found on distant and highly inclined orbits, as exhibited by HD106906 b in this exo-planetary system and the putative Planet Nine in the solar system.

HD 106906 b’s origins are still unclear: how did it get so far from its parent stars, and why is its orbit so tilted?

“We do not conclusively know where or how the planet formed,” De Rosa said, referring to the exoplanet. “Although we have made the first measurement of orbital motion, there are still large uncertainties on the various orbital parameters. It is likely that both observers and theorists alike will be studying HD 106906 for years to come, unraveling the many mysteries of this remarkable planetary system.”

Trump’s House loyalists planning last-ditch attempt to reverse Biden’s victory on the floor: report

According to a report from the New York Times, hardcore supporters of Donald Trump who serve in the House are willing to attempt to deny the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden if Donald Trump gives them a thumbs-up to proceed.

With the president insisting on Saturday during a Fox News interview that “It’s not over,” and Biden would be an “illegitimate president,” a few Republicans are making plans to use the rules of the House to contest the election results.

“As the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory,” the Times reports. “Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.”

According to the report, the effort is being led by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) who has amplified the president’s accusations of voter fraud despite a complete lack of evidence.

“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” the conservative GOP lawmaker explained. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”

As the report points out, “Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed,” with the likelihood that either Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) or Rand Paul (R-KY) might step up.

“Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes,” the report notes. “Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.”

That, in turn, could put Vice President Mike Pence — with an eye on his own political future — on the spot.

“The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally-designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results,” the Times reports. “But given Mr. Trump’s penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for past four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump’s confidence while adhering to the law.”

Adding to that, an attempt to throw out the election results and defy the will of the voters could cast a cloud over the Republican Party whether it works or not.

As for Republican Brooks, “It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.”

You can read more here.

Trump launches attack on Social Security with rule aiming to restrict disability benefits

Just weeks away from relinquishing power to incoming President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration is quietly launching a last-minute assault on Social Security by rushing ahead with a rule that, if implemented, could deny critical benefits to hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) late last week submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a proposed rule aiming to further tighten eligibility requirements for Social Security disability benefits, which around ten million Americans currently rely on for a modest monthly income.

While it is unclear whether the rule can be finalized before Biden takes office next month, Social Security defenders reacted with outrage to the proposal and called on the president-elect to make clear that he will immediately roll back the change.

“It is outrageous,” Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, said in a statement Monday. “The Trump administration could pull the rug out from millions of Americans, especially older Americans, in the waning days of its administration. Since the day he took office, President Trump has claimed he would protect Social Security. He is showing his true colors again.”

Advocacy group Social Security Works called the proposal “a despicable attack on people with disabilities and on our Social Security system” and urged Biden—whose own record on Social Security has been heavily criticized by progressives—to “clean house at the Social Security Administration on day one” by replacing top officials appointed by President Donald Trump.

In the works for months, the Trump administration’s proposed rule would significantly revise the criteria by which SSA determines who does and doesn’t qualify for disability benefits.

Under current law, applicants with certain serious conditions automatically qualify for benefits; those with other ailments are deemed qualified or not based on an evaluation of additional factors such as age, work history, education, and “residual functional capacity.”

The Trump administration’s proposed rule, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, “would no longer assume age seriously affects a person’s ability to adapt to simple, entry-level work.”

“It would raise the age at which education and work experience are considered in determining eligibility to 55, from 50,” the Journal reported. “The new rule would also update data on occupational skills that the agency uses to determine eligibility, based on new information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Another component of the proposed overhaul, according to HuffPost, would “essentially redefine full-time work as 30 hours per week, instead of the usual 40, for purposes of determining whether someone is disabled.”

“Fewer people would likely win benefits as a result,” HuffPost noted.

Fiesta warned that the Trump administration’s rule—one of many attacks it has launched on Social Security during its four years in power—would impose “a massive change that could push thousands of Americans into poverty.”

“Social Security’s disability payments are modest, an average of $15,096 each year for the average worker,” said Fiesta. “These benefits are not easy to receive; disabled workers go through a lengthy and rigorous process to determine eligibility. We are in a pandemic that is hitting older Americans the hardest. Our government should be helping Americans who can no longer work due to a disability, not scheming to deny them the benefits they have earned over a lifetime of hard work.”

Economist David Weaver joined calls for Biden to immediately roll back the Trump administration’s proposed change, noting in an op-ed for The Hill on Monday that the rule “could ultimately prevent as many as 500,000 Americans from receiving benefits.”

“Looking at recent or modern data, the current system routinely denies benefits to older individuals with serious health problems and diminished prospects in the modern economy,” Weaver wrote. “Amplifying these outcomes by trying to get even more denials is not a rational policy approach.”

As HuffPost‘s Arthur Delaney reported last month, Biden will soon have the authority to unilaterally undo Trump’s attack on Social Security disability benefits as well as a slew of other safety net cuts the president is attempting to ram through the regulatory process during his final weeks in the White House.

Bethany Lilly, director of income policy at advocacy group The Arc, told HuffPost that if a rule hasn’t been finalized by the time the Biden administration takes office, “they can effectively just put a stop to it.”

“I would expect the Biden administration to do so,” said Lilly.

No, Obama, we do mean “defund the police”: It’s not a snappy slogan, it’s a demand for justice

If I was big-time, rich and connected, I’d ask Barack Obama to sit down and talk with my old buddy Chuck about defunding police. 

“If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund The Police,’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” Obama recently told Peter Hamby on Snapchat’s Good Luck America.  

“But if you instead say, ‘Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly” Obama continued, “You know, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there was a homeless guy, can maybe we send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?’ Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj-eNGfeG0o&feature=youtu.be

What Obama doesn’t get — and he’s not alone on this among well-to-do Democrats — is that people who aren’t listening aren’t being put off by a snappy slogan. This country has historically ignored poor Black people, and this debate over how to frame “defund the police” is one of the latest manifestations of that problem.

My friend Chuck is a big Obama fan. He would’ve arrived at our hypothetical meeting a day early. When the doors to the imaginary meeting place opened, Chuck would walk his lanky 6’6″ frame into the room, dipping his clean-shaved head under the door frame to get in. His face would light up at the sight of our nation’s first Black president. He’d be in awe. Like me and other ’80’s babies, Obama was his introduction to politics. He was the first person we voted for. He dared us to dream. He primed us to believe in his snappy slogans, like “Real Change.”  

Because they both love basketball, Chuck would probably challenge the former president to a game of one-on-one. I imagine that Obama would take him up on that offer because he’s a natural competitor. These two spindly dudes could probably go back and forth about hoops for hours, so I’d have to place myself in this meeting to make sure they stayed on task. 

 “Ayeee, Chuck,” I’d say, as I always said to him in passing when he and the other big fellas hung by the corner. “How does defunding the police sound?”  

And like me and many other victims of police violence from our neighborhood, I believe Chuck would say, “Throw the whole department away!” 

When wealthy Democrats like Obama and Joe Biden, his vice president and now the president-elect, advocate for the police, they talk about how the “brave” men and women in law enforcement keep us safe. Then they cling to the “bad apple” argument when officers kill unarmed Black people, or are caught breaking laws themselves.

Now, Chuck and I can’t speak for all Black people from poor neighborhoods across the country. But knowing that 28% of the people killed by police in 2020 have been Black, despite being only 13% of the population, is a problem. Knowing that at the height of stop and frisk, Black and Latinx people in New York were nine times more likely to be stopped by the police is a problem. Knowing that in 2018, according to Pew Research, “Black Americans represented 33% of the sentenced prison population, nearly triple their 12% share of the U.S. adult population,” is a problem. The amount of evidence that proves this system is broken and racist is overwhelming. You’d have to be delusional to see anything but failure, unless you have the luxury of living safely, on the other side of all of our pain.

That’s what’s at the heart of the “snappy slogan.” The people on the front lines­­ — the protestors marching until the seams on their sneakers unravel, the teachers explaining how lopsided our system is to their students who have to survive it, some of whom have parents serving time because of that failed system, probably don’t see anything glib about calls to defund the police.

To be clear, defunding isn’t about firing a bunch of people and walking away. It’s about retraining personnel and creating different positions inside of police departments that will help those departments serve our communities in a more effective way. Police as we know them have too much power and have never served my community. In my own first-hand experience, they have always been menaces, from the multiple times they chased me for nothing, to the time one cop kicked me on the basketball court, to the time two police officers pulled their guns on me and a friend just we because we had walked down the alley and stopped by my house. 

But I’d ask Chuck to share his story with Obama — and not the one about his cousin Bucket who did 10 years for nothing, nor the one about the multiple times husky plain clothes-knockers rolled up on dice games in unmarked cars, slammed us around and pocketed all the money. I’d ask to Chuck to tell Obama the story about his teeth. 

It’s a simple, straightforward tale: On one of those summer nights that came with a much-needed breeze after a day so hot you needed to be outside after the sun went down, Chuck and the guys were sitting on Chuck’s front steps. And a cop — who remained employed by the Baltimore City Police department up until the day he retired a few years back, mind you — came by and told Chuck to take it inside. Chuck was sitting on his grandma’s steps, his own home. He ignored the cop’s request and had his teeth knocked out as a consequence.

It’s been about 10 years since that summer night, and Chuck’s teeth are still jagged and chipped up from that incident. No, there was no investigation. A number of reasons prevent people from neighborhoods like ours from filing Internal Affairs reports, like the fear of nothing happening when cops investigate cops and the inability to take off work. But the main reason is a justified fear of police reprisal. 

After Chuck finished, I would tell Obama that I do feel him on adjusting the language to engage more people, I really do. But that can’t happen if the adjusted language disrespects us to our core. Then respectfully, I’d ask him exactly what kind of bridge he is trying to build. Because it won’t happen at all if leaders like him continue to burn down his own side. Like Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) pointed out, “One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.”

I know Chuck would feel me. I imagine Barack might, too. So before Chuck could ask to flick it up with the first Black president, passing me his phone so I could snap the pic, I’d briefly explain the fiscal benefits of defunding from a local perspective. 

Baltimore City’s budget, passed in June, is $3 billion, with over $500 million of that funding the police. Our city’s population floats around 600,000 residents and we will surpass 300 homicides for the sixth consecutive year. Last year, we had 348. To put it in context, Los Angeles has 3 million more residents, and ended 2019 with 95 fewer homicides. The current system of allocating money to the police in my city — to say nothing of the reckless way overtime is doled out — is not working. We are too invested in a system that has historically failed Black people. We can do better.

The $527 million for the police budget is just the beginning. The city has recently agreed to pay out more than $10 million in settled police misconduct lawsuits. Last month, Umar Burley and Brent Matthews were awarded $8 million in a settlement after being recognized as victims of the Gun Trace Task Force — eight Baltimore police officers convicted of a plethora of crimes themselves, from robbing and stealing to selling drugs and roughing up cases. Members of the GTTF planted drugs on Burley and Matthews and prompted a car chase that killed a man. Burley and Matthews were pushed into guilty pleas and both served time in federal prison.

It’s important to mention that prior to the GTTF being exposed, Wayne Jenkins, their leader and star, had been lauded throughout his law enforcement career for making cases like Burley’s and Matthews’, showered with unlimited professional resources, including city money for personnel and overtime­­. And now more than a thousand of those cases are under review, and millions of dollars will be paid out directly to victims of the police officers’ crimes against the people they pledged to protect and serve. But somehow it’s always just “a few bad apples” causing the problems, as if they spoil by accident. People in power, like Obama and those he has ties to and influence with, won’t acknowledge that the systemic problems with police power run too deep for simple reforms. 

But now it’s time for the photo to close our hypothetical meeting. “OK guys, say cheese,” I’d say, hoping the former president heard me and Chuck, and would now be closer to understanding why defunding the police is too important a message to play rhetorical games with, too urgent to soften for affluent Democrats to feel comfortable. Chuck’s broken-up smile would tell him that, too. 

Win Black founder Ashley Bryant: “Trump was a reflection of the disease in our country”

Ashley Bryant wants people of color to be aware that the disinformation campaigns about politics are not ending just because the 2020 presidential campaign season is over. It’s a year-round fight. I spoke to Bryant, the co-founder of Win Black/Pa’Lante, on an episode of “Salon Talks” about how Black and Latino communities are fighting back against misinformation campaigns, especially with the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia looming large.

Bryant explained that the impetus for the Win Black campaign was designed in 2016 to push back on the “weaponization of digital media” that is being used to suppress votes in communities of color. Her organization’s approach to counter the misinformation is to correct the lies spewed and teach grassroots activists how to spot false information.

While big tech social media companies like Twitter and Facebook claim they are taking a more active role in policing disinformation, Bryant says it’s “10 years too late.” In her view, these companies knew how their platforms were being used in the past to suppress voters of color, yet did little to stop it. The meaningful work starts on the community level and through deeper civics education.

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Bryant below or read the following transcript to hear more about the fight to counter lies and disinformation and why she’s hopeful about Georgia’s Senate races, even with Donald Trump ratcheting up the false claims one more time. 

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

Before this November’s election, you worked on the ground to prevent the spread of misinformation, with the goal of trying to teach people what’s garbage and what might be real. Why did you want to build this campaign?

The impetus was coming out of 2016, but also well beyond. What we found is the weaponization of digital media and an evolution of voter suppression tactics overall, especially targeted to Black and Latinx voters. We created the model of Win Black/Pa’lante to not just monitor this misinfo and disinfo, but create a network of influence that would actually counter these narratives.

We wanted to educate folks to let them know that this disinformation was out there space and to be mindful and vigilant, but to also arm grassroots organizations across the country that were within our network with the right content and right messages that would counter this misinfo and these extreme narratives that were trying to deter and depress the Black and brown vote.

In 2016, I actually experienced something personal when it comes to disinformation. A Russian disinformation campaign actually used an image of me because I’m Muslim. They made up an Instagram account with real people like me and used it to target my community. At the time, it was to turn them against Hillary Clinton and make them support Donald Trump by saying, “Hillary is all about war in the Middle East and she’s going to kill people there.”

Oh wow.

Your work is focused on the Black and Latinx community. Was there an acute need for it or were they were targeting that community specifically?

Folks know when Black and brown folks show up together, things change. We just saw that with Georgia turning blue for the first time, right? They’re targeting our communities because of the political power that we hold. And it’s unfortunate because there’s always this question of “Do our votes matter?” especially in the Black community.

This has proven itself. There are millions of dollars being spent to deter us from showing up to the polls, to silence our voices and votes. And that’s what misinformation and disinformation is doing. And what happened to you is exactly the example, these bad actors take the form of real people. They pretend to be Black activists or Muslim activists, and use that to build a sense of community. And then turns that community against being civic participators. It says, “None of these candidates are for us so we’re just not going to show up.” And they really tried it, they tried it in 2016, 2018, they tried it this year but we’re becoming just as sophisticated to be able to really counter these tactics.

And it’s not over. When we think about the midterms in 2022 and the 2024 race, everyone will be seeing information online that they’re not sure is real or not. What are the telltale signs people can look out?

No. 1, if anyone tells you not to participate in democracy, they’re not for you. We always say, if someone’s telling you not to vote or to not raise your voice and be heard, that is a clear sign that this is not someone that is trying to bring folks together for common issues. 

If we dig into online profiles, for example, even commentators or people that are in the political space, even my channel, I don’t talk about politics all day. I don’t talk about the critical issues of America. I sprinkle in some things about my friends and family and different personal things about myself. It’s very easy to tell what’s a bot or what’s a fake profile. If all they’re sending out are these extreme messages, whether they’re conservative or liberal. But that’s a really great way to tell if it’s actually an individual person or just someone that’s there to incite you.

This election cycle we saw Facebook and Twitter making an effort to step up and clamp down on misinformation, or at least not allow monetizing ads from it. Is there more that the big tech companies should be doing as we go forward?

There’s always more that can be done. I’m not ready to give away any awards just yet, quite honestly. For it to finally be top of mind this year is 10 years too late. I think the resources that are put into building these algorithms to make communities also need to be invested in figuring out how to put guard rails in place for these very coordinated campaigns, funded campaigns that exist to spread lies and disinformation.

Media platforms have a ways to go and to be able to meet us in a place where they’re holding accountability, and not just accountability but responsibility. We have a responsibility to make sure that we are not allowing any type of oppression or suppression on whatever these channels may be. It’s an area that I want to continue leaning into as we look ahead.

How do we prevent Trump or another Trump-like person from ever being the White House again? He used misinformation well. In my conversations with his supporters, I’ve found some of them lack critical thinking skills and it’s remarkable. I’m not even talking about education. Some people just want to believe what they want to believe, you’ll never reach that. 

I do think that there is absolutely an education piece, including bringing civics back into schools. The idea of preventing another Trump starts somewhere well beyond disinformation, well beyond technology. Trump was a reflection of the disease in our country which is racism, which is bigotry, which is xenophobia, it’s reflection of that. So when we talk about how do we prevent these things, I think it goes well beyond education. I think if it is education, it’s talking about the equality of our communities, it’s healing within these communities and showing folks that you shouldn’t be afraid of Black and brown people. 

As far as our work with Win Black/Pa’lante, it was very important for us to educate folks around the idea of finding trusted sources. How do you determine what’s facts and what are mistruths? There is an opportunity for organizations like ourselves to really help folks think about how we’re continuing this education piece. As we attack this threat to our democracy.

Exactly. I beg people to look at the source and ask, “Where did it come from?”

It’s almost like when you pick your friendships, right? I don’t want 10 people that are always agreeing with me, that doesn’t push me to grow. As we think about Facebook, as we think about Twitter, these algorithms are built to put all the like-minded people around you. You get into your bubble, you start to believe everything that your high school friend or your aunt is sending you and it becomes pretty difficult. It’s almost this sense of comfort of, you know what? My views are right. I don’t want to dive into the fact that I could be wrong, right? And so that’s certainly a piece of it.

Let’s talk about the 2020 election. Twelve percent of Black men voted for Donald Trump, but at the same time 87 percent of Black voters, more than any other race, voted for Joe Biden. When you look at it, can you share with us, why is it the Black community has been the backbone of the Democratic Party in the modern era?

I think No. 1, Black women especially have been speaking truth to power for decades. And we have a sense of community where we’re used to having to put our communities on our backs. There’s a certain level of compassion because of what we go through every single day as Black Americans.

What’s interesting for me is to highlight the overwhelming percentage of Black voters that showed up whether it’s to vote for Biden or against Trump, right? We need to stop considering the Democratic base as this white middle-class. White women two times now voted for Trump, and so I’d rather have that conversation. I’d rather be talking about why is it that Black and brown communities are standing up for all communities, right? We’re not just showing up to the polls for ourselves, we’re showing up to the polls to transform our country and protect our country to what we believe the values should be. It’s not a surprising number to me at all.

When people support elected officials, there’s often an ask: This is what we want if we’re going to support you. Do you think the Black community has been making that ask? If not, what would you make the ask to the Biden administration? Because again, without the Black community, there’s no Joe Biden and Donald Trump is still there.

I think the ask is to every administration: We want to be heard and we want to be represented in all facets of our government, whether it’s federal or local, right? And so the ask is very simple. We want to be able to thrive, not just survive. 

There has to be a dismantling and a true transformation of our policies. We have to think about our criminal justice system, we have to think about our inequities in health care. We’re not one issue voters, we’re not a monolithic community. It’s very clear that we have to be represented in these policies. We’re not a handout community. We are ambitious and successful parts of this country, but for any elected official or any administration, we want to make sure that we are seen through the policies that are put forth in those administrations. That covers everything from climate change to mass incarceration, to the criminalization of marijuana, it covers all issues. And we’re going to be very vigilant. We may have showed up in 2020 to get Trump out of office, but we’re going to be taking to the streets just in the same to hold this administration and every elected official across this country accountable.

Earlier, you mentioned that Black voters have struggled to just have the right to vote. We see Donald Trump lying and fabricating information about this election and pushing to disenfranchise voters in Milwaukee and Philadelphia and Detroit. It’s almost like the GOP party line, just because there are a lot of people of color in an area, it has to be crime and fraud, and we’re going to disenfranchise them. What’s your reaction when you hear this?

My reaction is disgust, but no surprise. I think this is exactly what we’ve been preaching this entire election cycle. I mean, this is simply trying to disenfranchise our communities, this is purging voters in Georgia, knowing the importance of this election. And quite honestly, it’s not a Trump thing. I almost find that to be a cop-out, to blame these things on Trump. This was happening for decades and this is the GOP playbook.

They don’t want us to vote and it’s very clear and they don’t hide it. They don’t pretend that it’s not their playbook and so I think we need to stop pretending that it is right, I think we need to acknowledge it as well. I don’t typically like to draw party lines because I think that there are obviously some great folks that consider themselves Republicans, I don’t know about Trump-supporting Republicans.

But I will say that this has been a playbook for years and we’re not standing for it. That’s why orgs like Win Black are happening because we want to join the fight to educate folks and to show this is what happens when you show up. Georgia voters, Georgia Black voters, look what happened when you registered and you showed up to vote. Can you imagine if we do it every single time?

On Jan. 5, Georgia will have runoff elections for two Senate seats, it’s the most important of our lives probably, frankly, because the Senate’s in the balance. What are the lessons in Georgia from the presidential race where Joe Biden won as a Democrat for the first time in decades, that you think can be used to win?

There’s nothing more simple than showing people how their votes truly mattered. And I touched on this a little bit earlier, but it’s almost the beauty in the proof point because I think that Georgians can finally feel as though their voices are making a difference. And I think of folks in Florida and Texas that are clamoring to see their state change power, right? And Georgia has the opportunity to see it happen in real time.

I’m hoping that this momentum is going to continue and to get folks to show up and show out from now until Jan. 5. But I think from a disinformation standpoint, we’re seeing it just evolve and right now if I use the social listening tool, most of it is coming from the administration. I think what has happened is this disinfo coming from Trump and the GOP is backfiring because it’s so evident and obvious now. Even their supporters know who won the election, so now it’s just embarrassing and it’s actually helped us show people what misinformation looks like and why people use it in order to stop you from casting your vote. Hopefully, it’s going to help us in Georgia and actually turn out more voters than we’ve ever seen in a runoff.

I think that Georgians see the importance of these two races and how it impacts the policies that we need in our communities, but it certainly is taking work on the ground. Georgia is definitely in some damn good hands to get it done.

Why the Democrats failed again: On the cosmological emptiness of liberalism

The post-election hangover that has accompanied the Democrats’ failure to reclaim the Senate and the prospect of four more years of partisan gridlock and culture warfare largely results from the sense that Democrats have, in the cosmic drama of our time, once again played the fool. The failure was not in the Senate outcomes themselves. It was in the catastrophic misapprehension of human nature which led, as in 2016, to delusional magical thinking and overconfidence concerning the rationality and coherence of voter behavior (evidenced by trust, once again, in “the polls”), a pathetic and persistent blindness to the political and cultural dynamics that energize political psychology and drive election outcomes.

Indeed, the failings of liberal democracy since the end of the Cold War lie squarely in the donut hole of the Democratic Party in particular and liberalism in general. This donut hole emerges from what one might call the “cosmological emptiness” of the Democratic Party’s organization and program, and of its governing principles and ideology. 

What do I mean by this somewhat grandiose term? By cosmological emptiness, I am referring to the absence of any animating set of principles and beliefs about human nature, history, society and politics which is grounded in the mystery of creation itself. Say what one will about the take-no-prisoners, animal energy of the Trump insurgency, with its play to the darkest impulses of its religious and rural bases. Christian conservatives within the Republican Party take that mystery seriously, and have articulated and organized a coherent strategy that fully exploits its subdural power.

We have heard much talk in recent decades about the “clash of civilizations,” which often means end-times conflict between Christianity and Islam, or Christianity and “godless liberalism” (which used to be “godless communism”), or between “nationalists” and “globalists,” or between “the West” and “the Rest.” In reality, the civilizational clash that promises to be the most likely axis of conflict in the next century will be the struggle between the creator-centered faiths and creation-centered science (using both terms broadly) — a struggle to define and hold onto conceptions of humanity in an unprecedented era of technological imperialism and environmental, ecosystem, and nation-state collapse. The battle between religion and science is ultimately a contest between competing and colliding cosmologies, an attunement to non-linear narratives of origins, epistemologies, forces, transitions and relationships in the universe, and on our planet, that frame and control specific perspectives on politics and power.

Democrats keep missing the target because party elites — and, to varying degrees, the liberal and progressive bases of the party — lack a cosmology of any kind, and therefore act upon a more constrained and less exalted stage of possibility, one that is specifically geared to short-term appeasement of interest groups, fractional change and limited audience engagement, and which lacks any clear narrative arc. Suspicious of power, fearful of bias, inhibited in their language, addicted to procedure and politesse, liberal and progressive avatars of the Democratic Party embrace everything, commit to nothing and routinely, predictably, miss the forest for the trees. But the forest is ablaze (literally) and in the absence of any anchoring cosmology to establish the meanings, stakes, significance and path through this conflagration — which are really the only things that justify and legitimate the exercise of power — we relinquish the limited agency we may have to forces that are more directly inclined to carve irremediably destructive paths into the future.

*  *  *

In times of “normal” politics in the United States — taking “normal” to mean the American-schoolbook “consensus,” “pluralist” or “interest group” images of politics that prevailed for several decades after World War II — the center holds because ultimately it is in the interest of politicians and their parties, along with the organizations and groups and populations they represent, to compromise and take half a loaf in order to live to fight another day.

The premise of these “liberal” images of politics has been that people are mostly pragmatic rather than idealistic, and that bargaining and deal-making can hold the nation together because most people are fundamentally alike, at least in the sense that they are all rational agents who speak the same language and can build trust around their understanding of what words mean and how they represent the world. These agent-based notions are the mother’s milk of our citizen identity, reinforced historically and culturally through our political and civic associations (including the media), our common law traditions, and our supposedly shared Enlightenment values.

The strength (and weakness) of these political habits and beliefs is that they are process-driven, not outcome-driven. We associate Enlightenment ideals of representative democracy, individual freedom, legal equality and political justice with rule-driven attributes and standards of process fairness, consistency and coherence. The container matters more than the content. This liberal political culture owes an enormous amount to the historically specific claims of the Enlightenment, in combination with English common law traditions, on the American founders.

Indeed, when one reads “The Federalist,” despite the significant and meaningful differences in the political visions of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, and between the Federalists and the Antifederalists, all parties communicate a deeply rooted commitment to the shared identity of humans bound together and lifted up by a capacity to reason, employ logic, deduce consequences, gather evidence and share knowledge. Baseline commitments to process (and progress) within our political culture depend on the Enlightenment assumption of epistemic coherence, meaning the shared notion that knowledge about the world objectively exists, and that we can discover and share this knowledge with each other.

The problem is that when we experience abnormal or disjunctive political moments — such as, most recently, 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or Wall Street run amok or global pandemic or racial fracturing — we discover that the process coefficient breaks down and epistemic incoherence ensues. We become strangers to each other. Irruptions from below disclose a chaotic, Bosch-like underworld that disputes almost every dimension of the reality our political institutions take for granted and require – that our votes matter, that our efforts matter, that science matters, that government helps us more than it harms us, that media seeks and tells the truth.

In those moments, unfairly disproportionate or unexpectedly unequal social outcomes shred the process container, and in the chaos that ensues we experience not simply the frailty of our political institutions, but the extent to which the rational Enlightenment vision on which they depend remains inaccessible and alien and threatening and illegitimate to vast layers and segments of the American population. At that moment, we no longer recognize ourselves.

*  *  *

Shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals such as Nicholas Kristof wasted way too much ink writing that we need to give Donald Trump a chance, what they were really communicating was that we needed to give America a chance. They were insisting that we should continue to trust in the strength of our democratic institutions and the vitality of our spirit as a nation. We must trust our belief that we are the exceptional nation.

This belief in American exceptionalism extends beyond the actual arrival of European settlers to the American strand. (Consider the idea of “utopia,” for instance, in the westward-gazing imaginings of Thomas More, early in the 16th century.) But in the past century, particularly following World War II, this idea assumed more specific (if divergent) meanings. In “The Liberal Tradition in America,” published some 65 years ago, Harvard professor Louis Hartz argued that the United States is exceptional because it is the product of unique and favorable historical and geographic circumstances that have insulated and sheltered its populations from the tectonic forces of class and creed that shaped the European experience.

“The Liberal Tradition in America” remained the canonical statement on American exceptionalism until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan (along with speechwriters such as Peggy Noonan) subtly reframed the argument, mostly by repurposing the Puritan vision of the “City on a Hill.” According to Reagan, America is an exceptional nation because our (Western, Judeo-Christian) circumstances, beliefs, traditions and institutions make us better than other nations that lack such a privileged foundation and divinely authored spirit.

Particularly since 9/11, conservative advocacy organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have evangelized this somewhat more mystical (and certainly more smug) understanding of American exceptionalism. They have also infused it with a dark, brooding, menacing, paranoid and toxic energy — the energy that powered Donald Trump to the presidency.

*  *  *

Bottom line, American exceptionalism is a creedal statement that it cannot happen here. That “it” might include: War. Genocide. State failure. Economic collapse. Civil strife. Boorish descent to the Hobbesian state of nature. Except it has happened here. The prophets of American exceptionalism never had it right. Louis Hartz carefully elided the nation’s traumatic experiences with racial conquest and civil war in order to sustain his consensus vision (for contemporary perspectives, see this New York Review of Books article). Ronald Reagan entirely ignored the deepest and most enduring meaning of John Winthrop’s lovely and profound City on a Hill sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity“:

If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

Well, we have dealt falsely in our beliefs, with ourselves if not necessarily with our God. and liberal democracy has paid the price. Louis Hartz plumbed (and then released) his own personal demons to write “The Liberal Tradition in America. (Reagan was simply not terribly bright.) But the scorched-earth politics that have consumed our nation since the end of the Cold War have unleashed very smart, well-organized, technologically savvy and preposterously well-funded tribal movements in this country that have outmaneuvered ordinary, well-meaning liberals at nearly every turn, particularly in the past 15 years.

Demographic shifts aside, the coalescence of these groups around a newly transfigured commitment to “Western civilization” in 2016 (that which had originally “made America great”) represented a pure will to power, difficult to define, pin down, understand and address because its raison d’etre has nothing to do with the conceptions of interest, logic and reason that continue to blinker the Democratic Party. Not just in 2016, but since 2001 (and, truly, since the early 1970s), the Democratic Party has been fighting the wrong war. Trump remains a freak of nature, but those who have attached themselves to him — the Steve Bannons and Stephen Millers of the world — are cynical, instrumental and ruthless. They are cunning, not wise, arrogant, not humble. Their currency is fear. And they have no respect or affinity for the truth.

One definition of an exceptional nation — not so different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s original conception — is that it is somehow prelapsarian and has no experience with or true knowledge of evil. Well, if that blessed state were ever ours in the United States, it is no longer. But truly, that blessed state never even was. Those who would like to consider how thinkers and actors in less sheltered times and places addressed the irruption of evil into their world, and the undoing of all they imagined to be enduring, might start (but not end) with the insights of Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr.

We might also remember J.R.R. Tolkien, who found Mordor in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I, and wrote “The Lord of the Rings” as an allegory of “power exerted for domination.” That work also instructs us in the dialectics of power and the capacity of “small” people, in dark times, to find within themselves hidden caverns of strength, resourcefulness, wisdom and love that evil can subdue but not destroy. This is a strategy, in our dark times, to which hope can attach itself. But as Tolkien’s Oxford counterpart, Philip Pullman (no great fan himself of Tolkien), and his rival medieval-mythical fabulist, George R.R. Martin, both take pains to emphasize, Tolkien’s own world founders within its own massive donut hole (the elision of sexuality), and the hyperbaric hope that fills its void is usually misplaced, a kind of willful blindness or weakness. Winter is always coming.

*  *. *

One of the most brilliant moments in the TV series “Mad Men” occurs when Don Draper and his family are picnicking by a lake near their house. When they are done eating and return to their car, they leave behind a trail of trash and litter from their lunch. This pre-Earth Day moment discloses so much about the ways in which we manufacture and package virtue (civil and otherwise), but the moment fascinates us because it also captures the essential mystery of our condition as a species – the windblown detritus an image of everything we leave behind, the tailings of our existence, forgotten but not gone.

Several years earlier (in Don Draper time, not ours), in the preface to the revised edition of “The Sea Around Us,” Rachel Carson had written about another, far more lethal sort of litter, the barrels of atomic waste the U.S. government had been dropping into the ocean, a new chapter in the story of “man’s ability to change and to despoil” earth’s natural resources. A representative of the Atomic Energy Commission had conceded to Carson that these atomic waste containers would be unlikely to maintain their integrity for very long and might possibly rupture under pressure at depths of little more than several hundred fathoms. She concluded:

The truth is that disposal has proceeded far more rapidly than our knowledge justifies. To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time.

In this poignant elegy Carson bears witness to both the inestimably marvelous flux and complexity of ocean ecosystems, to their fragility and resilience, and ultimately to the unfathomable mysteries they contain and secure, no matter the degree to which we might irradiate their depths. The starting point, in all of her inquiries, is this mystery of creation born of complexity — the idea, indeed, that mystery, and the awe we experience when confronted with it, is complexity.

A cosmology starts with this mystery and awe, perhaps resolved through a reliance on myth and superstition (as with religion) or through exploration and inquiry (as with science), but in either case never lacking awareness of worlds and meanings beyond our ken.

Liberalism’s cosmological emptiness has been the source of liberalism’s great failure — a failure of imagination. As Trump’s Republicans ratchet up their existential assault on American democracy, liberals and progressives would do well to ask themselves why they have so reliably underestimated and miscalculated this threat, under the grievously mistaken assumption that these attacks happen to other nations but not to us. They would do well to acknowledge the intellectual challenge encoded within this rancorous insurgency: Serious conservatives navigate by the stars of a well-mapped cosmology. What comparably robust and detailed cosmology guides you?

Indeed, we don’t need to travel abroad to tear the scales from our eyes. We never did leave Kansas. The Enlightenment, as we mythologize it, never happened at all, never did occur. We have always been fallen. And the question has always only been: What will we do with that knowledge?