John Lennon still lives among us

Forty years ago this week, headlines screamed, “John Lennon Gunned Down by Stranger.” Yet, for assassin Mark David Chapman, John Lennon was no stranger. Although he had never come within a hundred miles of the former Beatle until that winter, Chapman knew John Lennon very well; so well, in fact, he often believed that he was John Lennon.

The teenage Chapman wore his hair like Lennon’s, learned to play guitar, and joined a rock group. He sang Lennon’s songs over and over. Like Lennon, Chapman married an older Japanese woman. As a security guard at a Honolulu condominium, he even taped Lennon’s name over his own on his ID tag. On the day he quit, Chapman signed out as “John Lennon,” crossing the name out with the final stroke of his pen. The murder he was about to commit was a partial suicide.

“Although decades have passed since Lennon was murdered, my emotions remain raw.”

John Lennon was killed by the sinister side of the same force that makes millions of people still mourn him and other dead media icons: a sense of personal connection to selected strangers fostered by media that simulate the sights and sounds of face-to-face interactions.

As with real-life friends, we feel bound to our “media friends,” not simply because of what they have accomplished and can do but based on a more personal set of feelings about who they are — how their very “presence” in our lives affects us. The natural mental space for a hero is at a distance on some pedestal. The imagined space for a media friend is at our sides — hanging out at home, walking down a street, riding in a car.

The more we see and hear them, the more musicians, actors, sports figures, newscasters, political figures, and talk-show hosts become part of our extended network of social ties. They provide a sense of intimacy, but one without any risk of embarrassment or physical harm. Some of them are there to say, “Good morning;” others to say, “Good night.” They sing in our ears as we jog. They hover near us even in the most private scenes of our lives.

We follow the personal and public dimensions of media friends, and their life stages often become key signposts we use to mark and recall periods in our own lives. Conversations among real-life friends often refer to shared media friends. Ironically, relationships with media friends often outlast our relationships with many of our actual friends, neighbors, co-workers, lovers, even spouses.

When a widely shared media friend dies unexpectedly and “before their time,” the unusual nature of the relationship explodes in the public sphere. To banish the demons of grief and helplessness, thousands of people spontaneously gather in streets or parks, or hold vigils near the media friend’s home or place of death.

That’s what happened when John Lennon was gunned down. Strangers embraced and wept. Crowds stood in silent witness or chanted the dead hero’s words or songs. Such pain is paradoxical — it feels personal yet is strengthened by the extent to which it is shared with the crowd.

Ironically, but appropriately, the media that give birth to these relationships also provide the most ritualized settings for mourning a media friend’s death. Radio and television present specials, retrospectives, and commentaries. “Never before seen” photos and videos are a kind of cultural séance, extending the connection past the grave.

The final irony, then, is that in many ways, the media friend never dies. The only means through which most people came to know him or her — media images and sounds — remain available forever. When a media friend dies, the relationship is embalmed rather than destroyed. Nevertheless, the sense of loss is profound.

John Lennon was fearless in speaking about peace and justice and asking us to imagine a better world. You still can feel and hear both his presence and his painful absence at every antiwar rally, environmental action, and police brutality protest over the last forty years. Indeed, his songs are often part of the soundtracks for progressive political action.

Of course, ties to media friends are often commercially fabricated. And yet, these relationships are still very human, very caring. No analysis of these unreal, but real relationships can explain away or weaken their emotional power. We may never have seen them in the flesh, and they would never have taken note of our own deaths, but when our media friends die or are killed, we feel pain. We worry about their widowed spouses and fret over the children who have lost a parent. We dwell on ways the tragedy could have been avoided. Sometimes, we even feel partly responsible, as if we could have saved or warned them.

I understand the absurdity of many aspects of the relationships with media friends, yet I have also felt all these things. Although decades have passed since Lennon was murdered, my emotions remain raw. Yes, I never really knew him. Yes, he was not even aware of my existence. Yet I found my political voice with his help, and he has inspired millions around the world not to be silent in the face of militarism and injustice. The simple truth is, I still feel him marching beside me now — and I still miss him.

The “Ted Lasso” way is comforting – and a counter to the hollow nationalism Americans have embraced

Citing a single favorite scene in “Ted Lasso” may not be impossible, but it is certainly difficult. That’s the burden of a comedy devoid of wasted dialogue or pretentious cleverness – and that merely refers to the joke setups and punchlines. Honestly, if memorable scenes were gems, “Ted Lasso” would be an encrusted splendor fit for the Queen.

But there is a monologue nestled within the eighth episode that burrows straight to the core of why this little comedy has sparked something dormant in our hearts. It takes place in a pub where Ted, a character inventively reimagined by Jason Sudeikis, has repaired for a business meeting with his boss Rebecca (West End musical theater favorite Hannah Waddingham).

This being a situational comedy, the pair happen to run into Rebecca’s repellent and excessively wealthy ex-husband Rupert (Anthony Head, at his most nefarious) who, in so many words, lets them know that this run-in is not random and proceeds to lord his presence over them. Understand, Rebecca and Ted are known to the tavern regulars but far from popular.

Rebecca hired Ted, an American football coach, to run AFC Richmond, the premier league soccer, er, football team she obtained in her divorce from Rupert . . . and Ted, a man who knows absolutely nothing about the rules of the game, has not endeared himself to its rabid fans. In that moment, Rupert is the big man in the room: buying everyone’s drinks, loudly berating Rebecca for failing to pull its team out of the league’s bottom ranks, calling Ted a hillbilly.

Ted, in response, smiles broadly and challenges Rupert to a game of darts, with the aim of defending both his honor and Rebecca’s. Again, to remind you: “Ted Lasso” is still very much a situational comedy, one devised by Sudeikis and co-creator Brendan Hunt (who plays Ted’s reliable assistant Coach Beard) and executive produced by Bill Lawrence, the man who brought us “Scrubs” and “Cougar Town.”

I repeat this to let you know that if you’ve seen enough sitcoms the outcome of this darts match is in many ways not in question, nor does it matter. The soulful joy of “Ted Lasso” springs from its message’s substance.

In this scene Ted lays out the series’ entire philosophical bent in a flawless monologue where Ted talks about being underestimated his entire life, and how much that used to bother him. That is, until one day he drove his son to school and saw a Walt Whitman quote on a wall that changed his entire perspective. He recalls that it read, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

You can watch this passage in its entirety and it will not spoil the first season for you. Actually, I encourage you to do so. Seeing the action is the only way to appreciate the extensive and meticulous thought that went into this moment.

Whether you choose to watch or not, the scene’s construction merits a pause and a closer look. Appreciate the monologue’s prose, gorgeous and simple. The lilting score behind Ted’s speech softly casts a gentle aura around him in contrast to his rowdy surroundings.

Bringing it home is Sudeikis’ manner as he shares Ted’s folksy anecdote: it contains not a whit of vanity or gloating at his adversary’s downfall. You can pick up shades of anguish in the actor’s delivery even when triumph is imminent. Take in all of these details and you’ll understand why this series feels entirely right, especially right now.

We are in the month of “Best of the Year” lists and late appreciations (like this one) of series that may have escaped review at premiere but deserve to be noticed. “Ted Lasso” debuted in August, and if this were any other year it would not have had much competition. But this was 2020, a year of civil rights uprisings, a mismanaged pandemic and an election in which the stakes were representative democracy itself. Our attention was being pulled in many other directions, few of them for happy reasons.

With all of this in the foreground, the notion of sitting down to a story about a college football coach with an accent stuffed with all the corn in Kansas basically sailing into a high-profile job for which he isn’t qualified – in London! – may not have been realistic. In 2013? Sure. That was the year Sudeikis debuted a much broader and shallower version of his Ted Lasso character in a series of NBC sports promotional video spots.

But in 2020, a braying satire of failure would be crass and too close to the reality we’re intent on tuning out; besides, we wanted the comfort of the familiar. “Comfort” is one of 2020’s defining terms, along with “horror,” “unprecedented,” “anxiety,” “insomnia” and a barge’s worth of negative words that speak to the tire yard fire that is the preceding 12 months. Against that expansive vocabulary doomscroll, the concept of comfort acts as a blanket covering everything, concealing life’s unpleasantness from sight and offering us a place to hide.

Thus, 2020 also became the year to revisit old TV shows and movies, partly due to the industry-wide dearth of new content, and partly because we craved the solace of the known. A secret ingredient of films and series we designate as classics is that we can hear a line or watch a scene countless of times over the years and still feel a joyful flush spread over our skin, the same excited tingle race up the back of our necks. The re-watch is a feel-good drug that never stops working. We know what we’re getting, and nine times out of 10 it is just the thing for what ails us.

That means there’s something to be pondered in the widespread impulse among the “Ted Lasso” faithful to replay the entire season right after they’ve seen it for the first time. Very few new shows have that kind of appeal. I suspect that’s because there aren’t many out there that invite us to feel good about who we are and what we can be.

By all appearances Ted is the textbook example of the ugly American as the British might envision him, right down to his walrus mustache and provincial accent exhumed from the Dust Bowl era. Rebecca hires him for those reasons and selfishly destructive ones, since AFC Richmond is Rupert’s pride and joy, and she believes nothing will make her happier than to ram it into the ground, as if that will somehow hurt her arrogant ex.

This is the rash act of someone who is hurting, and the series makes that plain. The entire team is in disarray when Ted finds them, set against each other owing to the showboating arrogance of its star player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) and the seething anger consuming team captain Roy Kent (actor and comedian Brett Goldstein). Realizing their fate has been placed in the hands of some bumpkin from the U.S. doesn’t give them much hope . . . until Ted gets to work, partly inspired by that Walt Whitman quote.

That’s where this series’ one-of-a-kind brilliance begins to gel. Setting “Ted Lasso” in the world of premier league football should not be a turn-off to people who don’t follow that sport, since it is decidedly not about the ins and outs of the game. (As a huge fan of “Brockmire” I can attest that you don’t have to love any pro sport to fall for a comedy about it.) Instead, what it preaches is taking comfort in who we are and how we are, and having faith that we can become better.

Methodically, and with a lopsided portion of boundary-busting positivity, Ted disarms the walled-up people around him with his guileless optimism, starting by showing the simplest act of kindness toward the team’s roundly abused kit man Nathan Shelley (Nick Mohammed), an insecure wallflower whose meek nature obscures hidden greatness.

He gets the resident curmudgeon Roy to read “A Wrinkle in Time” and eventually melts the icebergs surrounding Rebecca in part by obliquely inspiring a friendship with Jamie’s girlfriend Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), a model whose branding acumen earns her a lasting role with the organization.

And Ted becomes the catalyst for this mass evolution by wielding an optimism that is earnest and mostly real. Part of it is a put-on because frankly, nobody would offer themselves up for such a high probability of public failure on an international stage if they weren’t a little crazy, and yes, Ted is contending with heartbreaking challenges of his own.

This sadness informs his gentle mania for coaching with an eye towards helping people to be their best selves, and not necessarily to win. Stating this out loud to the British press, and one notoriously harsh journalist in particular, makes it open season on Ted Lasso in the U.K. Immediately he earns the nickname of “wanker.”

Even this does not deter him, because Ted is not dumb. He’s acutely aware that his players, their fans and England itself are judging him. The quality that differentiates him from most mere mortals is his near lack of ego and the confidence that if people were curious enough to come to know who he is and what he stands for, they’d like him and maybe even find a way to see the best in themselves.

That outlook produces the type of humor that isn’t going for reflexive laughter or stringing one rock solid punchline to the next. It speaks to a desire at the core of us that doesn’t merely want to feel better but be better. The so-called Ted Lasso way doesn’t always result in a win, and only ever guarantees a paradigm-shifting lesson.

This makes “Ted Lasso” stand apart from every other series, comedy or drama, that we’ve turned to in this trying year, in that it dares to correct the hollowness of the nationalist “be best” motto. Americans have long connected the concept of “being best” to an outsized sense of primacy, an illusion that steadily deteriorated over the past decade and was entirely obliterated by this administration’s pandemic response. But as this series plays out, being the best isn’t about dominating others or succeeding at the expense of the people around you.

Ted’s paradigm envisions excellence through self-examination and collaboration, believing in one’s self while being curious enough to affirm the best of what we see in others. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of a message like that, especially in a such a brutal year and at a time when the world sees America as an erratic joke. This series replies with an acknowledgement of the truth in that image and reminds that we’re all capable of doing better by doing right by others.

Apple TV+ still is not a widely adopted service even among devoted viewers, despite the cavalcade of A-listers it has lured into its tent. Part of the reason for that is none of its series feel essential – even those that are critically acclaimed. “Ted Lasso” does; my God, does it ever.

You’ll have to watch it to understand . . . and take comfort in knowing that it only gets better with each new viewing, and that your re-watching it is not a means of retreat. It’s an end-of-the-year refueling with a brighter view of how much better we can be.

The 10-episode first season of “Ted Lasso” is currently streaming on Apple TV+.

How remote learning is making educational inequities worse

The widespread reliance on remote learning is harming students of color from low-income households more than kids who are from more affluent families. Our survey of over 1,000 families in South and East Los Angeles (95% of whom identify as Hispanic and 96% who are on free or reduced-price meals) shows that these students often lack the appropriate technology for learning at home. They also often have parents who must work during school hours or who have limited ability to help their children with online learning. As a result, families in the survey reported lower levels of schoolwork completion and class engagement, two important predictors of academic achievement.

We also found that 57% of the families whose children could use computers for school were staying engaged during distance learning, compared to 43% of the families whose kids had to rely on tablets or smartphones. Likewise, when students can attend live class sessions, which usually requires high-speed internet, they are significantly more likely to complete their schoolwork.

The obstacles to learning away from school went beyond technology. Only one in three of the families we surveyed said they have an appropriate space, free of noise and distractions, in their homes for remote learning and homework. We also found that parents unable to work remotely often struggle to help their children during school hours. Instead, this job falls on older siblings and other relatives.

Why it matters

Our findings highlight the urgency of narrowing the digital divide as a way to improve academic achievement among low-income students of color.

The pioneering American educator Horace Mann famously characterized public schools as the “great equalizer,” places where children could receive a high-quality education regardless of individual or family circumstances. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this goal was far from realized. But when living rooms and bedrooms become classrooms, disparities in digital technology and support students have at home have a bigger impact than ever. Our research also comes at a time when a group of seven families have sued the State of California. Their lawsuit accuses the state of failing to provide “basic educational equality” during an extended period of remote learning brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What still isn’t known

We conducted this survey in July 2020, shortly after the 2019-20 school year ended. School districts have taken steps to improve remote learning since then by spending more on technology.

But there are early indications from the Los Angeles Unified School District and other large school districts that attendance remains lower than it was before the pandemic and that more students than usual are getting failing grades. That troubling news suggests that many of the challenges to remote learning identified in our study may remain largely unresolved.

Another major concern is whether remote learning will affect the transition to college for students who would be the first in their families to continue with their education beyond high school.

What’s next

We are following up by conducting in-depth interviews with Hispanic families to better understand how they are coping with remote learning. We also plan to survey other groups, including Black families and English language learners.

Hernán Galperin, Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Stephen Aguilar, Assistant Professor of Education, University of Southern California

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

After Democrats flip state, Georgia moves to shut down early voting locations ahead of Senate runoff

Civil rights groups warned on Monday that a decision by election officials in Georgia to shutter numerous early-voting sites ahead of the state’s Senate runoff elections would disproportionately impact people of color.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU’s Georgia branch and other groups said in a letter that the decision to close six of the 11 early-voting sites that were used for the November general election in Cobb County, which borders Atlanta, “will be harmful to Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters because many of the locations are in Black and Latinx communities.”

The county, which is home to more than 537,000 voters, will have just five polling sites when early voting kicks off on December 14. Along with Cobb County, three of the other 10 most populous counties in the state will reduce their early voting locations, according to NBC News.

Many of the closed sites are located in minority areas, the groups said. In some cases, the nearest available polling site will be up to 12 miles away with inadequate transportation options. The groups called on election officials to keep the same number of early-voting locations as it had during the general election.

Janine Eveler, the Cobb County elections director, told the groups that she does not have enough trained staff to maintain the general election locations for the runoffs, according to The Washington Post.

“We lost several of our advance voting managers and assistant managers due to the holidays, the workload and the pandemic,” she said in her response to the groups. “The remaining team members who agreed to work would do so only if the hours were less onerous. … We are at the end of the election cycle and many are tired or just unwilling to work so hard, especially during this time of year.”

Eveler told the Post that many trained election workers are “not willing to work 14-hour days for six days a week for three weeks.”

The early voting period in Georgia was marred by hours-long lines. Some voters had to endure waits of up to 10 hours to vote. Eveler told the Post that the county would add more check-in stations to speed up the lines but the civil rights groups argued the delays showed that the areas need more polling places, not fewer.

Cobb County, which voted for President-elect Joe Biden by a 56-42 margin, is expected to be key in deciding the runoff races between Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Democrat Jon Ossoff and Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Ossoff carried Cobb County in the general election by 11 points while Warnock got 38% of the vote in the county to Loeffler’s 25% in a field of 21 candidates.

Though runoff elections generally get less attention than general elections, the two races will determine which party controls the Senate when Biden takes office. Nearly 1 million voters have already requested mail-in ballots for the runoff elections, according to election officials. About 1.3 million mail-in votes were cast in November’s general election, which Biden led by about a 400,000-vote margin.

Michael Pernick, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told the Post that the groups were considering next steps to “protect communities of color in Cobb County that would have significant difficulty accessing advance voting if that plan goes through.”

Pernick said that four locations in the southern part of the county, where many of the region’s Black and Latino voters live, have been folded into a single site that is “all the way at the bottom of south Cobb and is not accessible to many of the voters in those communities.”

Eveler denied that people of color would be harmed by the closures, telling the Post that there would be early-voting sites in “each quadrant of the county” and that voters have “other options for voting,” like mail-in ballots.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, the head of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, disputed Eveler’s argument, noting that “Black voters in particular” have been impacted by hours-long lines in the county.

“In an election that is sure to see high turnout and high voter enthusiasm, this is unacceptable,” she said in a statement to the Post.

The state’s two largest counties, DeKalb and Gwinnett, will maintain the same number of early-voting locations as they had in the general election. Chatham County, the fifth biggest county in the state, plans to close one early-voting site. Forsyth County, the eighth most populous county in the state, will shutter six of the 11 early-voting sites it used during the general election. Hall County, the tenth largest county, will shutter four of the eight early-voting sites. Biden carried Chatham by 18 points while Trump carried Forsyth and Hall Counties by big double-digit leads.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said it was not involved in the decisions.

“They set their budgets and manage turnout of voters accordingly,” Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told NBC News.

The outlet added that county budgets may have played a role in the closures after they were forced to pay for two recounts, including one requested by the Trump campaign.

Georgia Republicans have also called to toughen voting rules, though Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, shot down the idea of implementing new rules before the runoff. Raffensperger, who has drawn praise for standing up to Trump’s baseless attacks on the state’s election, has backed Republican complaints about an election that saw no major irregularities or evidence of fraud. He called for absentee ballot rules to be tightened, drawing allegations of “voter suppression” from Democratic leaders.

Georgia has repeatedly been accused of voter suppression by civil rights groups after the state systemically shuttered more than 200 polling sites after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

“This is what real election rigging looks like,” Michael McDonald, an election expert at the University of Florida, said after the latest Cobb County closures.

Rev. Dr. William Barber, an NAACP board member and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, cited the report to hit out at Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud in the state.

“Voter suppression,” he wrote, “is the real fraud.”

Why Joe Biden should forgive billions in student debt

There is an easy option available to President-elect Joe Biden to ease the economic suffering of Americans on the first day he takes office, and that is to cancel outstanding federal government student loans. Senator Elizabeth Warren made the case during a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, saying that, “All on his own, President-elect Biden will have the ability to administratively cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt using the authority that Congress has already given to the Secretary of Education.” She added, “This is the single most effective economic stimulus that is available through executive action.”

She’s right. About 45 million Americans have a whopping $1.6 trillion of student loan debts, and a significant number have made no progress in paying them off. After home mortgages, student loans are the second most common debt in the United States. There is no mystery as to why this is the case. While the cost of higher education has risen, wages have simply not kept up, and debt has slowly ballooned. The burden of debt repayment has held people back from buying homes, moving out of their parents’ homes, having children, pursuing further education, starting businesses, and more. In other words, it has dragged down lives and the economy.

Senator Warren asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, “If people who, instead of spending that money in the economy, are spending that money by sending money back to the federal government on their student loan payments. That is a problem for the economy, is it not?”

Cody Hounanian, program director of the group Student Debt Crisis, explained to me in an interview that federal government loan debts are “around 80 percent of the federal student loan market.” The rest is held by private institutions. While Biden does not have the authority on his own to address private loan debt, he could, with the stroke of a pen, cancel federal government loans. Indeed, it may be the easiest and most effective economic stimulus plan available to him using his executive authority. Hounanian said, “The President of the United States, no matter who it is, including Donald Trump, has the authority right now to cancel student loan debt using executive action. This is a power written into the Higher Education Act.”

Canceling federal student loans is a racial justice issue as well. The existing racial wealth gap is exacerbated by student debt. One reportestimated that racial inequities in student loans are even higher than expected with Black graduates owing nearly two times the amount that white graduates owe. According to Hounanian, “debt cancelation is a civil rights issue. It is an important equalizer.”

During his campaign, Biden endorsed canceling $10,000 per person of student loan debt. Yet, as soon as he won the election, Biden called on Congress to take up the matter. Zack Friedman writes in an article for Forbes, “Biden is deferring to Congress to pass relevant legislation on student loans, rather than act unilaterally as president.”

At a time when partisan gridlock in Congress has blocked most progressive legislation from even getting a hearing, Biden’s suggestion is naïve at best. Even Trump understood the seriousness of the issue when he used his executive power (for once in a positive manner) to extend until the end of the year student loan payment relief that was included in the CARES Act.

Biden is being flanked to the left by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as well. Schumer—not known as a champion of progressive causes—has joined forces with Senator Warren to demand that Biden cancel $50,000 per person of student loans through executive action. If Biden is shy about using his executive authority in the wake of the Trump presidency, the nation is in deep trouble.

“This is an opportunity for Joe Biden to have his FDR moment,” said Hounanian. His organization Student Debt Crisis has been working on this issue for years and is part of a large coalition of hundreds of organizations calling on Biden to do the right thing. A petition launched earlier this year to cancel student loans has garnered more than 1.3 million signatures. Advocacy groups are optimistic that this may be the closest they have come in years to realizing their goal of eliminating student loan debt.

And yet the voices of opposition are already pressuring Biden to do the wrong thing. Fox Business in a laughably hypocritical piece claimed that canceling student loan debt was regressive and would disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, in a typically patronizing tone claimed that loan forgiveness “rewards fiscal irresponsibility,” failing of course to apply those same standards to tax breaks for wealthy Americans or taxpayer-funded subsidies for corporations. Education Secretary Betsy DeVoscalled the idea of debt forgiveness an “insidious notion of government gift-giving,” simultaneously refusing to see the economic benefits by her department’s policies to wealthy Americans as “gift-giving.”

DeVos also claimed that forgiving student loans was “unfair” to those who did not go to college or those who managed to pay off their loans. In other words, all should suffer because some suffered. This is the conservative logic gleefully invoked to preserve any unfair status quo that maintains wealth inequality. Imagine applying that logic to, say, the 2017 tax reform bill. Why should corporations and wealthy Americans get tax breaks that their predecessors or earlier counterparts did not obtain?

Thankfully, most Americans do not espouse the elitist views of out-of-touch billionaires who have waged class war on the nation for decades. A recent Pew poll found that an overwhelming majority supports federal government action to address the student debt crisis.

Biden has already made it clear that on the issue of student debt forgiveness, he falls on the side of ordinary Americans and not on the side of Fox Business or DeVos. What he appears unclear on is how best to achieve his goal of easing the burden of student loans. If his presidency does not seize the moment and use its clear authority to realize his stated goals—if he instead defers to an unrealistic legislative path—then his campaign promises will rightly be viewed as disingenuous.

As the global pandemic was unfolding in the United States, Biden rightly said, “In this moment of crisis, we should be sending federal resources to those who need it most. It’s not just good economics—it’s the right thing to do.”

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

After “Queen’s Gambit,” Anya Taylor-Joy and Scott Frank reuniting for Nabokov adaptation

Nobody could have predicted that “The Queen’s Gambit” would become the global phenomenon that it has, and that includes co-creator Scott Frank and lead actor Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the Netflix limited series. Academy Award-nominated writer/director Frank, who co-created the series with Allan Scott, is now hoping that lighting in a bottle will carry over to his next project. According to an interview with The Ringer’s The Watch podcast (via JoBlo.com), Frank is currently developing an adaptation of “Lolita” author Vladimir Nabokov’s 1932 novel “Laughter in the Dark,” with Anya Taylor-Joy to star.

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Frank called the project “a valentine to movies, I’m going to do it as a film noir and a movie within a movie. And it’s a really nasty, wonderful, thriller.” The book centers on Albert Albinus, a middle-aged art critic who takes a special interest in Margot Peters, a 17-year-old aspiring actress and model. They form a mutually parasitic relationship, abetted by Margot’s old flame Axel Rex, who reunites with her to suck the life out of Albert.

Nabokov used some of this material as the basis for “Lolita.” Not many film or TV projects have successfully adapted Nabokov’s voice, outside Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 “Lolita,” whose screenplay Nabokov himself wrote. Adriane Lyne crafted a much grimmer version of the book about an adult man’s sexual relationship with a young girl in 1997. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, meanwhile, adapted Nabokov’s doppelgänger black comedy “Despair” into a 1978 film.

Scott Frank, an Oscar nominee for writing the screenplays for “Out of Sight” and “Logan,” said he’s also working on another project inspired by the works of hardboiled detective novelist Dashiell Hammett. In this case, Clive Owen would play Sam Spade, a character seen in films like “The Maltese Falcon,” but now older. “What if you do Sam Spade later in life and he’s 60-years-old?” Frank said. “He’s now an ex-pat living in the South of France. His past comes to his [present] and finds him in this small town. It’s going to be a six-episode series with Clive Owen.”

“The Queen’s Gambit” is currently streaming on Netflix. Star Taylor-Joy is now a global phenomenon herself, as she’s next set to star as Furiosa in George Miller’s upcoming “Mad Max” spinoff.

Lori Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Jade on college admissions scandal: “I don’t deserve pity”

While both of her parents are serving time in prison, Olivia Jade Giannulli sat down on “Red Table Talk” to break her silence on the college admissions scandal from last year.

Giannulli — a lifestyle and beauty influencer who is the daughter of “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin and multi-millionaire fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli — was accepted to USC after her parents paid $500,000 to fraudulently have her and sister admitted to the university as phony crew recruits, though they had never participated the sport.

“On paper, it’s bad. It’s really bad,” the influencer said on the Facebook Watch show. “But I think what a lot of people don’t know is that my parents just came from a place of, ‘I love my kids, I just want to help my kids. Whatever is best for them,'” she explained of Loughlin and Giannulli. “I think they thought it was normal.”

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The 21-year-old admitted to living in a “bubble” and having little awareness of her privilege, at the time of the scandal. She explained that paying your way into college, legally, is not uncommon in the world in which she grew up, so she did not realize the severity of her parents’ crimes when the scam was exposed. She says she learned about the scandal as news broke online.

“When all this first happened and it became public, I remember thinking — my thoughts are completely different now — ‘How are people mad about this?’ I know that sounds so silly, but in the bubble that I grew up in, I didn’t know so much outside of it. A lot of kids in that bubble, their parents were donating to schools and doing stuff that advantaged,” she said. “It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it was happening. And so, when this first came out, I was like, ‘I don’t really understand what’s wrong with this.'”

“I didn’t realize at the time that was privilege,” she continued, saying that she has learned over the past year-and-a-half. “I didn’t put those two together. I was like, ‘Well, this is what everybody does, and my parents worked really hard and I don’t understand.’ But that’s not how it should be and unfortunately, that’s how it was, and I’m grateful for this situation to see that big change and that big difference in my own mind.”

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Before Giannulli joined the three co-hosts at the red table, Jada Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, said she did not want her as a guest on the show, especially with the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. “I just found it really ironic that she chose three Black women to reach out to for her redemption story…it’s bothersome to me on so many levels,” Banfield Norris said. “Her being here is the epitome of white privilege, to me.”

Throughout their dialogue, Giannulli said she is not trying to victimize herself. “I don’t want pity. I don’t deserve pity,” she said. “What’s so important to me is to learn from the mistake — not to now be shamed and punished and never given a second chance because I’m 21. I feel like I deserve a second chance to redeem myself, to show I’ve grown.”

Later on, she explained, “I didn’t come on here to try and win people over…I just want to apologize for contributing to these social inequalities, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

While she said she is not looking for sympathy, she feels she has been misunderstood, and admits that she was “not fully aware of what was going on,” as she was applying to colleges.

“The picture that has been painted of me, I feel like is not who I am. I’m not this bratty girl who doesn’t want to change anything,” Giannulli said on “Red Table Talk.” She added, “I understand why people are angry and I understand why people say hurtful things, and I would, too, if I wasn’t in my boat.”

Her parents, Loughlin and Giannulli, were charged along with more than 50 people as part of the FBI investigation dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues,” which was exposed by federal prosecutors in early 2019. The couple maintained their innocence for over a year, before finally pleading guilty in May 2020. Loughlin is currently serving a two-month sentence, which is expected to end before the new year, and Giannulli is serving a five-month sentence, having played a more active role in the scam.

Giannulli says she has not spoken to her parents since they’ve been in prison, but recalls when she confronted them about the scandal when she was “ashamed” and “embarrassed,” as the story spiraled, making international headlines.

“They didn’t really have much to say expect like, ‘I’m so sorry. I really messed up in trying to give the best to you and your sister,'” she shared of her conversations with her mother and father. She says she knows her parents have “struggled” throughout this process, and she believes their time in prison will give them a period to re-think what happened.

“It’s been hard. I think for anybody, no matter what the situation is, you don’t want to see your parents go to prison. But also, I think it’s necessary for us to move on and move forward,” Giannulli said. “I’m super close with my parents, especially my mom, she’s like my best friend, so it’s definitely been really hard not to be able to talk to her, but I know she’s strong and I know it’s a good reflection period.”

When asked by Pinkett Smith if she ever went back to USC, Giannulli said, “I never went back. I was too embarrassed — you know what, I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, clearly, so there was no point in me trying to go back.”

In the aftermath of the conspiracy scandal, Giannulli, who has over one million followers on Instagram and nearly two million on YouTube, where she is a beauty vlogger, lost major brand deals with companies like Tresemmé, HP, Lulus and Sephora, who had a cosmetics collection with the influencer.

“What were some of the repercussions throughout this whole situation?” Pinkett Smith asked, adding, “Because you’re a beautiful young white woman who’s been born into privilege, so there will be some people who feel like, ‘She’ll be fine.'”

Giannulli specifically noted that one of her now-infamous social media videos makes her “cringe” where she said she was excited to participate in social events at college, but not excited to be going to school. “It’s embarrassing that I ever said those types of things,” she reflected. “There was no malicious intent behind it. I was never trying to hurt anybody or say those things to brag about my life. I was oblivious.”

At one point, Banfield Norris shared her frustration with the entire scandal, illuminating the issue of racial inequality. “‘Child, please,'” she said. “I am exhausted with everything that we have to deal with as a community and I just don’t have the energy to put into the fact that you lost your endorsements or you’re not in school right now because, at the end of the day…your parents are going to go in and they’re going to do their 60 days and they’re going to pay their fine and you guys will go on…and you will live your life, and there are so many of us that it is not going to be that situation. It just makes it very difficult right now for me to care.”

By the end of the 30-minute conversation, the three women and Giannulli came to peace with the fact that the beauty influencer is committed to learning and growing. Pinkett Smith was pleased that she is now “aware” of her privilege and is looking forward to investing her time in understanding the experiences of those in communities other than her own.

“I know right from wrong,” Giannulli said, “I just never knew the depth behind it.”

Just days before exit, Trump plans “going out of business” sale with Arctic drilling leases

Conservation campaigners on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of taking a “wrecking ball” to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as the White House announced plans to move ahead with the sale of drilling leases in the 19 million-acre coastal preserve, despite widespread, bipartisan opposition to oil and gas extraction there.

Seven weeks before Trump is set to leave office, the administration announced it plans to conduct the sale virtually on January 6. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will enter a notice about the sale in the Federal Registry next week.

The announcement comes a week after Bank of America became the latest bank to rule out financing of drilling projects in the Arctic Refuge. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo have also stated in the past year that they will not give financial backing to fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic, leading the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last month to propose a new rule that would bar financial institutions from refusing to lend to specific sectors in the name of “fair access.”

“Arctic Refuge drilling makes zero sense in today’s reality of high oil market volatility and with every major U.S. bank and many international banks unwilling to invest in risky, expensive Arctic oil projects,” said Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “The administration is simply rushing to sell off one of the wildest places left on earth for pennies on the dollar before President-elect Biden takes office in January.”

Every major US bank has now walked away from destructive, risky drilling in the Arctic refuge. Banks recognize this drilling represents a financial risk, as well as a severe blow to our climate. Drilling in the refuge should be stopped entirely to save this natural gem. https://t.co/H4uRVgEqmn

— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) December 3, 2020

According to Kolton, Trump’s plan to move forward with his deeply unpopular leasing plan is “yet another dangerous political favor” to the fossil fuel industry and an action which suggests he is eager to do as much damage to the environment before Biden—who opposes drilling in the Arctic Refuge—is inaugurated.

“President Trump’s electoral fate has been sealed and his days in office are numbered,” he said. “The fact that the sale will be officially noticed on December 7, one day after we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Arctic Refuge by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, symbolizes the degree to which the president has taken a wrecking ball to decades of bipartisan conservation support.”

The timing of the announcement, added the Natural Resources Defense Council, makes “a mockery of the ongoing public comment period.”

‼️ Making a mockery of the ongoing public comment period, the Trump Administration has announced when they will auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: January 6th – one month after the 60th anniversary of the Refuge. https://t.co/WptcwipNwE

— NRDC 🌎🏡 (@NRDC) December 3, 2020

Today’s decision to guide @Interior’s Arctic Refuge drilling strategy is deeply flawed: It violates Indigenous rights, ignores science, and fails to protect polar bears & caribou.

This is wrong from start to finish and WE OPPOSE IT!! #DefendTheArctic #StandWithTheGwichin

— NRDC 🌎🏡 (@NRDC) December 3, 2020

The Gwich’in people, who have hunted caribou on the land that is now the Arctic Refuge for thousands of years, are among the most vocal opponents to drilling in the region. In August the tribe sued the Interior Department and the BLM over the Trump administration’s plan to sell leases in the refuge’s 1.5 million acre coastal plain.

“The Interior Department’s Arctic Refuge leasing process has been flawed from the outset, ignoring science and Indigenous voices throughout and failing at every turn to sufficiently analyze the impacts drilling will have on our climate, our air and water quality, the health of wildlife or the future of local Indigenous communities,” said Kolton.

In addition to negatively impacting the Gwich’in people, opponents say drilling in the Arctic Refuge would also harm the polar bears that live there and have already been harmed by the warming of the planet, numerous fish species, and nearly 200 species of migratory birds.

“For decades, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has stood as a symbol of our nation’s strong natural legacy,” said Ellen Montgomery, public lands campaign director for Environment America. “Its breathtaking landscape is home to endangered polar bears, caribou, wolves, muskoxen, and migratory birds that travel annually to all 50 states. Destroying their home in the craven desire for more oil is a tragic mistake.”

“Once this seal is broken, there is no going back,” Montgomery added. “Industrial-level oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Refuge cannot occur without doing catastrophic damage to vital habitats.”

According to a poll released in August by Morning Consult, just 31% of Americanssupport drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

In light of public opinion, banks’ unwillingness to fund drilling projects, and signs that renewable energy industries are poised to grow faster than the fossil fuel sector in the coming years, Kolton said, “any oil company bidding on this sale will face not only economic challenges, but enormous reputational and legal risks as well.”

“America is transitioning to a new administration that has already pledged to protect the refuge,” said Montgomery. “We are rapidly moving to renewable energy and clean transportation options. We don’t need the current administration to jam this through, using a ‘going out of business sale’ approach. We strongly urge oil companies to take a pass.”

The Trump campaign paid Trump’s private jet company $16,800 in “consulting” fees after the election

New Federal Election Commission filings show that President Donald Trump’s campaign paid $16,800 in “advance consulting” fees to the Trump Organization company which owns the outgoing president’s private aircraft two weeks after the election.

The payment, reported on Nov. 19, was made to a company called DT Endeavor and came out of the campaign’s “recount” account, according to the filing. Trump’s financial disclosures show that DT Endeavor I owns his personal aircraft, and that Trump owns DT Endeavor I through his revocable trust — meaning that the donor-funded $16,800 ended up in his pocket.

Flight records suggest that the $16,800 funded a short round-trip flight from Washington to Philadelphia on the day after the election.

The Trump Organization owns a number of aircraft, including a screamingly Trump-branded 757 jumbo jet. But that particular plane has been grounded since 2019, Jon Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current, recently reported. Trump’s Cessna Citation X — a 1997 nine-seater which he used extensively, and for a time illegally, on the 2016 campaign trail — appears to have made these flights.

In order to re-legalize the plane in 2016, Trump created DT Endeavor I. Until last month, this Trump company had never been directly paid by the Trump campaign, even in the campaign’s early days, according to FEC records.

Private aviation booking companies told Salon that the $16,800 sum would likely cover only a short private flight, especially to charter a Cessna Citation X, one of the fastest jets out there.

The money came out of the campaign’s post-election “recount” account — the campaign’s donor-backed post-election litigation war chest. However, the $16,800 payment was not itemized as air travel in the campaign’s FEC report. Instead, it was described as an “advance consulting” fee as part of Trump’s post-election litigation efforts.

The payment was dated Nov. 19, but flight records recorded by ADS-B, the world’s largest such database, show the Cessna has not flown since Nov. 5.

The same database shows Trump’s jet made a Nov. 3 flight from Oxford, Conn., to LaGuardia Airport in New York, to Washington, where the campaign held an election night party at the White House. However, an Election Day trip cannot be paid by a post-election fund.

In the early hours of Nov. 4, Trump emerged to prematurely and falsely declare victory. The next day, his jet made the round trip from Washington to Philadelphia.

That afternoon, Rudy Giuliani tweeted that he was “en route” to Philadelphia from Washington along with members of the Trump campaign’s legal team. (Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, had spent the previous night at the White House election party.) Later that day, he and Eric Trump held a press conference which prematurely and falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania. The pair threatened to file lawsuits over false allegations of election fraud in the state.

Longtime Trump associate Corey Lewandowski, who attended the same White House election party, also appeared in the City of Brotherly Love that day, as well as former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Giuliani’s tweet came just before 2:00 p.m. local time. The jet left Washington a little after 2:30 p.m. local time, and it returned four hours later. Each leg took about 20 minutes.

A major private aviation charter company told Salon that $16,800 price would fit the Washington-Philadelphia round trip. It would charge a little under $15,000 for the Cessna Sovereign, which is a slightly smaller model.

Giuliani’s communications director, Christianné Allen, told Salon that “to my knowledge, Mayor Giuliani did not” take the Trump jet in recent weeks. Asked repeatedly whether her information had come from Giuliani himself, Allen would not reply.

Though this was the Trump campaign’s first payment for use of the jet, FEC filings show that Trump Victory, one of two joint fundraising vehicles between the campaign and the Republican National Committee, has paid the president through DT Endeavor three times in total: $3,500 on Oct. 9; $25,900 on Oct. 1; and $28,000 on July 20.

Those payments appear to line up with a few short campaign-related flights. The $28,000 payment appears related to a July 17 round-trip flight from White Plains to Washington.

That night — and perhaps ironically — Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, the former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, hosted the campaign’s first-ever virtual fundraising event. It featured the McCloskeys — the St. Louis couple later charged for brandishing their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters.

Guilfoyle is finance chair for Trump Victory, the committee which footed the bill for the flight.

The New York Times reported in August, the month following that flight, that campaign staff and donors had sharply criticized Guilfoyle for her profligacy and specified private flights:

More concerning to some donors and campaign aides has been private plane use by Ms. Guilfoyle and her team, which has caught the eye of several staff members. In January, as requests started coming in for private flights, the campaign had to work out a plan for approving such trips, which must be listed as in-kind contributions or reimbursed by the campaign in order to comply with campaign finance laws.

Ms. Guilfoyle’s private flights did not violate those laws, although in one case, two of her aides, without seeking prior approval, took a private flight to a fund-raising event in March. The campaign then had to reimburse for the trip at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, according to two people familiar with the trip.

Chief campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Times that donors had paid for all flights categorized as in-kind contributions to the campaign.

“In any event, the cost of flights and the efficiencies they provide are investments in fund-raising events that raise millions of dollars for the president’s re-election,” Murtaugh said.

But those payments shuttled $28,000 into Trump’s pockets.

It is not clear whether Guilfoyle or other Trump Victory officials or surrogates took previous flights on the jet, and if so, how those payments were settled.

Ultimately, the private flights on Trump jets are subsidized by Trump campaign donors, and the $16,800 specifically came from contributions to the outgoing president’s efforts to overturn the election results.

Days after the Nov. 3 election, the campaign blasted supporters with emails seeking donations to help fund its legal challenges to Trump’s election defeat in key states. The fine print in the first wave of emails said 60% of donations would first go to pay down the campaign’s outstanding debts, with any overage going to the recount account.

However, a few days later, Trump officially launched his Save America leadership PAC, a committee which would allow him to line his own pockets. Afterwards, the fundraising fine print was changed to put the PAC ahead of the campaign’s debts. The recount effort still took second billing.

A neurotoxic insecticide sprayed on corn and fruit remains legal thanks to Trump’s EPA

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Friday that it is going to continue to allow a pesticide called chlorpyrifos that interferes with mammalian brain development to continue to be used in the United States. Many states have already decided to phase out or ban the widely-used agricultural product. The public will have 60 days to offer comments on the EPA’s decision.

In its announcement, the EPA included a number of proposals to improve the safety of how chlorpyrifos is used, including requiring more personal protective equipment (PPE) of individuals handling the chemical and adding new regulations to limit the risk of the chemical contaminating drinking water. At the same time, the agency is allowing it to continue to be registered in the United States, even though there are a number of alleged health risks associated with the insecticide.

Indeed, the insecticide has been banned in the European Union since early 2020; the European Food Safety Authority, which regulates pesticides, said that “no safe exposure level – or toxicological reference value – can be set for the substance,” and specifically cited concerns about “possible genotoxic effects as well as neurological effects during development.”

In a statement to Salon, Center for Food Safety legal director George Kimbrell wrote that “true to form, the Trump Administration has placed corporate dollars over public health. If allowed to stand, its proposal to continue registering this neurotoxic insecticide would cause irreparable harm to farmworkers and future generations. Everything possible must be done to ensure the Biden Administration reverses this proposal and once and for all bans this pesticide.”

Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, explained to Salon that chlorpyrifos is used on over 50 crops, including corn, wheat, cotton, grapes and crops that come from fruit and nut trees. The chemical can also be found in areas that are not used for food, like golf courses and Christmas tree plantations. Describing it as a “neurotoxic insecticide,” Freese told Salon that it was introduced to the United States in 1965 by Dow Chemical Co. (now Corteva Inc.) and was banned by the EPA in 2000 from residential uses because of the damage it could cause children. It is still used in agriculture, with President Barack Obama’s EPA proposing a ban on the chemical in 2015. Trump reversed the ban in 2017.

“The evidence is clear. Chlorpyrifos is a neurotoxin, and it damages the developing brains of children. This unconscionable decision must be reversed, to save still another generation of children from the entirely avoidable learning disabilities caused by this brain-damaging pesticide,” Bill Freese, science policy analyst at Center for Food Safety, said in a statement.

Freese’s position is echoed by a 2012 Columbia University study, which found that there were “significant associations of prenatal exposure to a widely used environmental neurotoxicant, at standard use levels, with structural changes in the developing human brain.” In October a California family filed a lawsuit against Corteva, two California municipalities and two California pesticide applicators alleging that one of their children suffers from serious and debilitating neurological issues due to chlorpyrifos exposure.

According to a Harvard report in 2018, commonly consumed produce like peaches, nectarines, bell peppers, hot peppers, snap peas and cilantro frequently test positive for chlorpyrifos residue. The National Pesticide Information Center reports that limited exposure to chlorpyrifos can result in an increase in drooling and saliva production, tearing up, increased sweating and running of the nose, as well as nausea, dizziness and headaches. If people are exposed to the chemical in larger quantities they can vomit, twitch, lose coordinate and experience muscle cramps, as well as develop diarrhea and vision problems. In the most extreme cases, people exposed to chlorpyrifos can struggle to breathe, lose control of their bowels and bladder, convulse, lose consciousness or even become paralyzed.

GOP conference call erupts after lawmaker floats punishing Republicans who ask Trump to concede

A phone call among Republicans in the House of Representatives devolved into bitter infighting after one GOP lawmaker floated a resolution that would formally condemn any Republican who called on President Donald Trump to concede the 2020 presidential election.

The Washington Post reports that the controversy started when Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) pitched a resolution during the call that would condemn “any member who calls upon President Trump to concede prematurely before these investigations are complete.”

According to the Post’s sources, many members of the House Freedom Caucus voice support for the measure, while more moderate members strongly objected to it.

Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), who has recognized President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, reportedly said that “it’s not the job of the conference to tell members how to think or what to say.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) similarly told the conference call that he opposed the measure while also saying, “This is America.”

It’s been just over a month since Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, which he won by 74 votes in the electoral college and by more than 7 million votes in the nationwide popular vote.

Trump, self-described dealmaker-in-chief, opted not to buy millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine

President Donald Trump ran his 2016 presidential campaign on the promise that he was an expert dealmaker, a political outsider whose expertise lay in the business realm. Yet curiously, the self-described dealmaker-in-chief passed up the chance to purchase millions of doses of Pfizer/BioNTech’s novel coronavirus vaccine, a decision that will slow the rate at which Americans can access the vaccine.

The company made several efforts to convince Trump to purchase more than the 100 million doses of the company’s vaccine candidate that it had reserved over the summer for $1.95 billion, according to The New York Times. Yet Trump turned down the offers, which gave other nations like the United Kingdom the opportunity to lock them down first. After Pfizer and BioNTech announced last month that they had seen success in developing their vaccine candidate, and submitted an emergency use authorization request to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Trump administration began talks with the company for more of its vaccine. Yet the company is not sure it can deliver more than the initial 100 million promised doses before the summer of 2021.

Because the vaccine requires two shots to be effective, this means that only 50 million Americans will be able to get the Pfizer vaccine before then, with priority being given to health care workers and residents at nursing homes.

Moncef Slaoui, the official in charge of Operation Warp Speed (the government’s vaccine development program), told ABC on Tuesday that the government did not know which vaccine candidates would work and which ones would not.

“No one reasonably would buy more from any one of those vaccines because we didn’t know which one would work and which one would be better than the other,” Slaoui said.

Scott Gottlieb, a board member of Pfizer who worked as a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner under Trump, confirmed to CNBC on Tuesday that “Pfizer did offer an additional allotment coming out of that plan, basically the second-quarter allotment, to the US government multiple times.” He added that the company did this “as recently as after the interim data came out and we knew this vaccine looked to be effective” and speculated that the Trump administration was “betting that more than one vaccine is going to get authorized and there will be more vaccines on the market …. perhaps [that] could be why they didn’t take up that additional 100 [million] option agreement.”

Perhaps in response to the news about his administration’s failure to get a better deal on Pfizer’s vaccine, Trump announced on Tuesday that he is going to sign an executive order stating that Americans will receive priority over other countries in obtaining a coronavirus vaccine. The White House has not offered any specifics on how its executive order will accomplish this, however, and Slaoui told ABC News that he did not know anything about the order’s contents. Representatives from Pfizer and Moderna, the other pharmaceutical company to announce a recent coronavirus vaccine breakthrough, declined to attend a White House “Vaccine Summit” event also held on Tuesday, according to STAT News.

A number of people took to Twitter to question the wisdom of Trump’s decision to not accept Pfizer’s offer.

“Why would the trump administration turn down the opportunity to buy more of the pfizer vaccine,” tweeted Molly Jong-Fast, editor at large at The Daily Beast. “What was the thinking here? I’m fascinating by how stupid this is.”

Garrett M. Graff, director of the Aspen Institute’s Cybersecurity Program, tweeted that “it’s hard to imagine more deflating pandemic news than the that Trump administration botched ordering additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine and as many as 100 million Americans will have to wait months longer for a life-saving treatment.”

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe had his own speculative theory, tweeting, “Who among us would be surprised if Trump or some of those close to him had financial interests that accepting Pfizer’s offer could have compromised? Isn’t that very prospect a devastating indictment of the corrupt family running this administration?”

Writing to Salon, Tribe observed that while “it’s well beyond my capacity to conduct any such inquiry. I was careful in my tweet just to raise the question, not to offer an answer. Given the vast web of financial holdings in the Trump orbit, and this president’s past history of corrupt dealings, it’s a natural question to raise. And my main point was that the very fact such a question would seem plausible with respect to a sitting president is a sad comment on where we find ourselves.”

In “Farewell Amor,” separated immigrants reunite 17 years later for an imperfect American dream

“Farewell Amor” is director Ekwa Msangi’s auspicious, award-winning feature film debut, based on her 2016 short, “Farewell Meu Amor.” The filmtakes a triptych approach to telling this immigrant drama of an Angolan family reuniting after 17 years. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is first seen meeting his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) at the airport and bringing them to his Brooklyn apartment.

The film shows how each character individually adjusts to this new life together after so long apart. Walter, who drives a cab, still tries to find ways to see his mistress, Linda (Nana Mensah). Sylvia attends school and hopes to participate in a step contest as she loves to dance — despite the disapproval of her mother. Esther, who is devout, struggles with her faith and her family.

Msangi shows how each character changes over the course of the story, and her prismatic approach provides revealing details that illuminate the commonality of the characters. The filmmaker recently chatted via Zoom with Salon about “Farewell Amor.”

I like how Esther and Sylvia both have one foot in the new land and one foot in their homeland, as they navigate a new life in America. What prompted you to tell this immigrant story?

I’m an immigrant, and I live in Brooklyn, so I’m surrounded by immigrants. I have rarely seen immigrant stories about the Africans that live in New York. I wanted to make space for that. I was inspired by my aunt and uncle, who are were married in Tanzania in the mid-’90s. My uncle got a student visa to come to the U.S., and he had every intention of bringing his wife and 5-month-old right behind them. But to this day, they have been stuck in an endless cycle of visa applications and rejections. Watching the way that it has changed them as individuals and changed the family in general. I was inspired by the [idea] – What if the visa was no longer an issue, and Auntie and cousin were able to come? Where does one begin after so many years apart? How do you repair a relationship like that?

Why did you take the triptych narrative approach you did, and tell each character’s story from their own perspective?

I was fascinated by this idea that even though they are all experiencing this one event — a big celebration, the end! We reached the pinnacle, success! — it’s not the end, it’s just beginning. We have a lot of expectations and assumptions about what that means for them. They should be happy and relieved. It’s not so much about problems they have, or the challenges they face, it’s that they are all experiencing this great event from very different perspectives. They are each having a unique experience of the one shared event. I wanted to explore each because each of them was so interesting to me. I decided that it would be interesting to experience each of their stories.

What decisions did you make regarding which dramatic moments to include and overlap?

I knew the airport was definitely an overlapping point, it was a ground zero to come back to — to center the audience and to place us back to everyone’s beginning and as a shared experience. I wanted to not necessarily show the most monumental moments in the story, but the mundane things, and how things can be misinterpreted or misunderstood; what I thought was a wonderful, happy thing to say, you took as something else. But also trying to make sure I am moving the story forward and giving new information when you see it from another perspective. That was the challenge — so as to better understand the characters and know more about them. Because we can only say so much, we tried to be as economical as possible.

Each character has a secret, or double life. Can you talk about creating that, and why being together forces the family members to hide, not reveal, more of themselves?

To me, it was a kind of politeness. Here we are, we are so joyous and excited to be together, and we’ve had to get rid of all of these things, these secrets and double lives to be here and be together — and that’s what they want, or at least have been working towards, for many, many years. Because it has been so long, that want has changed. You forget why you wanted it in the first place. Or you question it.

Each of them has developed these crutches to survive the separation, and they find there is not enough space for them and their crutch, so they have to get rid of that — and that’s a scary thing to do. Each character is terrified to be without a crutch that they developed and that has served them well. It requires them to turn into a different person. That’s a question we all face in our lives. You get into a stride at work and you’re good at it, and you get to the point where you might have to let go of it and you question your identity. Each of the characters question their identity and whether it is safe to show themselves to each other in the way they’d like to. When there has been so much anticipation for this reunion, you can’t come together and say, “This is a bad idea, I’m going back.” It has to work. Too many people have prayed for this, and put in time and money; you have to make it work. Even if you are having second thoughts and doubts, you are not really allowed to say that out loud.

There are themes of repentance and forgiveness as well as duty and freedom. What did you learn about how families like Walter’s when they reunite and rebuild after so much time apart?

A lot of it is my imagination, and the case of my aunt and uncle, they have not reunited. I don’t know what that would be like. My closest comparison is a long-distance relationship. You talk every day and say, “I love you/I love you, too.” But when you get together, “You’re not as cute as I thought.” Repentance and forgiveness, for something that has been so hard, and has taken so long, they did stay the course — but it’s not the picture-perfect family dynamic.

They all had to lean on someone else in order to get here, and so there’s a level of forgiveness of each other, but also of themselves. They are different people, and that’s human nature. We do change as people over time. A lot of times, people get disappointed by that: You’re not the person I married! We all sort of evolve based on our lives, sometimes we have to learn to forgive ourselves especially if it might disappoint someone you care about.

Dance, of course, is important for all of the characters. Why did you choose dance as the form of self-expression for the characters?

For African-heritage people it’s such an automatic thing, and dance is so important for so many. There are strains in our DNA in movement and how we respond to movement, and it’s very deeply spiritual, and there is messaging carried in music. It’s hard to talk about African-heritage people without including some form of dance or music. It’s how we speak, it’s how we move, it’s how we talk. It’s a part of life. But with these particular dances I chose to feature in the film — Kizomba, which Walter dances with Linda, it’s a couple’s dance. It’s very sensual and beautiful. Unlike other couple’s dances, it does not have a regular foot pattern, and so, in order to perform Kizomba, the leader is responding to the music and whoever is dancing with them has to have a connection with the leader. If you don’t have that connection, you can’t dance. It was an interesting metaphor for a relationship and for this couple that used to be in step, literally.

For Kuduro, which is the style Sylvia dances to, it is also an Angolan dance. It is a young, hip and energetic. It looks like a teenage hip-hop style. But it is an important platform for young people to be able to express themselves in a society where they don’t have a lot of spaces to express themselves and say how they feel. For a young African girl, who doesn’t have the permission to have a tantrum, or stomp out, or curse her parents, this would be a way for her to dance and move or use music to express or heal or work through her emotions. Esther’s dance is religious. I wanted to use dance and music as a third language for us to get a glimpse of the character’s inner lives.

Walter observes, “This country is very hard for Black people, especially for foreigners.” I appreciate that observation, but there is very little discussion of race in the film, and almost no white people in the film. Can you talk about depicting race?

Their world is Brooklyn, which is very diverse. It’s not that I wrote white people out of the script, but I wanted a film where the African people are at center of story. They are not explaining their presence, or having their presence be because of or in relation to someone else. There are not there because the foreigner is trying to save them. I wanted to just focus on this family, and their world, and who would be in it. Even in casting, we thought should we have more white people? Is this weird?

The other thing is that Esther and Sylvia are coming from Africa. Here in the U.S., you can’t go a day without thinking about race, or referring to it in some way, without being affected by it in some way. It is just a part of the air we breathe. And it takes up a lot of brain space. Am I offending? Should I say it this way? Should I speak differently? You are navigating your space all the time. In Africa, you can choose to engage with people of another race. But for the most part, it’s not something people think about all the time. Of course, our lives are impacted by colonialism. A lot of foreigners who come to the U.S. — at least African foreigners — we don’t come here thinking about race. But you learn how important race and racism is here, and it’s a little bit of a weird thing. That’s the information Walter is trying to impart to her in as gentle a way as possible. It’s different here, and it can be really hard. But just be you.

What can you say about the use of space in the film? The apartment is rather claustrophobic, but there is a stifling, oppressive atmosphere throughout the film, which is very effective. It mirrors the characters discomfort.

I think that’s one of the things when you learn about New York and you watch “MTV Cribs,” or whatever it is when you look at that as a guiding light about coming to New York. No one talks about our tiny-ass apartments, or that you can hear everything neighbors are doing. It’s a detail that catches people by surprise — how tight and close everything is. And for Esther and Sylvia’s characters, the idea of coming to America, life should be bigger, wider, better, and more expansive. And they probably came from a lot of space. It’s a different environment in Africa; they weren’t sardined in. This is not what I was expecting to experience here. But also, this idea of a family that has been thousands of miles apart and longing to be close — that will solve all our problems. Now that we really are physically close to one another, is our life better now that we live in same space? But their minds are all somewhere else. Our physical bodies are here, but our minds and our spirits haven’t quite arrived yet.

“Farewell Amor” is available in theaters and on digital and VOD platforms on Friday, Dec. 11.

U.S. taxpayers funded a human trafficking operation to build Trump’s border wall: whistleblowers

Border wall contractors used taxpayer funds to smuggle armed Mexican guards into the U.S., according to two whistleblowers who have accused a pair of companies contracted by the Pentagon to build President Donald Trump’s border wall of trafficking armed Mexican security guards into the U.S., according to a federal court filing unsealed on Friday.

The accusations, which include building an illegal access road to make the smuggling process easier, raise questions about whether U.S. taxpayers funded the unlawful entry of armed Mexican nationals in an effort to build Trump’s border wall — an inversion of the outgoing president’s broken campaign promise to force America’s southern neighbor to foot the full bill.

In the court document, the two employees, both of whom provided security, accused Sullivan Land Services (SLS) and subcontractor Ultimate Concrete of El Paso of facilitating illegal border crossings by “armed Mexican nationals,” knowingly employing unvetted workers at numerous “sensitive” border sites, making false statements and overcharging the Pentagon for the services.

Ultimate Concrete “constructed a dirt road that would allow access from the Mexican side of the border into the United States,” the filing claims, parking construction equipment in front of security cameras to block the view. The scheme was signed off by an Army Corps of Engineers supervisor, according to the complaint.

One of the whistleblowers claims to have received a report about a shooting between the Mexican guards and other people who allegedly crossed into the U.S. to steal property. The report was allegedly forwarded to the Army Corps of Engineers, who said that they would investigate, but that the story did not line up with what Ultimate Concrete employees had told them.

According to the document, the president of Ultimate Concrete admitted that he knew about the use of the guards, and said that “he is making payments to citizens of Mexico who reside near the border in order to keep them from stealing equipment and supplies.”

The Trump administration has in all awarded SLS more than $1.4 billion in contracts related to wall construction and repair, some of which allegedly went to allowing Ultimate Concrete to shuttle the guards across the border.

But according to the document, the president of Ultimate Concrete submitted fraudulent invoices about his company’s activities, “‘hiding the full extent of his profits on the Border Wall project.”

“If they were using a forklift, they would use it only sporadically throughout the day but charge the government for fuel, in sum and substance, ‘as if it was running all the time,'” the whistleblowers said.

A federal judge in California unsealed the complaint last Friday after the Justice Department concluded that it would not pursue the case, The New York Times reported. The whistleblowers, a former San Diego County deputy and a former FBI special agent, both hired to provide security, can still independently seek a settlement.

Cost estimates for Trump’s quixotic border wall project have run billions of dollars over first estimates, as construction has been plagued with setbacks from the start. Most recently, The New York Times revealed that the “impenetrable” and “beautiful” bollards suffered hundreds of breaches in the six months between October 2019 and March of this year. The whistleblowers claim that those breaches were repaired by unauthorized workers.

Trump had sought earlier this year to divert $3.6 billion to the project from the military construction budget, but in October a federal appeals court ruled against him. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

In January, a video of one section of the wall toppling went viral. In September, engineers said that it was not a matter of if the wall will fail, but when. Construction on those sections was funded by “We Build the Wall,” a nominally nonprofit project co-led by Trump’s former top strategist Steve Bannon, who was recently indicted for defrauding donors to the project.

How Michèle Flournoy’s Pentagon dreams collapsed: Progressives fought back

Just a few weeks ago, super-hawk Michèle Flournoy was being touted as a virtual shoo-in to become Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of defense. But some progressives insisted on organizing to raise key questions, such as: Should we accept the revolving door that keeps spinning between the Pentagon and the weapons industry? Does an aggressive U.S. military really enhance “national security” and lead to peace?

By challenging Flournoy while posing those questions — and answering them in the negative — activism succeeded in changing “Defense Secretary Flournoy” from a fait accompli to a lost fantasy of the military-industrial complex.

She is “a favorite among many in the Democratic foreign-policy establishment,” Foreign Policy magazine reported on Monday night, hours after news broke that Biden’s nomination will go to retired Gen. Lloyd Austin instead of Flournoy. But “in recent weeks the Biden transition team has faced pushback from the left wing of the party. Progressive groups signaled opposition to Flournoy over her role in U.S. military interventions in Libya and the Middle East in prior government positions, as well as her ties to the defense industry once she left government.”

Of course Gen. Austin is a high-ranking part of the war machine. Yet, as Foreign Policy noted: “When Biden pushed to draw down troops from Iraq while vice president, Flournoy, then Pentagon policy chief, and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen opposed the idea. Austin did not.”

Video of Sen. John McCain grilling Austin several years ago shows the general willing to stand firm against the zeal to escalate killing in Syria, a clear contrast to positions that Flournoy had staked out.

Flournoy has a long record of arguing for military intervention and escalation, from Syria and Libya to Afghanistan and beyond. She has opposed a ban on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. In recent years, her advocacy has included pushing military envelopes in potentially explosive hotspots like the South China Sea. Flournoy is vehemently in favor of long-term U.S. military encroachment on China.

Historian Andrew Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and former Army colonel, warns that “Flournoy’s proposed military buildup will prove unaffordable, unless, of course, federal deficits in the multitrillion-dollar range become routine. But the real problem lies not with the fact that Flournoy’s buildup will cost a lot, but that it is strategically defective.” Bacevich adds: “Strip away the references to deterrence and Flournoy is proposing that the United States goad the People’s Republic into a protracted high-tech arms race.”

With a record like that, you might think that Flournoy would have received little support from the leaders of organizations like the Ploughshares Fund, the Arms Control Association, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Council for a Livable World. But as I wrote more than a week ago, movers and shakers at those well-heeled groups eagerly praised Flournoy to the skies — publicly urging Biden to give her the Defense Department helm.

Many said they knew Flournoy well and liked her. Some lauded her interest in restarting nuclear-arms negotiations with Russia (a standard foreign-policy position). Many praised her work in high-ranking Pentagon posts under Presidents Clinton and Obama. Privately, some could be heard saying how great it would be to have “access” to the person running the Pentagon.

More traditional allies of militaristic policymakers chimed in, often vilifying the left as it became clear in late November that progressive pushback was slowing Flournoy’s momentum for the Defense Department’s top job. Notorious war enthusiast Max Boot was a case in point.

Boot was evidently provoked by a Washington Post news story that appeared on Nov. 30 under the headline “Liberal Groups Urge Biden Not to Name Flournoy as Secretary of Defense.” The article quoted from a statement issued that day by five progressive organizations — RootsAction.org (where I’m national director), CodePink, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America and World Beyond War. We conveyed that a Flournoy nomination would lead to a fierce grassroots battle over Senate confirmation. (The newspaper quoted me saying: “RootsAction.org has a 1.2 million active list of supporters in the U.S., and we’re geared up for an all-out push for a ‘no’ vote, if it comes to that.”)

Reporting on the joint statement, Common Dreams aptly summarized it in a headline: “Rejecting Michèle Flournoy, Progressives Demand Biden Pick Pentagon Chief ‘Untethered’ From Military-Industrial Complex.”

Such talk and such organizing are anathema to the likes of Boot, who fired back with a Washington Post column within hours. While advocating for Flournoy, he invoked an “old Roman adage,” Si vis pacem, para bellum — “If you want peace, prepare for war.” He neglected to mention that Latin is a dead language and the Roman Empire collapsed.

War preparations that increase the likelihood of war may excite laptop warriors. But the militarism they promote is madness nonetheless.

Top Biden adviser vows Wall Street CEOs and GOP will get a “conduit straight into the White House”

Incoming senior Biden adviser Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., vowed to serve as a “conduit” between corporate executives and the White House during a business event on Monday.

Richmond, whose appointment to head the White House Office of Public Engagement angered many progressives concerned about his ties to big oil and gas firms, vowed that the incoming Biden administration will be friendly to corporations and conservatives at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council.

Richmond said he hoped to be a “conduit straight into the White House for American corporations,” according to Bloomberg News, and vowed to have an “open-door policy” for corporate executives.

“For me, nobody’s going to persuade me that—somehow, someway—that CEOs in this country are bad people,” Richmond said. “CEOs in this country are creating jobs, they are supporting families, and they are doing all those things. And they deserve a seat at the table, and they will have a seat at the table.”

Richmond said that President-elect Joe Biden would make good on his campaign pledge to raise taxes on corporations and the rich to fund social programs but “didn’t want to stymie research and innovation,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s not punitive. We will just do those things we find that are absolutely necessary to do,” he said. “And if that means raising the corporate tax rate to achieve infrastructure investment, which is important to both business and to normal everyday citizens, I think that that may be some middle ground that everybody can support.”

Richmond also said that he would create a new position in his office to reach out to conservatives.

“Right now I’m trying to set up the office and I’m actually looking at establishing a position that reaches out to conservatives — because it’s about moving forward. We cannot stay where we are,” he said. “We’re not elected just to help Democrats or urban cities or minorities. We were elected to help this entire country and that means reaching out to conservatives, that means reaching out to rural areas, reaching out to people who didn’t vote for us.”

Richmond suggested that an infrastructure bill could bring the two parties together.

“The famous words are, ‘There’s no such thing as a Democratic bridge or a Republican bridge,'” he said, adding that he hopes Congress can introduce “a very quick infrastructure bill to put people to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure making the country greener and cleaner.”

Richmond’s remarks irked some on the left after Biden sought to build a coalition that includes progressives urging him to focus on struggling Americans rather than corporations.

The New Orleans Democrat, who will also serve as a senior adviser to the president and a co-chair for Biden’s inauguration, has been one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from oil and gas companies. Some constituents have accused him of ignoring the needs of his district, which is home to some of the most polluted parts of the country, and failing to push for stricter regulations. Richmond also joined Republicans to vote to increase fossil fuel exports and develop the Keystone pipeline while opposing Democratic legislation to limit fracking pollution.

The progressive Sunrise Movement called Richmond’s appointment a “betrayal” because he “cozied up to big oil and gas” and “stayed silent and ignored meeting with organizations in his own community while they suffered from toxic pollution and sea-level rise.”

A Biden transition team official told The Guardian that Richmond will be tasked with working “with a wide range of groups to make sure that the Biden-Harris administration has a direct dialogue with the American people” and that the Biden administration is committed to tackling the “climate crisis and fight for environmental justice.”

Richmond is one of several Biden appointees that has already caused friction with the left. Numerous top administration picks worked at WestExec Advisors, a secretive consulting firm staffed by numerous Obama administration alums that helps firms land Pentagon contracts, and as former lobbyists, like Steve Ricchetti, a longtime Democratic aide tapped to serve as a top adviser to Biden.

“If Joe Biden continues making corporate-friendly appointments to his White House, he will risk quickly fracturing the hard-earned goodwill his team built with progressives to defeat Donald Trump,” Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive group Justice Democrats, said last month. “A Biden administration dominated by corporate-friendly insiders like Steve Ricchetti and Cedric Richmond will not help the President-elect usher in the most progressive Democratic administration in generations.”

Arizona Republican Party calls on supporters to give their lives to fight Trump’s election loss

The Arizona Republican Party urged supporters in a pair of late-night tweets on Monday to potentially sacrifice their lives on behalf of outgoing President Donald Trump‘s muddled crusade to rewrite his election loss.

The official Twitter account of the Arizona GOP posted two tweets drumming up the case for martyrdom in the waning hours of Pearl Harbor Day, meant to commemorate the date when Japanese pilots bombed a U.S. naval base 79 years ago, pulling America into World War II.

In a since-deleted post, the official state party account shared a clip from the Sylvester Stallone action movie “Rambo,” captioned with the quote: “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something.”

In another post, the party commented on a tweet from Ali Alexander, an itinerant right-wing provocateur and one of the lead organizers for the Trump-supporting group called “Stop the Steal.” Alexander, formerly known as Ali Akbar, has a shady political history even by the loose standards of MAGA-world. He tweeted that he was “willing to give my life for this fight,” and Arizona Republicans upped the ante, asking: “He is. Are you?”

The latest antics of the Arizona Republican Party come as the state’s Republican governor Doug Ducey refuses to yield to pressure from fringe groups to stay loyal to the president. There is no evidence of voter fraud in the presidential election, according to election officials in every state. President-elect Joe Biden won the contest with a record-setting 81 million popular votes — a margin of victory of more than seven million votes over Trump.

Yet the Arizona GOP, under the oversight of Chairwoman Kelli Ward, continues to demand that Ducey not certify the results of what the party called a “false election.” Ward, who has previously drawn backlash for organizing political stunts predicated on baseless conspiracy theories, continues to challenge the results in court, even as efforts from Trump’s own legal team and his allies have failed. Arizona voters handed Trump a defeat. The state counted its votes multiple times, and Ducey certified them twice, most recently last week, when a video of the event showed him ignoring in real-time what appeared to be a phone call from Trump himself.

Last week, Republicans in the Arizona state legislature heard arguments from former LifeLock spokesperson and lead attorney in Trump’s legal fight against inevitable loss Rudy Giuliani. The legislature, however, shut down this week after Giuliani, who appeared maskless in a number of photographs from the hearing, checked into Georgetown University Hospital with COVID-19.

The latest GOP demands coincide with the Dec. 8 “safe harbor” deadline, the date by which states must submit the names of their presidential electors to Congress. The Trump campaign had signaled ahead of the election that it was eyeing the deadline as a pressure point to convince state legislatures to override their voters in event of a loss.

Joining the Arizona GOP’s bizarre calls on Pearl Harbor Day was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, currently the target of an FBI bribery investigation, who asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block electors from key battleground states from casting “unlawful and constitutionally tainted votes.” Paxton’s 154-page filing sues Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania for what he claims were illegal procedural changes made in consideration of the coronavirus pandemic.

Legal experts have dismissed the longshot lawsuit, with some raising questions about whether Paxton is angling for a pardon from the outgoing president.

Paxton’s counterpart in Arizona, however, who has felt pressure from far-right protest groups since the night of the election, has endorsed the governor’s decision and said he has seen no evidence of voter fraud.

Republicans want to steal this election for Trump — they just don’t know how

Donald Trump is still trying to steal the election from Joe Biden, and while he is still going to fail, the terrifying reality is that a few cracks in the wall protecting democracy have started to appear.

While many pundits continue to minimize this entire situation, sneering at people who use phrases like “attempted coup,” the grim reality of our current moment is that Trump got far closer to succeeding than many people would like to admit. He’s only stopped now by the fact that too many people voted against him in so many different parts of America. Every indication suggests that if it were up to Republicans, who still hold a disproportionate amount of power, Trump might very well have been illegally installed for a second term in office.

The Washington Post reported that Trump reached out to Bryan Cutler, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, on Monday in an effort to get Cutler to invalidate the state’s presidential election results, citing “all these issues in Philadelphia.” This is the third Republican state leader Trump has reached out to with this request — he’s also contacted Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp and brought Michigan legislators to the White House — and the third strikeout.

In fact, it’s arguably the fourth. Trump also called Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey. Ducey claimed the president wasn’t trying to pressure him — but c’mon, Trump’s “information gathering” is just more Trumpian code for his pressure campaign.

So why isn’t Trump getting what he asked for? Much of the coverage of the recalcitrant Republican leaders portrays these officials as brave defenders of democracy, or at least people who have had enough of Trump’s corruption and are drawing a line.

That’s nonsense.

It’s evident that what’s holding Republicans back is not honor or decency, but a lack of options. There simply aren’t legal processes to pull off what Trump wants, no matter what Newsmax or OANN might say, and state leaders know it. They are saying no to Trump not because they want to, but because, legally, they have to. Witness, for instance, what the Pennsylvania House speaker’s spokesperson told the New York Times about the discussion with Trump: “Cutler made it very clear what power the legislature has and does not have.”

Missing, of course, is any mention of the importance of democracy or a robust defense of the right of Pennsylvanians to vote. Cutler sympathizes with Trump’s desire to overturn a free and fair election, which is why he signed a letter to the state’s congressional delegation asking them to object to the state’s electoral votes. He just doesn’t have the power to vacate the election results.

Georgia’s Kemp issued a similar response, noting how much effort he’s put into “auditing” the vote, but underlining that he’s hamstrung from doing any more. Again, this is not a high-minded defense of the right of Georgians to have their votes counted. On the contrary, Kemp has a long history of being an eager vote suppressor, and that’s likely why he’s governor today. He’s just hit the limit of his powers to deprive voters of their right to be heard. The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has received widespread praise for his “courage” in standing up to Trump’s coup effort. This is further nonsense. While Raffensperger has been more outspoken in defense of the election results than other Trump-toadying politicians, he too is acting more out of legal necessity than a desire to defend democracy.

Raffensperger has a long history of supporting voter suppression. Indeed, he’s exploiting the current situation by conflating Trump’s attacks on the election with the fight by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to ensure free and fair elections, on the grounds that both are losers who are critical of Georgia’s election process. Of course, the two couldn’t be more different, starting with the fact that Abrams is telling the truth about voter suppression and Trump is lying about voter fraud. But the larger point here is that Raffensperger’s instinct is to use Trump’s coup as leverage to strip away more voting rights.

Raffensperger is no hero. He’s just legally constricted from being a villain in the particular case of Trump’s coup.

Indeed, there was surprising enthusiasm for Trump’s efforts in the days after the election from state-level Republicans, which is why 10 Republican state attorneys general filed an amicus brief on Nov. 10 demanding that the Supreme Court gut a Pennsylvania law giving mail-in ballots mailed by Election Day up to three days to arrive. What’s happened since then, however, is mounting evidence that Democratic voters, egged on by the party’s calls to vote early, outwitted Republican efforts to steal the election through such legal maneuvers. For instance, only 10,000 votes arrived in that three-day post-election window in Pennsylvania, so even if Trump’s lawsuit had been successful, it wouldn’t have changed the results of the election in that state.

Even in the face of all this, some state-level Republicans are still looking for any angle they can find to overturn the election. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the Supreme Court prevent state delegations from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from voting in the Electoral College. Notably, all four states have been subject to accusations from Trump that the votes from large, racially diverse cities are specifically illegitimate.

On the federal level, the same dynamic is in play.

The Washington Post surveyed 249 Republicans in Congress about Trump’s attempts to steal the election, and the numbers are disheartening, to say the least. Only 27 GOP congressional members openly opposed the coup by acknowledging that Biden had won the presidential election. Two members said publicly they believed Trump had won, and the rest — 220 duly elected Republican members of Congress — wouldn’t answer the question either way.

Saying nothing is tacit support. These members would be perfectly willing to go along with Trump stealing the election if he could pull it off. They just aren’t getting on board publicly because they know it won’t work. Even if some congressional Republicans object to the state electors — and every sign shows that a handful will — Democrats control the House, so nothing will likely come of it. But this silence speaks volumes about who would happily collaborate with Trump’s coup if they had any confidence it would work.

Of course, not all of them are silent. A group of House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mo Brooks of Alabama, are publicly calling on Trump to continue fighting even after the Electoral College legally certifies the election for Biden next week. There has been no rebuke from the Republican leadership to these extremists, not even from leaders who hail from the states where Trump is trying to have legal votes thrown out. The Republican stance, on both the state and federal level, is clear: They wish they could help Trump overturn the election, but they just don’t see a path forward. They were prepared to abuse their power as far as they could to help him, and have hit the wall

Unfortunately for Trump, time has run out. Tuesday is the deadline for states to certify their results, and next Monday the Electoral College will finally make Biden’s win official. The results are clear, not because Republican leaders have any integrity, but because voters showed up in large enough numbers to render all these shenanigans effectively moot. Trump will leave office on Jan. 20, and the only people who deserve credit for that are Democratic voters and organizers, who made sure Biden’s win was big enough that it couldn’t be stolen away.

What Bob Dylan selling his music catalog does and doesn’t mean

The news that Bob Dylan has sold his full publishing catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group, in a deal estimated to be worth more than $300 million, is a big surprise in the career of one of music’s greatest songwriters. It’s likely one of the biggest deals of this kind ever made. But what does the sale mean, exactly, for Dylan’s songs? Here are the main takeaways from what’s been reported so far.

All money generated by Dylan’s prior work as a songwriter has a new recipient.

This deal concerns only the publishing rights for Dylan’s existing songs — the music and lyrics for all of the 600 or so songs he has composed since his career began, and the songwriting royalties generated that way. That means that any time “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” or any other Dylan composition gets streamed, sold, played on the radio, or used in a commercial enterprise like a TV advertisement or film spot, the songwriting royalty check that would have gone to Dylan will make its way to UMPG’s bank account instead. (The same goes for any other artist’s cover of a song written by Dylan — and for the Band’s 1968 classic “The Weight,” which was written by Robbie Robertson but whose publishing Dylan owned.)

Read more from Rolling Stone: Inside Operation Gideon, a coup gone very wrong

It’s important to note that the deal only covers the publishing side of the two-lane road of music rights, not the recorded music side. Recall that Taylor Swift’s $300 million catalog acquisition by a private investment group covered recorded rights but not publishing — the opposite of the Dylan sale. The owner of publishing rights typically controls whether or not songs are cleared for inclusion in TV, film, and ads; so, in Swift’s case, that’s Swift, and in Dylan’s case, it’s now UMPG. Which means…

Dylan’s songs could start appearing in more movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Since Dylan has been more than willing to exploit his catalog this way in the past — memorably licensing his music to ads for Apple, Victoria’s Secret, Cadillac, Pepsi and more — this seems unlikely to lead to a major shift in how often you hear his music in contexts like those. There could be more to come, though; if you find yourself wondering why “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is soundtracking a Peloton ad next year, you’ll know who to blame.

Read more from Rolling Stone: The mother of Daisy Coleman, from “Audrie & Daisy,” has died of suicide

Dylan’s recorded output will stay the same.

This deal does not cover the master rights to Dylan’s recordings — that is, the rights and royalties associated with any of the albums and songs he’s released as a performer — so there’s no more likelihood of Blonde on Blonde: The EDM Remixes or Freewheelin’ 2 than there was last week. This also means that there should be no change to future installments of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series of unreleased vault recordings, which continue to be controlled by Dylan, his management, and his record company.

Read more from Rolling Stone: Rudy Giuliani hospitalized with COVID-19

Look for more catalog sales from major artists to come.

Dylan isn’t the only one with this idea: In 2020, a flurry of major artists are striking huge deals to sell their catalogs to investors and music companies. Stevie Nicks just did the same, as have Jack Antonoff, Tom DeLonge, Richie Sambora, Imagine Dragons, and dozens of other acts. That’s because these back-catalogs, in the evergreen era of streaming, have the potential to fetch their copyright owners a ton of money in the future. So artists and songwriters benefit by getting massive lump-sum payouts right now, in exchange for giving their revenue streams to new owners, who benefit by being able to scoop up whatever lucrative opportunities or streaming revivals are possible in the future. Since investors with deep pockets are still hungry for new deals, the fervor’s not dying down anytime soon. Dylan will certainly not be the last major artist to sell their catalog for a huge sum — and there’s still a whole host of classic acts out there who don’t release music or tour anymore but certainly wouldn’t balk at a nine-figure offer for their old rights.

Additional reporting by Amy X. Wang

Armed police raid home of whistleblower who accused DeSantis administration of a COVID cover-up

A Florida data scientist who accused the state of manipulating coronavirus data at the onset of the pandemic just had her home raided by state police and is now alleging that Gov. Ron DeSantis was behind it.

Rebekah Jones helped build the state’s coronavirus dashboard before she was fired by the Florida Department of Health in May after she says she refused to make certain changes to the data. On Monday, she released a video of armed officers raiding her home.

“They pointed a gun in my face,” Jones said in a tweet with a video of an officer pointing a gun up a staircase as she told him her two children were upstairs. “They pointed guns at my kids.”

1/
There will be no update today.

At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech.

They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint.

They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids.. pic.twitter.com/DE2QfOmtPU

— Rebekah Jones is on blsky (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020

According to a copy of the affidavit that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said it used to obtain the search warrant on Jones’ home, the department is investigating a complaint that a “person illegally hacked” into “a web-based platform” developed by the Florida Department of Health for “incident and emergency planning” in November and sent a message to the multi-user account group.

“[I]ts time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” the group text read. “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”

Florida police said they determined Jones’ Tallahassee home was the location from which the unauthorized message was sent. “Agents knocked and called Ms. Jones both announcing the search warrant and encouraging her to cooperate. Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents,” the agency said. “After several attempts, Ms. Jones allowed agents inside. Agents entered the home in accordance with normal protocols and seized several devices that will be forensically analyzed. At no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”

Appearing on CNN Monday evening, Jones denied any involvement with the alleged hack.

“This is just a very thinly veiled attempt of the governor to intimidate scientists and get back at me while trying to get to my sources,” Jones told CNN, adding that she was “not a hacker” and the message was “not the way I talk.”

“The number of deaths that the person used wasn’t even right,” she said. “They were actually under by about 430 deaths. I would never round down 430 deaths.”

Lawrence Walters, an attorney for Jones, said in a statement that the video showed “unnecessarily reckless and aggressive behavior” by officers and vowed to “pursue all lawful avenues to seek return of our client’s property and vindicate her civil rights.”

“Our client was fully cooperative yet had guns pointed at her and her family,” he said. “We are concerned that these actions may be retaliation in response to her whistleblower claim against the Department of Health and her criticism of the Governor’s COVID 19 response.”

Jones, who launched her own dashboard after being fired using crowdfunded money, had provided daily updates of the state’s coronavirus data but said there would be no update on Monday because the agents took all of her “hardware and tech.”

She also alleged that the governor of Florida was behind the raid.

“They took evidence of corruption at the state level. They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo,” she wrote on Twitter. “This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.”

“DeSantis needs to worry less about what I’m writing about, and more about the people who are sick and dying in his state,” she told CNN. “And doing this to me, will not stop me from reporting the data, ever.”

A spokesperson for Desantis pushed back, telling CNN that “the governor’s office had no involvement, no knowledge, no nothing, of this investigation.”

Following the raid, Jones launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a new computer and a “hell of a good lawyer.”

Nearly 20,000 Floridians have died from the coronavirus and the state’s total infections top 1 million. DeSantis, who has rejected medical advice on coronavirus restrictions and banned cities from requiring residents to wear masks, has consistently received some of the lowest approval ratings in the country for his handling of the pandemic. A South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation published last week showed how the governor “misled the public on the COVID-19 pandemic” with “secrecy and spin.”

State officials said that Jones was fired in May after she “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination” and made “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.” She alleged that she was terminated for refusing to cast coronavirus data in a more favorable light. She told USA Today that the email that sparked the probe was sent after a “purge” of Department of Health leaders.

“It’s like a massacre. And those aren’t the only people that have been fired or left,” she told the outlet.

Jones also warned that her electronic devices contained confidential messages from state employees that could get them fired and urged them to be careful.

Is Trump staging a coup or just running a con? No reason he can’t do both

It’s pretty damn obvious what’s going on with Donald Trump and the election, and it’s probably not an attempted coup. At least, that’s not necessarily Trump’s primary intention with his laughably unserious procession of 50-some failed legal challenges to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump and his Republican enablers lost five cases on Friday alone, with more in Michigan and Georgia over the weekend. Meanwhile, his perpetually shvitzing lead attorney, Rudy Giuliani, tested positive for COVID after appearing in court on multiple occasions without a mask. And yet Trump and his gullible Red Hats keep reacting like Lloyd Christmas in “Dumb & Dumber.” Faced with one-in-a-gazillion odds of actually winning a case, their response continues to be, “So you’re telling us there’s a chance!”

These suckers happen to be Trump’s target customers, especially now.

Sure, Trump wants to be president for another four years. In fact, he’d probably be happy to serve in the post for the rest of his miserable life. Consequently, if there were to be an evidentiary breakthrough, which I suppose is always possible, he’d absolutely bask in the results and start planning his inaugural address.

I mean, there’s a legal strategy at play here, but it’s as primitive as the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park” testing the paddock fences for weaknesses. If they happen to find one, they’ll absolutely exploit it, taking the opening as far as they can. In the worm-infested minds of Trump and his followers, any such opening could lead them to the Supreme Court, where Amy Coney Barrett is waiting to help.

There’s no path, other than catching an extremely lucky break — a Lloyd Christmas one-in-a-gazillion fluke. The election ended the day the networks called it for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The president-elect’s margin of victory is too formidable, and considering that even Trump’s personal fixer at the Department of Justice, Bill Barr, announced that his people haven’t found any evidence of widespread fraud, there’s no other way for Trump. He can’t win. Vote certifications continue on schedule, and it’s virtually certain the Electoral College will cast its ceremonial ballots on schedule on Dec. 14, all but carving Trump’s loss into stone.

Despite the nonexistent odds of victory, Trump is still, for all intents and purposes, attempting to overturn the election in one of the most staggeringly obscene and unpatriotic temper tantrums in presidential history. Some are calling it an attempted coup d’état against the true winner of the election, and I agree. But it’s always been more of a performative coup. It’s a circus sideshow for the shrieking satisfaction of Trump’s tear-stained disciples, who simply can’t understand how the most destructively incompetent president in American history lost his re-election campaign.

It turns out that the performative coup, including the bogus “whistleblowers” and all of Trump’s various “lookits” (“Lookit Philadelphia! Lookit Dominion! Lookit Detroit!”), is only half of our transactional president’s latest transaction. He’s selling his Red Hats a stack of lies and nonsensical conspiracy theories about the election disguised as hope. In return, these badly deluded suckers are handing over their checking accounts to Trump’s Save America PAC in the midst of a crushing recession.

Since Election Day, around $207 million has been raised by Save America PAC as well as both the Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again committees.

According to numerous news sources, however, hardly any of that sum is being spent on “stopping the steal.”

As Salon’s Igor Derysh reported last week, fundraising emails from the Trump campaign “claim that the money is for the ‘Official Election Defense Fund,’ [but] no such account exists. … The fine print on the frenzied messages says the first $5,000 or first 75% of every donation greater than $5,000 goes to Save America, a new political action committee formed by the president in mid-November. The other 25% goes to the Republican National Committee.” I wonder how many Red Hat suckers have given money to the PAC thinking it’d be spent on Trump’s legal shenanigans. I’d wager most of them.

Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, told CBS News that the PAC donations can be used by Trump “to keep former campaign staff on the payroll, to fund Trump’s travel and expenses when he is campaigning for other candidates, and to help finance rallies and events (as long as the rallies and events are pitched as supporting other candidates or political issues rather than as Trump 2024 events).” As we’ve observed, Trump’s rallies for other candidates always turn out to be about him and his roster of grievances. So, obviously, Trump will fudge the campaign finance reporting to minimize time spent ranting about himself.

All told, Trump’s Save America PAC is, like most PACs, nothing more than a slush fund, located in the middle of a campaign-finance gray area. Candidates often use super-PAC money to finance lavish vacations and other personal expenses. Given that the Trump Foundation was shut down because the Trumps were self-dealing — using donations for personal items, including a painting of Trump — it’s safe to assume the Trumps will dip into the PAC account to pay for … whatever the hell they want.

According to recent polling, more than half of all Republicans believe Trump really won the election despite the math and despite vindication of the math by myriad state officials along with some Trump-appointed judges. Seventy-four million voters chose to cast ballots for an ungainly monster whose incompetence and irresponsibility led to the latest unforgivable spike in COVID cases, while other nations like Australia are celebrating the near-total defeat of the pandemic. (On Sunday, there were nine new cases in all of Australia. On the same day in the United States, there were 173,457 new cases.) A ridiculously large percentage of those voters falsely believe Trump won, and they always will.

It’s important to emphasize that we’re talking about chronological adults who believe the screechings of the world’s most notorious con man, while also believing that literally everyone else in the country is lying to them. Think about that. It’s like a cancer patient who’s diagnosed by the world’s most esteemed oncologists, but instead accepts the word of a Reddit troll while accusing the experts of being the real crooks.

Trump wants nothing more than to separate his fanboys from their money, and exclusively so. “Stopping the steal” is merely a sales ploy. He might as well be a fake Nigerian prince bamboozling his fans with an obvious phishing scam. And they’re walking right into it. These are desperately confused and easily-deceived adults whose TV messiah once tried to sell raw beef in Sharper Image mall stores. Trump’s selling them a phony-baloney dream of a second term — a dream he has no possibility or intention of fulfilling. In exchange, they’re giving him hundreds of millions of dollars that’ll be used for everything but that dream.

Granted, we shouldn’t get complacent until Joe Biden is administered the oath of office on Jan. 20, but we can at least rest assured that Trump’s coup has no chance of success. His fanboys, meanwhile, will keep shoveling cash into the gaping maw of a known scam artist. Ultimately, I’m fine with that.

Dr. Lance Dodes: Trump is “delusional at the core,” will live in “fantasyland till the day he dies”

Contrary to what the hope-peddlers and other members of “the Church of the Savvy” would like the public to believe, none of this is normal or ultimately “harmless”. Everything is not OK.

Donald Trump and his allies are continuing with their efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s victory. Trump’s attacks on democracy are a de facto coup attempt which includes not just “legal” tactics but intimidation and threats of violence. Last Saturday night, dozens of Trump’s unofficial paramilitaries surrounded the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Instead of properly reporting on the unprecedented attempts by a United States president to usurp the will of the American people in order to remain in power indefinitely — and the larger strategy by the Republican Party to create a new American apartheid – too many in the mainstream news media are looking ahead to the Biden administration and convincing themselves that by ignoring or minimizing Trump’s attacks all will somehow be fine in January.

On this, Jack Holmes writes at Esquire:

Meanwhile, those preaching calm over the last few weeks have not merely ignored the guiding principles of the Trump era: never assume there is a bottom to the shameless depravity, and never bet against that shamelessness being rewarded. …

It is also straight out of the strongman playbook to put a number of hare-brained schemes in motion, hoping that at least one will play out in such a way that you can profit off the chaos. But yeah, everybody simmer down. The important thing when witnessing the wild behavior of an authoritarian leader, cornered and desperate, is to be the most Calm and Savvy observer. Don’t you know about The Laws?

Such behavior testifies to the fourth estate abandoning its role as truth-tellers and guardians of democracy but and instead becoming dispensers of happy pills and placebos. Reporting on the palace intrigue of Trump’s Kremlin on the Potomac in the aftermath of the 2020 election is part of the distraction and denial, a type of joyous schadenfreude by liberals, progressives and others who oppose Trump and his regime’s evil and have been made to suffer by it.

As such, it has been reported that Donald Trump is despondent, falling apart mentally and acting like an American Mad King; that he is ranting and raging as aides try to keep him under control, and decompensating as TrumpWorld supposedly implodes.

For example, in his much-discussed New York Times feature “Trump’s Final Days of Rage and Denial,” Peter Baker reports:

Moody and by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up to work, ignoring the health and economic crises afflicting the nation and largely clearing his public schedule of meetings unrelated to his desperate bid to rewrite the election results. He has fixated on rewarding friends, purging the disloyal and punishing a growing list of perceived enemies that now includes Republican governors, his own attorney general and even Fox News. …

The final days of the Trump presidency have taken on the stormy elements of a drama more common to history or literature than a modern White House. His rage and detached-from-reality refusal to concede defeat evoke images of a besieged overlord in some distant dictatorship defiantly clinging to power rather than going into exile or an erratic English monarch imposing his version of reality on his cowed court.

Earlier reporting by the Washington Post echoes Baker’s account:

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”

These details are likely all true. What they describe is a national and global state of emergency. But such behavior must be located properly, relative to Donald Trump’s ongoing coup attempt and other attacks on democracy by his allies and followers.

Trump has publicly shown himself to be not just mentally unwell but perhaps even a sociopath or psychopath. Sick leaders attract sick followers. Sick leaders also amplify the various mental and other pathologies of their followers and inner circle. Sick leaders channel and therefore worsen the most unhealthy and unjust aspects of a given society. In all, Trumpism is a type of collective social and civic disease spreading throughout America.

How long will Trump be able to exist in his own reality? What will happen when and if Trump’s fantasies are destroyed? Is Donald Trump more or less dangerous after the 2020 election and Joe Biden’s victory? What do the accounts of Donald Trump’s increasingly aberrant behavior following Election Day reveal about his coup attempt and likely behavior in the future?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. Lance Dodes, whom I have interviewed on several previous occasions. He is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Given the election and its aftermath, with President Trump continuing to deny reality and refusing to concede, and the myriad of events as the United States awaits Biden’s assumed inauguration in January, how are you feeling?

I think Trump must be thinking about financial stability, the lawsuits that are going to come down the pike. It’s also in his interest to claim that he didn’t lose so that he can have a group of followers who believe in him, versus a country that is against him for all the deaths he caused and everything else, and because he needs to have people stay in his hotels and buy his steaks and whatever else he’s hawking. He’ll also need that for public support when he’s called into court for all his crimes.

How does someone with Trump’s personality and his many emotional and mental pathologies process defeat? Especially defeat on such a grand stage? Do they just create their own universe in their mind and deny reality?

It would be devastating if he allowed it, that’s the delusional quality of it. It’s always been confusing because Trump doesn’t wear tinfoil on his head and think that he’s getting messages from Mars, so people think he’s not delusional. But he is delusional at the core, because he can never accept reality that is unacceptable for him. Normal people, we all have losses. Trump doesn’t have losses. So he denies it. When it comes down to it, if you push him hard enough, which is what has happened, then you see the delusional core of it. It has all the qualities of a delusion.

Donald Trump is the same man he was before he lost to Joe Biden on Election Day. If anything, Trump is now behaving worse. Trump is remarkably dangerous. But as a function of the desperate yearning for normalcy, many people in the news media and the public just want to make fun of him and call him a buffoon. Which may be true, but nonetheless Donald Trump and personalities like him are very dangerous — and they are not going to stop being dangerous because people mock them.

I’ve objected to saying that he’s a clown because that misses the point. Clowns are funny and harmless. He is anything but harmless. If our country’s democracy were as weak as Germany’s was when Hitler took power, it would have been the end of democracy here as it was in Germany in 1932.

Is Donald Trump more dangerous now than he was before the election?

As long as he’s president, until Jan. 20, he’s still dangerous. Once he’s out of office, he becomes your average psychopath. He will continue to abuse workers and not pay people, and he will continue to foment as much trouble as he can. The last thing he would want is a successful Biden presidency, so he will try to cause as much trouble as he can. But once he’s out of office, I don’t think, for example, that he’s going to be able to cause riots in the streets. However, until he’s out of office, yes. For years, I and others have been worried about his creating a Reichstag incident, a crisis that would give him an excuse to remain in power, or at least leave a warlike situation in Biden’s lap. I think those days are still with us.

How successful he will be is not clear to me. There was a real chance that he could have stolen the election by having the Electoral College stacked the way he stacked the Supreme Court. He could still try to ruin the relationship with Iran for Biden, or do almost anything else to make the next presidency look bad.

When someone like Donald Trump is defeated, do they collapse inward, experiencing some type of breakdown? One cannot overlook that Trump believes he is a god. He needs narcissistic fuel. After he is forced from the presidency, will Trump just live in a fantasy world of his own making?

I think that Donald Trump will continue living in fantasyland until the day he dies. His life is about making sure the truth doesn’t hit him. I could see him for example going to jail — but then, in his jail cell, claiming that this is more proof of how he’s been treated unfairly. His paranoia is never going to go away. It’s always somebody else’s problem. Trump is not only the innocent victim, he is the saintly victim.

It appears that Donald Trump is not loved by anyone. Based on his public behavior it seems as though there is no one close to him who will tell him, “You’re embarrassing yourself! Have some dignity, man!”

I do not believe that Donald Trump loves anybody. To love somebody means to appreciate them as a separate person, for who they are, and for their life to be important to you, separate from your own. That’s why people sometimes are willing to die for other people. Trump can’t do that. One proof of that is his total absence of loyalty. As soon as somebody challenges him, he says, “You’re my enemy.” If you are not supporting him, if you are not revolving around him, if you are not part of him in a sense, then you’re the enemy. There’s no recognition of other people as separate centers of initiative who can be valued. Their only value is what they do for him.

If a person is not capable of loving others, are they capable of having a healthy love for themselves? One would think that a person with healthy self-love would exit the public stage gracefully: “This is done. Let me walk out of here with some dignity.”

I do not think that Donald Trump has healthy love for himself. His pathological narcissism indicates an emptiness inside. It’s not that he loves himself; it’s that he needs to protect himself against his enemies. His grandiosity is a reflection of needing to be great because there’s nothing else there. Healthy self-love means there is something there, and you love the thing that is there: You admire yourself, you like yourself, you have things about yourself that you think are good. Trump doesn’t have any of that.

The Washington Post and the New York Times are reporting that Donald Trump is in the midst of a breakdown of sorts. He is despondent, delusional, lashing out, planning revenge. As a mental health professional, how do you make sense of these reports?

There was nothing surprising in them. Trump is a very simple man psychologically. Normal people are complicated. I think anybody who understands him was able to predict this, and can predict the future as well, which is why we’re worried. The fact that all he cares about is preserving his own personal power and worth — and his sadism and wish to hurt anyone who challenges him is well-known. What I found actually much more interesting is how the people around him are dealing with that. Many of the Trump supporters have been willing to sacrifice what is right in order to curry favor from Trump and add to their personal power. Now that it’s no longer in their personal interest to support him they are jumping off the ship. But leaving now doesn’t undo their moral failure. They’ve already said something indelible about themselves.

How do you think people in the future will make sense of the Age of Trump and all its horrible events?

The public, especially all those people who are not particularly informed and who can be pushed either way by whatever is the prevailing norm, will come back to what we used to consider “normal” — at least outwardly sharing American ideals about democracy and decency. In my opinion, the new norm will be to say that Donald Trump was a fascist and he almost took over America. What were we thinking? Trump is a wakeup call that Americans are not different from other people and there will always be a substantial number of people in this country who, when feeling “cheated” and “unheard,” will fall again for a fascist leader if we do not address the underlying problems of the country.

Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller tells judge he’ll be unemployed after Dec. 15

Jason Miller, the chief strategist for outgoing President Donald Trump‘s 2020 campaign, told a Florida family court judge in a sworn affidavit filed last Friday that he expects to be unemployed beginning Dec. 15 — which is next Tuesday, the day after the Electoral College meets to ratify Joe Biden’s election as president. As a result, Miller said, he projects that his net monthly income, which was $99,000 for July, will drop to zero.

The affidavit, filed in a child custody case and obtained by Salon, says in a footnote: “Father’s current employment is expected to last until December 15, 2020, and he will earn $17,500 for the first half of December 2020. Thereafter, the Father will be unemployed with no source of income.”

The Trump campaign has spent the last month trying to reverse Trump’s defeat in a last-ditch crusade through the courts. Miller, a familiar face in the media, has played a central role.

Yet even though Miller does some of the most publicly visible work for the campaign, neither he nor the campaign have ever reported that the campaign pays him at all: His $35,000 monthly salary, marked for “video production,” is first routed through one of the campaign’s media contractors, Jamestown Associates, where Miller once served as an executive.

The arrangement appears designed to obscure the flow of money and conceal how much Miller makes from the woman with whom he fathered a child during the 2016 campaign. Campaign finance experts say the scheme is illegal.

A former top campaign official familiar with the arrangement told Salon that Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 bid who joined the re-election campaign in June, had negotiated the salary and third-party payment deal with top campaign officials, and that Jared Kushner had personally signed off. Jamestown execs were initially irked at being a go-between, according to the official.

Questions surrounding the payments, as well as Miller’s mysterious and ever-changing monthly income, are not only important for transparency reasons, but also in order to determine how much Miller, who is married, should pay for child support to AJ Delgado, a 2016 Trump campaign official and the mother of his child. Their contentious case has dragged out for years in Florida court.

Over a period of several months between 2019 and 2020, Miller ducked payments to Delgado almost entirely, while reporting monthly incomes between $27,000 and $99,000. For a time that income included secret side payments from his former firm, Teneo, where Miller had collected a $500,000 salary until it severed public ties him in June 2019, reportedly as a result of crass insults he tweeted at Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.

In his affidavit filed last week, Miller reported $683,660 in income for 2019.

During this boom time, however, Miller paid Delgado, who is unemployed, as little as $500 a month — one-sixth of what a court had demanded. That was the bare minimum required by the state for a parent who makes $2,300 a month. Miller’s financial affidavits make clear that he spends that amount or more every month just on expenses related to his cars.

In Miller’s initial parenting plan, filed in May 2019 when his son with Delgado was less than two years old, the campaign’s go-to media man expressed no desire to see his son: “This parenting plan does not contain any time sharing between the child and the father.”

Miller also claims in his affidavits that he owes exactly $500,000 in federal and state taxes, though it is unclear how the self-employed contractor arrived at that number. He refuses to tell Delgado whether he receives checks from either Jamestown Associates or the Trump campaign.

Campaign finance experts tell Salon that on its face, the triangular arrangement appears unlawful: It is illegal to conceal or lie about the true purpose of expenditures on federal reports.

“It is totally legal and not really out of the ordinary for a major figure on a campaign to be working through a consultancy. But then the payments are properly disclosed in FEC reports,” Jordan Libowitz, spokesperson for the government accountability watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Salon. “What you can’t do is mask the true reason for the spending.”

There is one striking piece of clarity in the campaign’s most recent Federal Election Commission report, however: After Salon’s exposé last month, the Trump campaign stopped smuggling Miller’s salary within a larger payment, as it had previously done. Instead, the campaign’s filings now show two clear November payments to Jamestown Associates of $17,500 — exactly half of Miller’s monthly salary.

Campaign finance experts say the campaign could conceivably justify this description if it successfully argues that Miller has indeed been doing that much work for Jamestown — offering direction or feedback on campaign videos, for example.

Such a setup would echo White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s thinly veiled moonlighting as a campaign official in her “personal capacity” during media appearances in the weeks before the election — a role which would otherwise violate the Hatch Act.

Libowitz told Salon, however, that it might be tough to sell Miller’s work as an outside contractor, given his near-ubiquity as a senior campaign official on television and in the press.

“It’s hard to fathom how someone could both be working for a campaign through a consultancy while also volunteering for it,” he added. “And the work Miller is doing for the Trump campaign does not appear to be video production.”

Also in July, Miller received $7,500 from a group called National Public Affairs, a consulting firm co-founded by former White House official Justin Clark and Trump’s current campaign manager, Bill Stepien, Salon reported. Miller received at least one other payment from the firm in that amount.

Stepien joined the campaign in December, but FEC filings do not disclose a campaign salary for him either. Reports suggest he took a 33% cut through another firm, Revolution Strategies LLC, when he stepped into the campaign manager role this July. But it is unclear why Stepien’s other firm paid Miller while he worked for the campaign, allegedly for free.

But FEC filings show that National Public Affairs had several high-dollar candidate clients who did spots on former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast around the time of some of those payments.

Miller co-hosted that podcast, and Bannon’s nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic (COAR), paid him tens of thousands of dollars a month, effectually an annual salary of about $200,000, Salon reported. The organization is currently a subject of an ongoing federal fraud investigation as a vehicle Bannon allegedly used to fabricate invoices in furtherance of the scheme.

Those COAR payments continued through July. The next month, U.S. Postal Service agents arrested Bannon on a yacht belonging to a billionaire Chinese dissident a few miles off the Connecticut coastline. Federal prosecutors say in the indictment that they are seeking to seize assets belonging to COAR.

“These allegations are very serious and I hope that Steve has some good answers for the things he’s been accused of,” Miller told NBC’s Chuck Todd following Bannon’s arrest. “It’s not something I worked on. I don’t know anything about the financial dealings of this organization or how it worked, and I hope Steve has an opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

Socialism is a trigger word on social media — but real discussion is going on amid the screaming

The word “socialism” has become a trigger word in U.S. politics, with both positive and negative perceptions of it split along party lines.

But what does socialism actually mean to Americans? Although surveys can ask individuals for responses to questions, they don’t reveal what people are saying when they talk among themselves.

As a social media scholar, I study conversations “in the wild” in order to find out what people are actually saying to one another. The method I developed is called netnography and it treats online posts as discourse — a continuing dialogue between real people — rather than as quantifiable data.

As part of an ongoing study on technology and utopia, I read through more than 14,000 social media comments posted on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube in 2018 and 2019. They came from 9,155 uniquely named posters.

What I found was both shocking and heartening.

Loyalty and fear

Both support for socialism and attacks on it appear to be on the rise.

Socialism can mean different things to people. Some see it as a system that institutionalizes fairness and citizen rights, bringing higher levels of social solidarity; others focus on heavy-handed government control of free markets that work more effectively when left alone. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, emphasized the right to quality health care, education, a good job with a living wage, affordable housing and a clean environment in a 2019 speech.

A 2019 Gallup Poll found that 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of socialism — up from about 20% in 2010; 57% view it negatively.

Prominent elected “democratic socialist” officials include six Chicago City Council members, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.

These and other advocates point to a version of socialism called the “Nordic model,” seen in countries like Denmark, which provide high-quality social services such as health care and education while fostering a strong economy.

Critics call socialism anti-American and charge that it undermines free enterprise and leads to disaster, often using the unrealistically extreme example of Venezuela.

President Trump has portrayed socialists as radical, lazy, America-hating communists. His son, Donald Trump Jr., has posted tweets ridiculing socialism.

During the 2020 election season, Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised that his party could win by being a firewall against socialism. He was on point: Fear of socialism may have been a reason why the Republicans gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

A “tug of words”

Although I wasn’t initially looking for posts on socialism or capitalism, I found plenty of them in my online investigation. Many were what I call a “tug of words” in which people asserted which system was better. People from opposite ends of the political spectrum made pithy observations, posted one-liners or launched strong, emotionally worded broadsides. There was often little dialogue — those who posted were shouting at each other as if using a megaphone.

A YouTube commenter uses a megaphone-like approach to preach about the perils of socialism. Screen shot by Robert Kozinets

I also found a large number of short, nonconversational, megaphone-like posts on visual social media like Instagram and Pinterest.

Some commentary on socialism on Pinterest. Screen shot by Robert Kozinets

But some people were more circumspect. While they were often reactive or one-sided, they raised questions. For example, people questioned whether business bailouts, grants, lobbying or special tax treatment showed that capitalism’s “free markets” weren’t actually all that free.

Making a historical economic argument against socialism and its slippery slope to totalitarianism. Robert Kozinets’ data collection

And some considered what “socialism” actually means to people, linking that meaning to race, nationality and class.

The meaning of socialism discussed on Twitter. Screen shot by Robert Kozinets

Overcoming primitive “isms”

Amid all the sound and fury of people shouting from their virtual soapboxes, there were also the calmer voices of those engaging in deeper discussions. These people debated socialism, capitalism and free markets in relation to health care, child care, minimum wage and other issues that affected their lives.

One YouTube discussion explored the notion that we should stop viewing everything “through the primitive lens of the nonsensical ‘isms’ — capitalism, socialism, communism — which have no relevance in a sustainable or socially just and peaceful world.”

Other discussions united both left and right by asserting that the real problem was corruption in the system, not the system itself. Some used social media to try to overcome the ideological blinders of partisan politics. For example, they argued that raising the minimum wage or improving education might be sensible management strategies that could help the economy and working Americans at the same time.

This Reddit post explores the benefits of changes that some might label as socialist. Screen shot by Robert Kozinets.

New forum for discussions

As America’s post-election divisions fester, my work gives me reason for hope. It shows that some Americans — still a small minority, mind you — are thoughtfully using popular social media platforms to have meaningful discussions. What I have provided here is just a small sample of the many thoughtful conversations I encountered.

My analysis of social media doesn’t deny that many people are angry and polarized over social systems. But it has revealed that a significant number of people recognize that labels like socialism, free markets and capitalism have become emotional triggers, used by some journalists and politicians to manipulate, incite and divide.

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To unify and move forward together, we may need to better understand the sites and discussion formats that facilitate this kind of thoughtful discourse. If partisans retreat to echo chamber platforms like Parler and Rumble, will these kinds of intelligent conversations between people with diverse viewpoints cease?

As Americans confront the financial challenges of a pandemic, automation, precarious employment and globalization, providing forums where we can discuss divergent ideas in an open-minded rather than an ideological way may make a critical difference to the solutions we choose. Many Americans are already using digital platforms to discuss options, rather than being frightened away by — or attacking — the tired old socialist bogeyman.

Robert Kozinets, Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair in Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

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