When I was in the Fugs — for one night. At the Mudd Club

Travel with me now through the mists of time to an era when it was still possible for a novelist to occasionally appear on magazine covers and be invited as a guest on late night television shows like Johnny Carson’s and Dick Cavett’s. Seen from the bleachers overlooking the daily nightmare of the Trump presidency, you might call it a more innocent time, although it didn’t feel innocent back then. It was a time that teemed with intellectual and artistic and political ferment, a time when writers picked fights with one another that were covered in the pages of the New York Times, a time when the release of an album by Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or a movie like “Easy Rider” or “2001: A Space Odyssey” could be an earth-shattering event.

One novelist in particular had an uncanny ability to dominate the national conversation. Norman Mailer made the news when he covered an antiwar march on the Pentagon and wrote “The Armies of the Night,” when he picked a fight with fellow novelist Gore Vidal on the Cavett show, when he wrote a magazine cover story on the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, when he bit off a chunk of actor Rip Torn’s ear in a fight during the filming of his underground movie,”Maidstone,” in the Hamptons.

I was a young man back then. Correction: I was an ambitious young man, and I don’t mean “ambitious” in the sense of aspiring to a particular job or career, or making a lot of money, or wanting to achieve elective office. I was ambitious in a way that if less focused, had the same power over me that more conventional drives had over others. If there was a national conversation going on, I didn’t just want to be a part of it, I didn’t just want a voice in the conversation, I wanted to know the people who made the news with what they had to say.

I remember sitting in my room listening to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” holding the album with the photograph of Dylan and his then girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. walking down a wintry Jones Street in the Village, and saying to myself, I’m going to walk down that street, I remember listening to Dylan singing the line, “Lights flickered from the opposite loft,” on “Visions of Johanna,” and thinking, I’ve got to get to know this guy. I want to live in a loft. I remember lying in my bed reading Mailer’s “Advertisements for Myself” and “The Deer Park” and “The Naked and the Dead” and “Why Are We in Vietnam?” and thinking, I want to be in that argument. I have to meet this guy.

I didn’t want to just sit on the sidelines reading the books and listening to the music and going to the movies. It wasn’t just fandom or hero worship. I wasn’t interested in their celebrity. I wanted in.

When I was a “plebe” at West Point, I got a subscription to the Village Voice, the weekly newspaper Mailer had founded a decade earlier with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, and I started writing letters to the editor. The first letter I wrote got responses the following week from Dwight Macdonald, an anti-war activist and cultural critic, Aryeh Neier, a director and lawyer for the ACLU, and Paul Goodman, a prominent social critic and author of “Growing Up Absurd.” Well, that was a start. A response to another of my letters to the editor from Mailer would come later. I took it as a sign and began to correspond with him by mail. We carried on an ongoing argument — about an article he wrote, or a book he had recommended that I read, or a movie we had both seen, and of course, the war in Vietnam. He was everything his public persona indicated he was: whip-smart, acerbic, brutally direct and, at times, hilarious.

I was having the time of my life writing letters back and forth to one of America’s most famous novelists and public intellectuals when one day I received a letter from Mailer inviting me to an appearance he would be making at the “Theater for Ideas” on Gramercy Park. You see what I mean? This was a time in America when they actually had a goddamn theater where every month or so, very smart people would have intelligent discussions about hot topics in the news and intellectual theories or the state of American politics. It turned out that on this night Mailer would be discussing the state of the American theater on a panel moderated by Voice columnist Nat Hentoff with Paul Goodman and the two people who ran the radical group of performance artists known as The Living Theater, Judith Malina and Julian Beck.

The group had recently put on their controversial play “Paradise Now” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a semi-improvisational piece during which some audience members were invited to sit on the stage and participate in the action. Most famously, during the performance, actors moved through the audience loudly reciting a long list of political and social taboos, and when they got to “nudity,” they disrobed en masse, standing naked in the audience shouting the rest of their list. It was wildly popular.

My girlfriend and I made our way down to Gramercy Park and paid our admission — $10 at the door, including an open bar at the close of the discussion — and took our seats. Mailer and the rest of the panel took the stage, with each of them making an opening statement in turn. I found it peculiar that with five people on the panel, there was only one microphone, which they passed from hand to hand. It became quickly obvious that whoever had the mic was in control of the “discussion,” and the evening soon devolved into Mailer shouting at Julian Beck and Judith Malina shouting at Nat Hentoff with Paul Goodman trying, usually fruitlessly, to get a word in from the sidelines with the audience shouting questions from the floor.

Suddenly, some of the people in the audience began standing and loudly shouting “I am not permitted to speak freely,” and “I cannot smoke marijuana,” and “I cannot feed my family.” They were members of the Living Theater who had been peppered through the audience before the panel began, and of course when they reached, “I cannot be naked,” they began disrobing. People were screaming from the audience. The panelists were fighting over the microphone.

I was eager to get a drink and finally meet Norman Mailer, so I whispered to my girlfriend, pointing to two large speaker cabinets on the theater’s floor on either side of the stage. I knew that on the back of each cabinet would be two thumb screws attaching the wires from the amplifier. I realized that in the madhouse the theater had become, no one would notice us if my girlfriend and I walked up to the front of the theater and bent down and unscrewed the speaker wires. We did it. The microphone went silent, and the discussion of the state of the American theater, such as it was, was over.

Nat Hentoff waved his arms and shouted, “The bar is open,” and the audience began making its way past the now-nude members of the Living Theater, who were still shouting about the freedoms society had refused them. I introduced myself and my girlfriend to Mailer and we stood around and watched as people from the audience accosted him with complaints about remarks he had made that night and essays he had recently published. Mailer seemed in his element, drinking and jousting with the public, but his wife, the actress Beverly Bentley, wasn’t having it. She grabbed him and began dragging him toward the door. My girlfriend and I followed close behind.

By the time they reached the street, Mailer and his wife were arguing loudly. She wanted to leave. He was the object of attention inside, and he didn’t. A cab pulled up, and she opened the back door, shouting at him that if he didn’t get in, he shouldn’t bother coming home tonight. Mailer hesitated, then reluctantly got in, still arguing loudly with his wife. The cab driver was leaning over the seat asking, like cab drivers did back then, “Where to, Mac?” Mailer was yelling at his wife, ignoring him, so the cab was just sitting there with the back door open. I figured, wherever they’re going has got to be better than anything I had planned, which was nothing, so I helped my girlfriend into the back seat and I opened the cab’s front passenger door and slid in.

Mailer and his wife were still fighting and didn’t even notice we were there. The cab driver, yelling over their argument, asked “Where to, Mac?” again, and Mailer paused long enough to give him an address on East 72^nd Street, and the driver threw the meter and drove away. We had traveled blocks uptown before Mailer noticed my girlfriend sitting next to him and me in the front seat. He chuckled and shrugged his shoulders and started in again with his wife.

When the cab pulled to a stop, we were at the very eastern end of 72^nd Street in front of a townhouse. We followed Mailer and his wife up a flight of stairs and into a large living room, with windows overlooking the East River, that was filled with people standing around talking with drinks in their hands. It was a party, and soon a tall, smiling man approached Mailer and welcomed him. It was George Plimpton, and this was his house and without having a clue about where we were going, we had ended up at one of his legendary parties.

Mailer introduced me to Plimpton, and Plimpton graciously introduced himself to my girlfriend and welcomed us in. Mailer and his wife were soon spied by friends and drifted away on a cushion of bonhomie and fame. My girlfriend and I made our way to the bar and got drinks and took in the scene. We didn’t know a soul, but haute literary New York was in attendance: There was Gay Talese, over by one of the windows. Truman Capote was sitting on a sofa talking to a woman as thin as a lampstand. Kurt Vonnegut was nearby, looking studiously morose.

At the street end of the room was a pool table. I recognized one of the guys playing pool. It was Ed Sanders, the poet, founder of the magazine, “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts,” and the lead singer of the Fugs, which was named, purposefully and ironically, after the word Mailer was made to substitute for “fuck” in the pages of “The Naked and the Dead.” I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand and we walked over to the pool table and I introduced myself and asked if I could have the next game. Ed gave me a big smile, and said, “You’re the guy from West Point who’s been writing in the Voice, aren’t you?” I had recently written my first front-page story in the Voice and glowing with accomplishment said yes. He showed me where the cues were, I picked one, and we started to play. We were among the last to leave.

From that night on, we were fast friends. Shortly after the party, Ed wrote me a letter inviting me to a poetry reading at St. Mark’s in the Bowery. A few years later, in 1972, when I was on assignment covering the Republican National Convention, I saw him and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman leading street protests by the Yippies. The next year, we drove to Washington together and attended the first three days of the Senate Watergate hearings.

Nine years after that, Ed called me up one day and asked, “You still do hambone?” This was a folk tradition of keeping rhythm by rapidly slapping your thighs and chest I had learned in high school in Kansas. I answered yes. “How would you like to play hambone with us at the Mudd Club in a couple of weeks?’ I said, “You mean with the Fugs?” “Yeah, we’re getting back together for a night. You should come. We’ll have fun.” I practically swallowed my tongue saying yes.

That’s me in the photograph in the foreground, sitting on a chair doing hambone with Ed in the background singing lead. That’s how my dream came true: I was a Fug for one night at the Mudd Club.

Trump’s lame-duck status leaves governors to wing it on COVID

Not long after the world learned that President Donald Trump had lost his reelection bid, states began issuing a new round of crackdowns and emergency declarations against the surging coronavirus.

Taking action this time were Republican governors who had resisted doing so during the spring and summer. Now they face an increasingly out-of-control virus and fading hope that help will come from a lame-duck president who seems consumed with challenging the election results.

President-elect Joe Biden has promised a more unified national effort once he takes office on Jan. 20, and pressure is building on Congress to pass a new financial relief package. But with record hospitalizations and new cases, many governors have decided they can’t afford to wait.

“I don’t know any governor who’s sitting there waiting for the knight to come in on the horse,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former senior health official in President George W. Bush’s administration. “There’s no way for these guys to just sit and wait. The virus and the crisis is getting worse hour by hour, day by day.”

As new measures trickle out across states, public health policy experts worry many don’t go far enough. For those states attempting to impose meaningful restrictions, their success depends on cooperation from a population with pandemic fatigue. And people may be reluctant to curtail their holiday gatherings.

Residents of many conservative states don’t acknowledge the depth of the health problem, especially given Trump and some of his allies have stressed the crisis is being overplayed and will end quickly.

The bottom line is that many people just aren’t sufficiently scared of the virus to do what must be done to stop the spread, said Rodney Whitlock, a health policy consultant and former adviser to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

“You’re dealing with folks there who definitely put liberty over everything else because they’re not afraid enough,” Whitlock said. “Even in the face of cases, even in the face of people around them getting it. They’re just not afraid.”

Among the first governors to act was outgoing Utah Gov. Gary Herbert. The day after The Associated Press called the presidential election for Biden on Nov. 7, the Republican announced Utah’s first-ever statewide mask mandate and clamped down on social gatherings and other activities until Nov. 23.

“All of us need to work together and see if there’s a better way,” Herbert said in a news conference.

Republican and Democratic governors alike followed with measures of their own in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and other states. Strategies included partial lockdowns, limits on crowds, canceling in-person classes for schools and reducing hours and capacity for bars and restaurants.

Health policy experts largely agree that the virus’s spread, not the end of the election, is what’s driving these changes — though the end of the campaign season does take political pressure off governors inclined to issue COVID-preventive policies.

“It’s much easier to act when you don’t have attention on you than when you do, but I would hope that the action is taking place regardless of what the political circumstances are,” Chen said.

No state has yet resorted to the sort of full lockdowns enacted in the spring, which resulted in mass business closures and layoffs and sent the economy crashing.

Christopher Adolph, an associate professor at the University of Washington, and his team with the university’s COVID-19 State Policy Project have been studying states’ responses to the pandemic. Some states have made a show of taking action, without much substance behind it, he said. For example, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, declared an emergency on Nov. 12 — but only recommended, not ordered, that people wear masks and maintain social distance.

Other governors first took small steps only to follow up with tighter restrictions. In Iowa, for example, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who opposed mask mandates during the presidential campaign, initially announced that all people over age 2 would be required to wear masks at gatherings of certain sizes. On Nov. 16, she issued a simpler but stricter three-week statewide mask mandate.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, also ordered mandatory face coverings for the first time. Hospitals there have been reporting they have more patients than capacity, and the state has been leading the country in new per capita COVID cases.

At the very least, each state should make it clear that people must not gather indoors, Adolph said. Restaurants, bars, gymnasiums and large indoor events should be closed, he said, and gatherings inside people’s homes should not happen.

“We’re not seeing enough clear, broadly communicated, well-stated, unambiguous policies,” Adolph said.

An exception is Herbert, one of two governors who will leave office in January. The two-term Utah governor will turn over the reins to his current lieutenant governor, Spencer Cox, who has been a part of the state’s response to the pandemic since the beginning. Both Republicans have promised a smooth, seamless transition between administrations.

The nation’s other lame-duck governor is Montana’s Steve Bullock, a Democrat. But unlike Herbert, the term-limited Bullock will be replaced by a governor from a different party. Republican U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte defeated Bullock’s lieutenant governor, Mike Cooney, in the Nov. 3 election. And Bullock lost his bid for the U.S. Senate.

Bullock said in a Nov. 12 news conference that he would not take additional COVID-intervention measures without a federal aid package to blunt the economic fallout. Five days later, he reversed himself to expand a previous mask requirement and limit capacity and hours in bars, restaurants and other entertainment venues.

Gianforte has not directly answered whether he would continue Bullock’s restrictions. When asked, the governor-elect has spoken instead of personal responsibility and reopening the economy while protecting the most vulnerable people. In July, he referenced the unfounded hope that the virus would be slowed by the U.S. reaching “herd immunity” by the end of the year.

Another obstacle is that a district judge essentially ruled Bullock’s mask mandate unenforceable. State health department lawyers had asked District Judge Dan Wilson to enforce the mandate against five businesses accused of flouting the measure.

“The businesses and the owners have been put on the front line of implementing a state policy that has more exceptions than directives and would be about as effective in bailing water from the leaky boat of our present health circumstances as would a colander,” the judge said in denying the request.

That leaves Bullock with the task of managing a crisis in his final weeks of office with local officials already looking past him to a new administration.

In Flathead County, where the five businesses were sued for violating the mask mandate, local leaders were already chafing from what they saw as Bullock’s heavy hand.

“He has angered a lot of people in Flathead County,” County Commissioner Randy Brodehl, a Republican, said of Bullock. “He didn’t come here, he didn’t talk to us.”

Bullock’s troubles show that even if governors take measures to stem the spread of COVID-19, they may still have a difficult time persuading people to go along with them. That’s particularly an issue in the Upper Midwest and the Rocky Mountains, libertarian-leaning COVID hot spots where the medical infrastructure is already strained.

Some Trump supporters have followed the president’s lead in downplaying the virus and others are fatigued after months of isolation and precautions, said Whitlock.

In rural and conservative areas, people protest that COVID measures come at the expense of their personal freedom and their ability to earn a living, and some feel as though they’re being talked down to by mask advocates and public health officials, Whitlock said.

It’s going to take smart and consistent messaging to change attitudes — but that means more than Biden telling people to wear masks once he takes office, Whitlock added.

“Everybody has to own it,” he said. “You have to scream at the top of your lungs at the protests, at the celebrations, at the football games, at the concerts. It has to be, ‘Stop it!'”

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Kelly Loeffler marketed derivatives during Great Recession at world’s most notorious tax haven

Months after the Great Recession brought the global economy to its knees, a financial management company called International Exchange (ICE) created a way for the world’s biggest banks to keep trading in the very financial instruments that contributed to the crisis in the first place.

To help those clients duck U.S. tax laws, ICE created an offshore entity in the Cayman Islands, and registered it in a building known as Ugland House — one of the most notorious locations for offshore tax shelters.

Salon reported in September that Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the ultra-wealthy unelected Georgia senator who faces a heated runoff this January, helped establish and market that tax dodge and give the banks a new lease on derivatives trading. In 2009, Loeffler was the top communications and marketing officer at ICE, and had been married to the company’s founder and CEO, Jeffrey Sprecher, for several years. They bought a $10.5 million mansion that year.

(Sprecher is the chair of the New York Stock Exchange, of which ICE is the parent company. The couple is worth between $800 million and $1 billion, per Forbes, an extravagant amount that has made Loeffler a target of political rivals.)

Though ICE pushes back against the notion that its clearinghouse allows companies to avoid U.S. taxation, the new disclosure of its use of Ugland House — for years pilloried and parodied as one of the most egregious examples of an offshore tax dodge in the world — sharpens questions about the company’s true intent.

It also raises questions about the activities of Sprecher and Loeffler, at a time when Americans were reeling amid generational global economic turmoil.

In 2008, high-risk derivatives trading wrecked the global financial system. The complex financial instruments to blame included credit default swaps (CDS), in which lenders essentially sell someone else the risk that a borrower will default on their loan. CDS trades grew so popular and so widespread that when banks began to fail, it set off a brutal chain reaction around the world.

But just a few months after markets crashed that September, ICE, under Sprecher’s leadership, set up an offshore CDS clearinghouse for the largest banks in the U.S., as well as foreign banks such as Deutsche Bank, UBS and Credit Suisse. The idea was to add a layer of protection to the trades.

Unlike many other countries, including the European Union, the United States taxes income earned overseas — at a rate of 35%. If that money gets reinvested abroad, however, the tax is deferred. In other words, if American companies put profits from their foreign subsidiaries in offshore holding companies, they can access it tax-free.

Those deferrals add up. In 2014, the Joint Committee on Taxation projected the revenue loss from deferrals at $83.5 billion, and the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2017 that deferred taxes on offshore profits will cost the U.S. $1.3 trillion over the next decade, or about $126 billion a year.

Nearly 100,000 companies worldwide avail themselves of the Cayman Islands’ 0% tax rate to duck corporate taxes — twice the size of the territory’s population. Ugland House, a modest five-story building in the capital of George Town, is home to nearly 19,000 corporate entities, or one corporation for every three square feet of space in the building.

Former President Barack Obama remarked of Ugland House in 2008, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

The press has frequently profiled Ugland House. In 2013 the Associated Press called it “a notorious tax shelter.” Foreign Policy magazine said in 2012 that “the building makes a mockery of the U.S. tax system.” The Economist wrote that it was “a symbol of all that is wrong with offshore financial centers.” In 2009, the year ICE registered its Cayman clearinghouse, Rachel Maddow said that Ugland House was one of the “go-to destinations for U.S. companies to set up fake headquarters so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits.”

Loeffler’s forebears in the Senate — Democratic and Republican alike — went after Ugland House by name.

In 2009, the year ICE registered its Cayman clearinghouse, Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, introduced legislation targeting Ugland House specifically:

The bill is a new addition to the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act designed to address the Ugland House problem. It focuses on the situation where a corporation is incorporated in a tax haven as a mere shell operation with little or no physical presence or employees in the jurisdiction. . . . The objective of this set up is to enable the owners of the shell entity to take advantage of all of the benefits provided by U.S. legal, educational, financial, and commercial systems, and at the same time avoid paying U.S. taxes.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing the year before, as the global economy was showing the first cracks from the high-risk trading that ICE later revived in the Caymans, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said American taxpayers should not pay a higher price “because sophisticated tax cheats move dollars offshore,” and singled out Ugland House:

Today, we will hear a lot of complicated reasons for why those 9,000 Americans chose to conduct business out of the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands. And today, we will also hope to get some straight answers from our witnesses about why they do so. And the answers have a lot to do with tax evasion. Offshore tax evasion costs Americans tens of billions of dollars every year. . . . We owe it to hardworking honest taxpayers to make sure that their tax burden does not increase because sophisticated tax cheats move dollars offshore.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., told the New York Sun in 2008, the year before Sprecher’s company established its Caymans setup, that Ugland is “one of the most likely places shady tax transactions could be sheltered.”

“If American companies are setting up shop at the beach just to avoid their tax obligations, we can’t keep our heads in the sand,” Baucus said, emphasizing, as Grassley did, a need to “make sure honest American taxpayers are not footing the bill for corporations that aren’t paying their fair share.”

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said in 2007 that Ugland House was “the poster child for offshore tax haven abuses,” a view shared in 2008 by fellow North Dakota Democrat Sen. Kent Conrad: “Of course, the only business they are doing in this building is monkey business, because what they are doing is claiming they are doing business there in order to engage in tax avoidance.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., made a similar quip in 2011: “The notion that 18,000 corporations are doing business out of this building — that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘small business.’ But there is no real business going on here. The business that is going on here is funny business, under the Tax Code.”

The ICE Cayman Islands arrangement incentivized the largest American financial institutions to execute CDS trades around the world by allowing them to dodge U.S. taxes on their profits.

Sprecher then created a system that rewarded the people whose recklessness had destroyed the economy only months earlier. He found a way to give new life to their CDS trades, which had cost millions of Americans their wealth, homes and livelihood. And Loeffler, his wife and ICE’s top marketing officer, helped package and sell the product.

More recently, Loeffler and Sprecher appear to have tapped another tax loophole for themselves, in the form of a provision in President Trump’s 2017 tax bill that turns private jets into flying tax shelters. The couple bought the plane last December, when Loeffler was appointed to the Senate by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. She stepped down from ICE to take the job, but her husband is still CEO, and she still holds a stake worth half a billion dollars — and sits on a committee that regulates the business.

In June 2009, the year after the bottom fell out of the global economy and a few months after ICE registered its Cayman Islands holding company, the couple purchased their $10.5 million Atlanta mansion. They call it “Descante” — relax.

Loeffler’s campaign did not reply to multiple detailed requests for comment for this article. An ICE spokesperson did not provide comment.

How Joe Biden did so well in Georgia

For nearly 30 years, the state of Georgia has voted reliably Republican in presidential elections. Not since 1992 has the state backed a Democrat for president. Now, the hand recount of 2020 election ballots has confirmed Joe Biden won the state.

The initial returns from Georgia on election night leaned Republican, but in the days that followed, the balance of the count shifted steadily, as ballots from in and around Atlanta were counted. These votes were largely from communities of color, mostly African American – and they represent much of the state’s rich history of civil rights advocacy.

Atlanta, often called the “cradle of the civil rights movement,” was the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. and made up much of the congressional district represented by the late John Lewis.

I am a political scientist and race scholar, with specific emphasis on examining social justice movement strategy and the impact of collective action. To me, the story behind how those Biden-Harris voters were mobilized – with others across the state – is the latest chapter in the state’s history of community organizing for peaceful democratic political change.

A long history

Social justice movements and civil rights activism have always been important in Georgia. Even during Reconstruction, in the wake of the Civil War, the organizers worked to teach Georgians about voting rights and the rules for qualifying to vote in a state that had long denied them that right.

Efforts continued through the years, including rule changes that added more than 100,000 Black voters to the state’s rolls between 1940 and 1947. In the 1950s and 1960s, voting rights campaigns across the South sought to remove the vestiges of a Jim Crow system that suppressed Black voters with literacy tests, grandfather clauses and physical intimidation.

One major effort was the 1961-1962 Albany Movement, based in the Georgia town of that name. The effort was led initially by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with later help from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, two of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations at the time. At the outset, Albany’s population was 40% Black, but many of them were not registered to vote.

The Albany Movement was the first attempt to completely desegregate a community, including through teaching nonviolence for people to engage in civil disobedience. The tactics and strategies pioneered there were successful in Albany and, as King and his movement shifted to Birmingham, Alabama, formed the basis for their work as well.

Between 1960 and 1964, half a million Black voters were registered in Georgia, as part of a larger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voter registration drive across the South.

Those decades of activism built strong networks for grassroots organizing and taught many people how to effectively fight segregation and racism with boycotts, sit-ins and other nonviolent methods of direct action resistance. After King’s assassination in 1968, the movement slowed significantly, showing how important it was to decentralize future civil rights efforts, rather than focusing them on one specific person or place.

Decades later, the Movement for Black Lives arose in response to police brutality against Black Americans, and built on the lessons learned through the 1960s.

A new movement

The latest push for Black voters in Georgia came in 2018, after former State Representative Stacey Abrams, a Black Democratic woman, narrowly lost the race for governor to Brian Kemp, a white Republican man.

Her loss was largely attributed to the efforts of Kemp, who had been the state’s top elections official, to suppress Black votes. Those efforts included throwing more than half a million voters off the rolls – most of them Black – and tightening other voting rules.

In the wake of that election, Abrams committed herself to fight voter suppression in Georgia. She created an organization called Fair Fight to get the purged voters back on the rolls and to register others who were eligible to vote as well.

She began these efforts when Black Georgians’ attention had turned strongly to politics after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. The 2020 death of civil rights icon and longtime Congressman John Lewis brought more attention to racial inequality. Many people realized they had been disenfranchised and were suffering from “intolerance fatigue,” the feeling of being “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Abrams and Fair Fight benefited from the state’s 2016 implementation of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, sometimes called the “motor voter” law, which gives people the opportunity to register to vote at the same time that they apply for or renew a driver’s license.

Altogether, that collective effort registered 800,000 new voters in Georgia since Abrams’ 2018 loss. Some of those were likely among the many that Secretary of State Kemp had forced off the rolls, but many were also people who had never before been registered to vote in Georgia.

In addition to getting people’s names on the voting rolls, these groups pushed the importance of actually voting and taught people how to vote safely, including by mail or in-person before Election Day. Their efforts resulted in a 63% increase over the 2016 statistics for mail-in and early in-person voting ballots cast.

Overall, Georgia’s 2020 turnout was roughly 800,000 more than in the 2016 presidential election.

An additional factor in the Georgia election result may have been President Donald Trump’s own statements discouraging his supporters from voting, but the real key was the grassroots organization, the modern echo of the Albany Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other efforts, that brought new voters into the fold.

Bev-Freda Jackson, Adjunct Professorial Lecturer, American University School of Public Affairs

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

7 of the most ridiculous moments in Rudy Giuliani’s absurd plot to overturn Trump’s election loss

In a Pennsylvania case that is widely viewed by legal experts as frivolous and ridiculous, President Donald Trump decided to let his attorney Rudy Giuliani — who perfectly embodies those adjectives — make the argument that he hopes will win back the election he just lost. The former New York mayor appeared before a court on Tuesday for the first time in decades, according to the Washington Post, and promptly embarrassed himself with a litany of errors, mistakes, and baffling decisions that left observers cackling.

Giuliani was not always regarded as a complete sideshow. He ran the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and he was mayor of the country’s largest city during the 9/11 attacks. But in his time as Trump’s attorney, he has turn into a preposterous spectacle with little grounding in reality or law. Nevertheless, his involvement with the president’s campaign at this time is also darkly sinister, as it is using absurd and meritless arguments in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election or, barring that, cast so much doubt on the legitimacy of the vote that it is permanently marred in the minds of Trump’s supporters.

It’s therefore worthwhile to emphasize just how off-the-wall Giuliani’s conduct and arguments are, which should help undermine the GOP’s disinformation campaign against democracy. Here are seven ridiculous moments from his case before the court:

1. Strict scrutiny

The moment that got the most attention from legal observers, which may seem a bit obscure to those unfamiliar with the law, came in a question about the level of scrutiny the judge should apply in the case. For judges, this is a technical matter that can lead to hot debate. But there’s a standard ranking of standards of scrutiny — strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis — based on the type of case in question. At one point in the proceeding, Judge Matthew Brann asked Giuliani what form of scrutiny should apply in this case.

“The normal one,” Giuliani replied. That was not an answer. Later, Giuliani said: “Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by strict scrutiny.”

This was not a gotcha question, but a basic query that should have come up in any rudimentary preparation for the case. But Giuliani had no clue.

2. Opacity

It wasn’t just legal concepts Giuliani struggled with — simple English words also presented difficulties.

Law & Crime recounted:

Giuliani confessed that he did not know the word “opacity,” applying the Bizarro World definition that it “probably means you can see.”

“It means you can’t,” U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann corrected.

3. The D.C. Bar

Ahead of the hearing, Giuliani claimed the the court that he is a member of the D.C. Bar. However, it appears that this isn’t true:

In other news, it appears @RudyGiuliani committed perjury in his pro hac vice petition to appear in MDPA today.

He is suspended from the DC Bar for non payment of dues. pic.twitter.com/tm1DWv93wY

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) November 17, 2020

4. “This is not a fraud case.”

Despite the fact that Giuliani and Trump have been alleging that the election was afflicted by criminal voter fraud, and Giuliani even told the court that the campaign was alleging “widespread nationwide voter fraud,” he had to admit, when pressed, that it wasn’t true.

“This is not a fraud case” as a matter of law, Giuliani told the judge.

5. Giuliani got Biden’s name wrong

“The Trump campaign has been treated totally differently than the Bush campaign,” he said, perhaps confused because he’s hoping to turn this case into the next Bush v. Gore. (Few experts believe that’s even remotely plausible, based on the arguments.)

6. The basic argument was absurd

Giuliani was essentially arguing that because different counties had different procedures for fixing voters’ ballots that were improperly filled out, the results of the election should be thrown out.

“You’re alleging that the two individual plaintiffs were denied the right to vote,” the judge said. “But at bottom, you’re asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth. Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?”

Instead, Giuliani said they only wanted to throw out the votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — which just happen to be hotspots of Democratic votes.

7. Giuliani seemed confused about others’ identities in the courtroom

AP reported:

Giuliani needled an opposing lawyer, calling him “the man who was very angry with me, I forgot his name.”

He mistook the judge for a federal judge in a separate Pennsylvania district who rejected a separate Trump campaign case: “I was accused of not reading your opinion and that I did not understand it.”

Patients pay thousands for a back pain treatment promoted by exaggerated claims

Desperate to relieve their suffering, people with chronic back pain who comb the internet looking for help sometimes stumble upon a device called the DRX9000.

It’s a mechanical table attached to Space Age-looking controls that its manufacturer claims can stretch the disks of the vertebrae, allowing bulges and herniations to be pulled back into place and taking pressure off nerve roots.

One Pennsylvania woman wrote on the DRX9000 Facebook page that she could barely stand long enough to take a shower or wash dishes because of bulging and torn disks.

“I suffer everyday and I’m disabled because of it,” she wrote. “What should I do?”

On Facebook and its website, the company behind the DRX9000, Excite Medical, offers compelling answers. Nearly 9 out of 10 patients who qualify for treatment on the DRX9000 will get relief, the company says. And it claims that researchers affiliated with prestigious institutions, including Stanford, Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, have done studies that “demonstrated” or “documented” its effectiveness.

The DRX9000 is one of more than a dozen “spinal decompression” devices that for three decades have offered back patients the tantalizing prospect of relief. Excite Medical, which calls the DRX9000 the industry leader, says that 2,400 of its systems are in use in 45 nations and shows it off at trade shows everywhere from Las Vegas to Dusseldorf, Germany, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Chiropractors across the United States buy the machines from Excite Medical and the makers of several similar brands and market the treatment, often using the same claims as the manufacturers — sometimes even going beyond them.

But a FairWarning investigation — based on review of lawsuits, scientific studies, government documents, chiropractic websites and interviews with experts — found that the claims of success for spinal decompression stretch the truth, enticing patients to pay thousands of dollars for a treatment that has never been proven in scientifically rigorous studies to live up to its stupendous billing.

Despite a spate of state regulatory actions in the 2000s against Axiom Worldwide, the original manufacturer of the DRX9000, and chiropractors for making unproven claims, they still permeate the internet. And federal and state regulators who can sanction false claims now show little evidence that they are interested in reining them in, the investigation found.

“Some may say that it is too good to be true, but research indicates that 92% [of] patients report overall improvement,” Shasta Spine Specialists in Redding, California, says of the DRX9000 on its website. The clinic, which cited a 1998 study of a different machine that Aetna described in a policy bulletin as “poorly designed” and without a control group, did not respond to a request for comment.

“This non-surgical spinal decompression system … is scientifically Proven By Mayo Clinic, Duke University, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine!” according to the website for GO Chiropractic in Illinois, which offers treatment with the DRX9000.

Jamie Stephens, one of the chiropractors who runs Go Chiropractic, said in an email, “We have seen nothing but outstanding results from this technology,” and referred further questions to Excite Medical, which he said provided his advertising materials.

Saleem Musallam, president of Excite Medical, said in an interview that the DRX9000 has saved countless people from unnecessary surgery and improved their lives. “I can tell you that you will not find a single person out there to tell you the DRX doesn’t work,” he said.

Musallam acknowledged, however, that more research is needed on spinal decompression in general.

Though other spinal decompression brands were not subject to the same level of scrutiny from regulators, many chiropractors who offer treatment with the devices make similar claims of success, citing studies that have been rejected by insurance companies and Medicare as less than scientifically sound.

For the DRX9000, most of the studies by doctors affiliated with the prestigious universities cited on Excite Medical’s website report promising results such as reduced pain and better functioning. But all eight studies call for more rigorous scientific research, including assigning patients randomly to groups getting treatment or a placebo, to prove the device’s worth. One of the studies’ authors says he has even demanded in a cease-and-desist letter that Excite take his studies off its website because Excite has no rights to his intellectual property. (Musallam declined to comment on the cease-and-desist.)

Insurance companies generally won’t pay the cost of spinal decompression treatment — which Excite Medical says typically runs about $3,500 for a full course of sessions on the DRX9000 — because they say there is no proof it works. Medicare won’t cover it, either.

Aetna, in its policy bulletin, calls spinal decompression “experimental” and “investigational.”

“Currently, there is no adequate scientific evidence that proves [it]… is an effective adjunct to conservative therapy for back pain,” according to the bulletin updated Oct. 1, which reviewed studies going back to 1998. In addition, the devices “have not been adequately studied as alternatives to back surgery.”

The DRX9000 Facebook page includes comments from patients who swear by it.

“I had bulging discs so bad I couldn’t stand up straight or walk,” one South Carolina woman wrote. “Had to use a wheelchair. My chiropractor got me on this and I thank God. After a week I was able to use a walker. After another week I was walking on my own.”

But Stephen Barrett, a retired doctor who founded the website Quackwatch to debunk false medical claims, is skeptical that more rigorous research will support the claims of a 90 percent success rate.

“If this device could actually relieve 9 out of 10 people,” he said, “it would be making headlines everywhere.”

“Worthless” research used to lure patients

Back pain has long plagued humankind. Over the course of a lifetime, 80 percent of people will experience it, with15 to 20 percent reporting a back episode in the past year. It’s the second most common reason for seeking medical attention, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Most back pain resolves on its own within a few months. But chronic cases can upend a person’s ability to work and enjoy life. It’s the most common reason for disability in people under the age of 45.

The spinal decompression industry came to life in the 1990s when a former Canadian government health official named Allan Dyer started marketing a device called the VAX-D that he claimed could lower pressure in disks.

Imitators soon entered the market, and some of the people behind the new devices split off and formed their own companies. The result was more than a dozen, with high-tech-sounding names like Accu-SPINA, Antalgic-Trak and Triton DTS. Before the DRX9000, there were the DRX2000, DRX3000 and DRX5000.

By the late 2000s, Axiom Worldwide’s DRX9000 appears to have pulled ahead of the pack, industry insiders say, thanks perhaps to an aggressive marketing plan. Chiropractors who paid as much as $125,000 for the device also got a package of suggested promotional materials, including the claim the DRX9000 was used in a scientific study that showed an 86 percent success rate. Many of the chiropractors took out newspaper ads that included the claims.

In later lawsuits, chiropractors complained that they were duped by Axiom. One, James Spiering in Texas, described being flown, plane fare and hotel paid, to Axiom headquarters in Florida, where he was told he would recover his investment in four months and clear $1.7 million in five years.

Spiering said he was shown videos full of “fraudulent” claims. The parties settled out of court in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.

Regulators across the U.S. also had started to take notice of the DRX9000’s claims of extraordinary success. Over the course of three years or so, the Oregon attorney general, the Florida attorney general and a group of 11 California district attorneys all filed suits against Axiom or a former chiropractor who created some of its marketing. The suits ended in penalties — $1.125 million in the California case — and Axiom agreed to only make claims based on reliable scientific evidence, according to news stories and settlement documents.

One of the claims the regulators targeted was from a 2003 study by Dr. Thomas Gionis that found 86 percent of patients treated with an unnamed spinal decompression device experienced an “immediate resolution of symptoms.”

The Florida attorney general, in its 2009 lawsuit against Axiom Worldwide accusing the company of deceptive and unfair trade practices, pointed out that the Gionis study lacked a control group and combined spinal decompression with other types of treatment. (Axiom was using the study in its promotions even though the study did not specify what type of spinal decompression table it tested.) Six years later, without admitting any violations of the law, Axiom agreed to a permanent injunction promising only to make any claims based on “competent and reliable scientific evidence” and to reimburse the attorney general $19,000 for its costs.

Not only was the Gionis study far from scientifically rigorous — the company also withheld information about the doctor himself that tended to cast doubt on the findings, according to two lawsuits against Axiom.

Before he did the study, Gionis had been sentenced to five years in prison for hiring two men to assault his estranged wife — the daughter of film legend John Wayne — and her boyfriend. The men sent by Gionis bound and roughed up the two victims, and slashed the boyfriend’s Achilles tendon, according to the charges. His medical license was later put on probation as a result of the conviction.

Gionis, who maintained his innocence in the assault on his wife, did not respond to a request for an interview.

Musallam, who worked at Axiom before starting Excite Medical, eventually winning the intellectual property rights to the DRX9000 through protracted litigation, called the Gionis study “worthless” and said he didn’t use it.

“We try to stick to hard facts and things that are credible,” he said.

Yet it’s easy to find scores of chiropractic office websites that do, including those that offer treatment with the DRX9000 and also other popular brands of spinal decompression machines. Some reproduce the entire Gionis report, while others refer to it by name or cite the 86 percent “success rate.”

“Decompression 86% Effective,” reads the headline over the Gionis study on the website of Natural Spine Care in Dublin, California, which offers treatment on a different device called ABS.

Jim Yang, one of the chiropractors there, said that “the people we buy it from provide that information,” and that he would have expected them to do their due diligence about the study’s validity (ABS is no longer in business). Yang added that “people do very well” with the treatment, and he cited one patient who’d been told he would never ski, golf or run after back surgery but is now doing all three.

As the Gionis study came under fire from regulators, Axiom realized it needed new data and formed a medical advisory board to do additional studies, Musallam said.

But the research, in many cases funded by Axiom, included big caveats: Because it lacked scientific rigor, including double-blinding in which neither doctors nor patients know who was randomly assigned real treatment versus placebos, no definite conclusions could be drawn.

The studies have another shortcoming, said Richard Deyo, professor emeritus at Oregon Health and Science University who has studied low back pain and inappropriate uses of medical technology, and who has reviewed the studies.

Eight in 10 people with back pain get better on their own, he said. So how to tell if those treated with spinal decompression would have improved without it?

Complaints of injuries

Spinal decompression is often advertised as a safe alternative to surgery. But several lawsuits and FDA documents show that patients have alleged serious injuries from the devices.

In July, Charlene Vaught of Florida sued Massage and Spinal Therapy of Winter Haven and owner Angie Reynolds, alleging that she experienced severe neck pain, atrophy in both hands and difficulty with motor skills after a treatment on a DRX9000 by an office assistant. Vaught says she now needs a home health aide.

The company has denied Vaught’s allegations. It did not respond to a request for comment.

On the DRX9000 Facebook page, more than a year before the lawsuit was filed, Reynolds claimed that in her 15 years of treating patients she had chalked up a 96 percent “success” rate, though she didn’t describe what that meant.

“I personally had three failed spine surgeries,” she wrote, “and the DRX 9000 is what finally cured my back pain. It is safe, it is effective, and it definitely is life-changing for most all of my patients.”

That case is still being litigated, but others have resulted in damages.

In 2010, for instance, a federal judge awarded a New Jersey woman, Marlene Newman, $380,000 from Axiom Worldwide in a default judgement after she suffered a torn rotator cuff during a DRX9000 treatment and had to have three surgeries.

The FDA has received about two dozen complaints about malfunctions in spinal decompression devices manufactured by various companies, some of which resulted in injuries. In 2010, a patient reported pain with every step after 20 treatments on the DRX9000. The patient described it as a “modern version” of a medieval “torture device.”

Many of the FDA complaints are about the Triton DTS machine. One alleged that in 2018, a rope attached to a patient’s harness pulled so hard that the patient had to be taken to an emergency room. A patient in 2015 described losing feeling in the legs and wrote, “It felt like my lower body was separated in two pieces.” The patient continued to have complications a year-and-a-half later, according to the complaint. DJO, the manufacturer in Vista, California, did not respond to a request for comment.

The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for documents showing what actions, if any, it took in these cases, but said that in general it requires device manufacturers to investigate “adverse events” and that the complaints are one tool the agency uses in deciding whether to take further action.

Taken together, the lawsuits and reports do not document widespread injuries from the devices, but they do undermine the claim, made by many practitioners, that spinal decompression is free of risk.

Musallam, president of Excite Medical, said he was unaware of any reports of injuries. “If someone is following its intended use and they’re paying attention to the contraindications, I don’t see how it’s possible they can possibly be hurt by the machine,” he said.

A lack of oversight

The federal agencies with the authority to sanction unproven claims, the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, appear to have done little to rein in either manufacturers or practitioners.

Barrett, the Quackwatch founder, says that over the years he has contacted the FDA several times about advertising for spinal decompression, as well as other medical devices. He’s never heard back.

“They don’t seem to want to regulate devices,” he said. “I can’t think of any logical reason why not. I mean, spinal decompression is a big industry.”

In response to FairWarning’s questions, an FDA spokeswoman released a statement saying, “When FDA receives information such as a complaint or allegation about a device, the agency will follow up as appropriate.”

In two cases, in 2011 and 2015, the FDA forced spinal decompression manufacturers to recall promotional literature that recommended uses or promised results beyond what the agency approved. But a search of FDA “warning letters” did not turn up the names of any of the major spinal decompression brands. It’s possible that the FDA took other types of action, but the agency did not immediately respond to a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records that would show that.

For drugs that it approves, the FDA requires three randomized clinical trials. But devices that are merely “cleared” by the FDA — meaning that the FDA finds they’re essentially the same as others already on the market — don’t need to have any trials at all, said Deyo, the Oregon professor.

“And so most of these things actually never undergo any sort of rigorous research,” Deyo said.

Today, some chiropractors still advertise that spinal decompression devices are “approved” rather than “cleared” by the FDA even though regulators a decade ago required manufacturers and practitioners to stop using that terminology.

The FTC has not issued any warning letters to manufacturers of spinal decompression devices over the past two decades or taken other public action. The FTC declined to comment.

At the state level, there’s been little action since the 2000s, when several states cracked down. At the time, state chiropractic boards also disciplined individual chiropractors for flimsy claims in spinal decompression advertising, including ones in Florida, California, North Carolina, Kentucky and Wisconsin.

But the state authorities seem to have moved on. Eight state chiropractic boards contacted for this investigation, including several that had sanctioned chiropractors a decade or more ago, could not point to any cases in recent years.

Deyo notes that one of the studies on Excite’s own website looked back at seven earlier studies of spinal decompression that did include randomized control groups. Six of the seven found no difference between those who got spinal decompression and those who did not. The seventh reported lower pain scores but the patients were no less disabled.

“So far,” Deyo said, “the best evidence suggests there’s not much of an advantage of these things.”

* * *

A story 12 years in the telling

In almost three decades as a reporter, I’ve written only two stories that were never published. In the language of the newsroom, they got spiked.

The term, from what I understand, comes from the days when editors who read a story that displeased them would impale the offending paper on a spike mounted on a wooden base, like the ones waiters use for orders.

My first spiked story came early in my career, in the late 1980s. I was working at a weekly in Palo Alto, Calif. The editor assigned the reporters to each find a local worker — it could be anyone — and write a profile. I thought the assignment a tad banal, and resolved to profile someone who would scandalize the tasteful liberals of Palo Alto — a stripper.

I had fun spending the day with Brandi, a wholesome New Ager serious about dance, and writing her story. But my editor saw it for what it was — an act of insubordination. Spike Number One.

The second came two decades later, when I was working as an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee, and this one had much more troubling implications for the state of the news business.

It all started one day when I got a tip that would launch me on a new project — a long email about a state agency, the Board of Chiropractic Examiners.

It seemed too juicy to be true. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had appointed a couple of old pals from bodybuilding days to this board, which was supposed to protect the public from quackery, ineptitude and thievery in the chiropractic ranks, the tipster wrote. And now these appointees were running amok, trying to make the board more friendly to their brand of chiropractic. The new chairman held that adjusting the spine in combination with alternative therapies could not only relieve back pain, but also cure everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis.

The editors at The Bee loved it. How could you not?

As a follow-up, one of my new sources suggested that I look into a medical device called the DRX9000 that claimed to cure back pain by stretching out the spinal disks. The board had tried to crack down on chiropractors making baseless claims about the device, the source said, but in the internet age, it was almost impossible to police bogus advertising that spread at the speed of light. My editor gave me the OK to pursue the story, and I was off.

I looked into the claims made for the DRX9000, and in a nutshell found that people were being enticed to pay thousands of dollars for a treatment that, despite a claimed 86 percent success rate, had never been scientifically proven.

I turned in the story, but soon found out that the top editors had problems with it. The objections seemed odd. After a couple of decades in the business, a reporter kind of knows when a story is not up to snuff. When an editor points it out, you think, “Well, yeah … “

But the criticisms of the DRX9000 story seemed vague, hard to answer. One of the editors wanted the story written “more like a Time magazine article.” That left me scratching my head. I had made a reference in my first draft to the “placebo effect” – the tendency of patients to improve when they believe they are getting treatment, even if the supposed medication is a sugar pill. One editor was adamant that the term had no place in the story because “placebo effect” was medical jargon that no one would understand.

They did raise one valid point. I had not spoken to anyone who had undergone treatment with the DRX9000. I knew that chiropractors who offered DRX9000 treatment advertised in The Bee. I’d noted the frequent full-page ads. So I grabbed a recent issue and found one.

It included testimonials from satisfied customers. I managed to locate about a half dozen of them. A few confirmed that, indeed, the DRX9000 had relieved their back pain. A woman in Rocklin, a town east of Sacramento, told me that she had been forced to sell her daycare business and her home after she injured her neck and back picking up children. After six weeks on the DRX9000, she was off pain medication and able to pursue hobbies such as panning for gold.

The others told much different stories. One man said he paid about $12,000 for a series of treatments, felt better and agreed to write a testimonial. But after a few weeks, the pain came back as excruciating as ever. The 62-year-old eventually had surgery. He called the DRX9000 “witchcraft.”

A 23-year-old woman said in her testimonial that after DRX9000 treatments, “I feel I have been given a chance at a new life.” But the new life didn’t last, she told me. A year later, the beneficial effects had evaporated. She was taking pain medication around the clock. And she was still trying to pay off the $5,200 cost of the treatments. She was “a little shocked” to hear that her testimonial was part of the ad, and planned to ask the chiropractor to remove it.

“I don’t want other people to read it thinking it will cure them as well,” she said.

I added all of this to the story. But it didn’t help win over the editors – quite the contrary. They showered me with new criticisms. I rewrote the story two or three more times, and it moved up and down the chain of command. Finally, one last try met with…silence. The story sat for weeks, then months. I asked my boss about it periodically, and then less often. No one told me my story had been spiked – but it was hard to conclude otherwise.

As naive as it may seem, it had not occurred to me that it might be a problem for me to go after one of The Bee’s advertisers. I had been raised in a newspaper culture in which there was supposed to be an impenetrable wall between the business side and the newsroom. It was verboten for journalists to even think about the newspaper’s financial interests, and in those days many journalists were oblivious to the company’s balance sheet, surprising for people who were in the business of gathering information.

Certainly, there had been lapses over the years when newspapers caved in to pressure from advertisers. But we knew about these cases because they turned into scandals. They were considered anomalies, counterbalanced by the many tales of editors who proudly printed stories knowing full well that they would cut into the newspaper’s profits.

In “Knightfall,” a book about the decline of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, Davis Merritt recalls how in the 1960s the president of Knight newspapers assured the staff of The Charlotte Observer that they had “done the right thing” by running columns critical of a car salesman, despite the fact that it led to an advertising boycott that cost the chain several hundred thousand dollars.

Not long before I embarked on my DRX9000 project, The Bee had run stories critical of the safety record of Humvees that led to some advertising losses.

But times were changing in the news business. For decades, we had fretted about the loss of readers, but the profits kept pouring in. Now the internet was changing everything. First, Craigslist decimated classified ad revenue. Then the longtime stalwarts in display ads – department stores, car dealerships, supermarkets – started pulling out in favor of cheaper alternatives on the internet. Facebook and Google vacuumed up almost all the digital ad revenue, leaving newspapers with the crumbs, yoked to the unwieldy printing press because print ads still fetched higher prices. But even that source of revenue was drying up.

Where once you might have seen a full-page ad from Macy’s, you now got appeals to sell your gold coins, take control of your toenail fungus – or heal your back with the DRX9000. The Bee, in a desperate attempt to maintain revenue, was selling display ads at a discount. The DRX9000 chiropractors and curers of toenail fungus were the types of businesses that were taking advantage of the newly affordable rates.

It wasn’t just the Bee. I recently found several lawsuits filed by newspapers against spinal decompression clinics around the same time the Bee was running ads, from Buffalo to Phoenix. Apparently the clinics had failed to pay their advertising bills. In a complaint to the Food and Drug Administration alleging injuries from DRX9000 treatments, one patient wrote, “I was duped by a local chiropractor that had advertised in our local newspaper.”

In the newspaper business as a whole, the squeeze on revenue was endangering the wall between the newsroom and the ad side. Still, I went on as if nothing had changed. But by the time my DRX9000 story was spiked, I was forced to consider the possibility that the advertising had something to do with it. Do I know this for sure? No. Maybe the story just sucked, filled with incomprehensible medical gobbledygook and lacking that magical Time magazine touch considered de rigueur at The Sacramento Bee.

And I never confronted the editors. It was a very bad time for newspapers, the beginning of a tailspin that would remake the industry over three or four years and leave many journalists out of work. With two kids to support, I would have been naïve, I thought, not to weigh the consequences of an ugly showdown with the bosses.

A confrontation also would be embarrassing – like having to tell a coworker that you suspected them of doing something unsavory, like filching your pens.

Just as all of this was happening in the spring of 2008, I was chosen to be a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. I would be heading off to Ann Arbor that fall, where the Knight-Wallace fellowship would pay me more than I made at The Bee to take whatever courses struck my fancy, drink wine and eat sumptuous meals twice a week with a dozen other fellows, and travel to Argentina and Russia. With a prospect like that on the horizon, why did I need to be picking fights with the newspaper that had granted me leave to go and whoop it up for a year?

I did go off to Ann Arbor, and it was everything I imagined it would be and more. Despite the many diversions, though, I found myself from time to time dwelling on my DRX9000 story. I told people about it until even I got sick of hearing it. As my year off wound to a close in the spring of 2009, I found myself dreading a return to The Bee. Part of it was that I felt transformed by the fellowship and couldn’t imagine going back to doing the exact same thing. But the killing of DRX9000 story played a part.

Around that time, a former colleague got in touch. She had taken a buyout from The Bee shortly after I left for the fellowship and gone to work for a newly-formed office in the California Senate that did investigations of state operations. The office was hiring a third staff member, and she wondered if I would be interested.

It seemed a momentous decision to leave behind a job that had been so much more than that. It pained me deeply to leave a profession that had felt to me like putting on clothes that fit for the first time. I routinely got weepy over black-and-white movies that depicted frenetic, wise-cracking newsrooms of yore. They were romanticized, no doubt, but they captured the spirit of the places I had worked. My family forbade me from watching “His Girl Friday” one more time. But from an objective standpoint, staying at a newspaper was about as sensible as my great grandfather’s decision in the 1890s to start a buggy business.

And so I went to work for the Senate. It was a satisfying job — our investigative reports often resulted in new laws or administrative reforms. My boss was an admirable public servant. But I knew in my heart that I was not truly independent, not the way I had been when I worked in a newsroom. And then, five years in, my boss was termed out and his successor apparently decided he didn’t like the idea of a bunch of ex-reporters snooping around the halls of government. And so he spiked our entire office.

Eventually, the lure of the newsroom proved irresistible, and in 2016 I left behind family and friends to work as investigations editor at a nonprofit news outlet in Honolulu. I was overjoyed to be back in a newsroom. When the pandemic hit, though, I realized I needed to be home in California and was lucky to find a good job here, at FairWarning.

One of our core coverage areas is consumer issues. And one day, while mulling over possible stories, the name popped into my head unbidden. “DRX9000.”

FairWarning published the story today, focusing not just on the DRX9000 but on the spinal decompression industry as a whole.

In the 12 years it took me to get it published, things have gone from bad to worse for newspapers. The fat financial cushion that allowed the media to take financial hits for reporting facts is threadbare at best. A host of nonprofits like FairWarning have blossomed, helping to fill the void left by a decade-and-a-half of layoffs. But most of them are not rolling in the dough, either.

Some day, I believe, someone will figure out how to make journalism profitable again, and publishers and editors will once more brag about losing money by pissing off advertisers. In the meantime, bleeding money and beat up by much of the public, we have to find some way to hold onto our independence. So it won’t take 12 years to tell the story of the next DRX9000. —John Hill

Trump’s purge of defense agencies comes at a vulnerable time for U.S. national security

President Donald Trump’s recent firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and subsequent resignations from the department of four more top civilian officials — either in protest or under pressure — are raising alarms in Washington. All were replaced by people with questionable qualifications.

One defense official described the situation to CNN as “scary” and “very unsettling.”

On Nov. 17, Trump also fired the cybersecurity director at the Department of Homeland Security, who had rejected the president’s claims of election fraud. Trump is reportedly weighing the additional termination of CIA director Gina Haspel as part of a late-term purge.

The transition period between two administrations, especially ones that are ideologically opposed, can be a socially and politically unstable time. Trump’s refusal to concede increases that instability this year.

Major personnel changes at America’s defense and intelligence agencies make it difficult for these departments to maintain the daily operations that oversee military forces and protect U.S. national security — much less follow strategic plans.

A lapse in preparedness can be deadly. According to the 9/11 Commission, the unusually short transition period between the Clinton and Bush administrations — truncated by the dispute over the election’s outcome — resulted in some of the intelligence and policy deficiencies that allowed Al-Qaida to attack and kill close to 3,000 Americans.

Politicizing national security

Political appointments have always influenced the American security apparatus. But this problem has intensified dramatically in recent years. If security and intelligence agencies make decisions based on narrow political considerations like satisfying the personal grudge or campaign promise of a president, it can put lives at risk.

Trump’s latest Defense Department appointments have some necessary policy experience. But their main attribute appears to be loyalty to the president. Loyalty goes beyond partisanship. It means policy decisions may be subject to the personal interests of the president.

For example, Defense Secretary Esper may have lost his job for opposing the sped-up withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan now underway. A withdrawal is in line with Trump’s 2016 campaign pledge to end “endless wars.” One former CIA official described the Afghanistan troop drawdown as “reckless.”

Brig. Gen. Antony Tata, who on Nov. 10 replaced Esper’s second-in-command James Anderson as undersecretary of defense for policy, is known for his vocal criticism of Democrats. In one 2018 tweet he called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”

U.S. intelligence has also become politicized under Trump.

The roles of CIA director and director of national intelligence have both traditionally been held by nonpartisan figures with substantial military and intelligence experience. Trump replaced one such figure, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, with a series of partisan appointees, some of whom were never vetted or confirmed by the Senate. Finally he chose John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman loyal to Trump who has no intelligence experience.

Lives at stake

Politicization undermines the ability of the intelligence community to deliver an unbiased, accurate and critical assessment of U.S. security policies and potential threats. That compromises the standing and effectiveness of these agencies.

“If people believe that our intelligence community is politicized, it will lose its credibility,” wrote intelligence veteren Michael Morell, a former CIA acting director, in a blunt Oct. 12 Washington Post op-ed. “Its views on important issues will carry less weight with policymakers and the American people, and it will therefore be less effective in warning of threats to our national security.”

“We will all be less safe as a result,” Morrell concluded.

Ratcliffe lost credibility within months of his May 2020 confirmation when he overrode the advice of numerous colleagues to declassify “at the direction of the president of the United States” sensitive information based on unsubstantiated Russian sources.

The intelligence, which alleged that Hillary Clinton tried to create a scandal in 2016 by tying Trump to Russian hacking, was released 35 days before the 2020 election in an apparent bid to damage the Democratic Party.

Intelligence may be declassified when “public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to national security.” Ratcliffe’s case did not meet this bar, according to experienced legal experts.

Eroding civilian oversight

A desire to aid Trump’s presidential campaign may also explain Ratcliffe’s attempt to limit civilian supervision over intelligence agencies.

One of Congress’ major duties is to supervise and monitor the various agencies of the executive branch. Legislative supervision is carried out via the control over budgeting, appointments and specialized investigative and legislative forums and committees.

Congressional oversight is particularly important with secretive agencies like the CIA, National Security Agency and the FBI.

These agencies have powers that can undermine constitutional guarantees, civil rights and international law. They undertake missions that may endanger American lives and have far-reaching consequences for the United States’ domestic security and international relationships. Occasionally they have violated legal norms.

Yet in August Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe announced he would end in-person briefings to Congress until after the Nov. 3 elections, allegedly to reduce leaks. Ratcliffe reversed his decision after pressure from Congress. But attempting to keep U.S. intelligence from lawmakers was unprecedented.

End of an era

Congressional supervision of defense and intelligence functions was, until recently, one of the few reliably bipartisan enclaves of American politics.

From Republicans like the late Sen. John McCain to Democrats like President-elect Joe Biden, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have come together to ensure these agencies work in legal and ethical ways to protect national security.

Congress authorizes wars, anti-terror missions, foreign negotiations and even the detention of American citizens based on the intelligence it receives. Oversight allows Congress to trust this information is accurate, unbiased and realistic.

Congressional supervision is a check on the executive-controlled intelligence and security agencies. With the country experiencing political and social instability, this civilian authority is more critical than ever.

Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell

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

Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excoriate Mitch McConnell on House floor

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor Friday on behalf of her working-class district and struggling Americans across the country to call out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for sending members of the upper chamber home for Thanksgiving without striking a deal on coronavirus pandemic relief legislation.

The New York Democrat decided to rise and speak out, she said, because McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, “decided to break the Senate.”

“And he broke the Senate,” she said, “as there are thousands of people in Texas lined up for food lines. He broke the Senate while hospitals no longer have beds to house the sick.”

“He broke the Senate, and dismissed the Senate, while 30 million Americans are on the brink of eviction,” she continued. “He dismissed the Senate when every single day, when we go back to our communities, people are asking us, ‘Where is there going to be help? Is there going to be a second stimulus check? Are we going to get the resources that we need?”

Recognizing that Americans continue to grapple with the “extraordinary health and economic hardship of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the congresswoman emphasized that “in breaking the Senate, we are abandoning our people.”

Watch:

Rudy Giuliani’s quixotic frenzy has observers wondering if he may need Trump’s protection

Erstwhile LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani on Thursday emceed a 90-minute Trump campaign press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters, where he and Sidney Powell, the red-pilled lead lawyer for Michael Flynn’s defense team, espoused outright lies and fringe conspiracy theories about President Donald Trump‘s electoral loss under high-powered media lights.

At one point, brown-tinged liquid inched down Giuliani’s cheeks after hair coloring appeared to sweat off the man formerly known as “America’s mayor.”

There is no evidence of voter fraud in the presidential election, according to election officials in every state. President-elect Joe Biden won with a record-setting 80 million ballots, posting a margin of victory of nearly six million votes over Trump.

The Trump campaign was met with defeat in three lawsuits on Thursday, hours after dropping a separate federal lawsuit in Michigan seeking to block the certification of ballots from the Detroit area. Giuliani admitted in open court in Pennsylvania on the previous day that an alleged fraud case was actually “not a fraud case.”

Among the lies told by Giuliani and Powell were dishonest attempts to link Dominion voting machines to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died seven years ago. The self-proclaimed “elite strike force” also alleged that the machines were financed by the Clinton Foundation and Democratic megadonor George Soros.

The conference reached the apex, however, with a stemwinder first posited by Powell and echoed more than once by Giuliani, repeating a false conspiracy theory circulating in right-wing internet crawlspaces that those voting machines had somehow sent American votes to Germany which were in turn counted in Spain.

Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who holds a vaguely defined official position at the White House and was present at the press conference, tested positive for COVID-19 the next day.

The 90-minute paroxysm, which Fox News broadcast live in its entirety, drew swift condemnation.

Christopher Krebs, Trump’s recently-fired former director of a Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity unit, called it “the most dangerous hour and 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported that the sentiment was shared even among Trump’s aides: “Trump advisers — none of whom are speaking publicly — are saying this press conference and what Giuliani is doing is dangerous. They’re waiting for the president to recognize that but he is not so far.”

One week earlier, Giuliani made patently false allegations of election fraud at another press conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping company adjoining a porn store and a crematorium. He subsequently wrested full control of the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, making his first arguments before a federal court in 28 years, which were panned as “disgraceful.”

Ahead of the election, Giuliani, whose pro bono work for the president led directly to his impeachment, for weeks pushed a dubious story alleging that contents from a hard drive of unknown origin revealed criminal wrongdoing on the part of Joe Biden’s son. The conspiracy campaign culminated in an online video broadcast in late October in which Giuliani called the former vice president the “prince of darkness.”

This whirlwind of outlandish claims have struck observers — Trump allies included — as smacking of desperation. As the brown streaks crept down the cheeks of the former mayor, a Trump campaign adviser texted a journalist from The Washington Post asking, “Is he deteriorating in real time?”

Trump backer Geraldo Rivera said on Fox News, “I love the president. I wanted him to win this election. What I saw with Rudy Giuliani, who I’ve known for decades, was bizarre.”

GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted on Thursday, “The thing about Rudy is that he wasn’t a carnival barker or a second-rate figure who needed to flail wildly for attention. He had mainstream respectability and was a national hero for a time. Why he decided to go down this road is a great mystery.”

The defense attorney for Lev Parnas, one of Giuliani’s indicted former associates, asked the question of the void of Twitter: “What’s happened to Rudy Giuliani?”

CNN analyst Joe Lockhart suggested that Giuliani, who has over the last two years aligned himself with foreign agents and indicted felons, might need Trump’s protection.

“One explanation of why Rudy is doing what Rudy is doing? He needs a pardon and he’s trying to earn it,” Lockhart tweeted.

A CNN report on Thursday included a passage indicating that Giuliani had recently come under renewed federal scrutiny.

“Complicating matters is that Giuliani’s post-election swirl of activity comes as federal investigators renewed their investigative interest into his work that is already the subject of a New York-based investigation,” CNN reported.

In recent weeks, FBI agents in New York contacted witnesses and asked new questions about Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine and possible connections to Russian intelligence, according to a person briefed on the matter. The FBI investigators, who have spoken to at least one witness previously months ago, came back to ask new questions recently about possible origins of emails and documents related to Hunter Biden that appear similar to those that the New York Post reported that Giuliani and others helped provide. CNN has previously reported that the ongoing probe is examining whether Giuliani is wittingly or unwittingly part of a Russian influence operation, according to people briefed on the matter.

The report added that the investigation had cycled out of the headlines as Giuliani arrogated the leading role in Trump’s challenges to his defeat.

According to interviews conducted by Salon with individuals familiar with the case and multiple news reports, Giuliani’s business dealings have been subject of an extended federal probe led by the FBI and the Southern District of New York — the very office he once led.

That probe grew out of the arrest of Parnas and another Giuliani associate, who were booked one year ago on unrelated campaign finance charges at a Washington-area airport as they waited to board a flight to Vienna. Their arrests came as impeachment hearings heated up in Congress — and one day after they met Giuliani for drinks at Trump’s Washington hotel.

This week, The New York Times reported that Giuliani, who has scraped for cash in the last year, asked the Trump campaign to pay him a day rate of $20,000 for his work on the last-ditch legal crusade. Such a price tag would rank Giuliani among the most highly paid lawyers in the world.

“I never asked for $20,000,” Giuliani told The Times. “The arrangement is — we’ll work it out at the end.”

However, his performance so far has heads shaking.

“If the campaign doesn’t want to pay him $20,000 a day, I’m sure the Biden campaign would,” a former senior Trump White House official told CNN.

“It’s easy to joke about this, and Rudy has become the butt of a lot of jokes. On the other hand, this is deadly serious stuff,” top election law expert Rick Hasen told CNN. “They’re talking about trying to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people, and take the election away from the winner and hand it to the loser.”

Neither Giuliani nor the Trump campaign responded to Salon’s requests for comment.

Plaintiffs in Trump’s lawsuits embrace conspiracy theories — one has even violated election laws

Plaintiffs in a number of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits challenging the president’s electoral defeat have peddled conspiracy theories and made racist comments. One of them, a plaintiff represented by Rudy Giuliani in federal court this week, was even implicated in an election fraud scheme of his own.

The new revelations, first reported by Salon, add another dimension of doubt to President Donald Trump’s widely discredited, last-ditch legal challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

“We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself,” Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. “The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs.”

Among the more recent of the campaign’s lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

Roberts is a former Pennsylvania Democratic state representative, who served from 1993-2006. During that time, he was accused of violating campaign laws multiple times, including election fraud.

In 2004, Roberts was accused of bribing a stalking-horse candidate to siphon primary votes from a Democratic challenger. That spoiler candidate, Michael Ciampanelli, at the time 20 years old, told the local board of elections that Roberts had paid him $200 to put his name on the ballot. A state grand jury investigated the claims, as did the attorney general, but what became of the probe is unclear.

That same year, the rival also accused Roberts of forging 33 signatures on his own nominating petition. The allegation was backed up by a woman who worked in one of Roberts’ offices. The woman said Roberts staff told her to lie about the matter, warning her she could face jail time “if the real story came out,” according to the Associated Press.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission slapped Roberts with a $600 fine for violations in 2001 and 2004, including unlawfully using legislative staff to organize campaign events and co-opting his legislative office as a drop-off point for campaign materials.

A separate Pennsylvania lawsuit dropped on Thursday by the campaign featured Ted Dannerth as a plaintiff, a man who has repeatedly spread conspiracy theories online.

For instance, Dannerth has tweeted multiple times this year about “Project Blue Beam,” an apparent reference to a fringe conspiracy theory falsely claiming that a NASA-Illuminati joint effort is engineering earthquakes in order to establish a new-age religion led by the antichrist. Dannerth has also called women a “weapon” against what he considers to be the “imminent threat” of sterility that would accompany a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump campaign plaintiff stitched a number of baseless fringe, QAnon-adjacent theories together in a lengthy Facebook post this April. Among other things, he claimed that Oprah Winfrey’s house had been raided in a sex-trafficking sting and the media had brainwashed Americans against the president, who “is working from the bottom up, to remove the Democrat/Communist/Socialist Epstein/Deep State/CCP scourge from the planet.”

Dannerth was also involved in a previous 2020 election lawsuit challenging public use of a private grant to fund election initiatives over his opposition to “the election of progressive candidates in local, state and federal elections.” That suit was dismissed by District Judge Matthew Brann, who is presiding over the Trump campaign’s current lawsuit.

Several plaintiffs in the campaign’s challenge to block Michigan canvassers from certifying Detroit-area ballots present similar personal histories.

Eric Ostergen, a Republican poll challenger named in the suit, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. This April, he shared a Washington Times op-ed calling coronavirus “the biggest hoax in political history,” on Facebook. In a separate post, he endorsed the since-discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine.

Ostergen posted two times on Facebook about lawsuits he filed against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., over coronavirus measures, saying that “the tyrants will now be reeled in.” He has also denied climate change science on Facebook, a platform where he has also posted baseless claims about Hunter Biden’s laptop and voter fraud in Detroit’s 2016 election.

The Trump campaign’s Michigan case also features another coronavirus truther, Marian Sheridan, head of the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), who in October led a “guard the vote” project after Trump’s calls to recruit an “army” of poll-watchers.

In April, Sheridan’s group staged “Operation Gridlock,” where thousands of protesters jammed the streets of Lansing with their vehicles to express displeasure with Whitmer’s stay-home orders. MCC also launched “Operation Haircut” in defense of a barber who opened his shop for illegal haircuts amid the state’s lockdowns. And Sheridan hosted a Tea Party event to educate the public about “the common roots of COVID-19 hysteria and climate change.”

A third plaintiff in the Michigan lawsuit, Grosse Pointe City Councilman Matt Seely, has mocked allegations of sexual assault in social media posts, including against Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“I’M SORRY THAT BAD MAN TOUCHED YOU INAPPROPRIATELY,” read one meme, featuring a crying woman, which Seely shared during the Kavanaugh hearings. “LET’S WAIT 30 OR 40 YEARS … UNTIL HE RUNS FOR OFFICE … AGAINST A DEMOCRAT.”

Seely also drew criticism for a social media post in which he connected four Democratic Congresswomen of color, known collectively as “the Squad,” to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the post — which was published on the 2019 anniversary of the attacks — Seely said the elevation of those women to Congress was “proof we have forgotten” about 9/11. The words accompanied a picture of the Twin Towers on fire.

Seely pushed back against criticism over the post, saying he could express political views on his private Facebook page. In doing so, he was backed by the mayor of Grosse Pointe Shores and other city council members.

In Nevada, former Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle — who already had a mail-in ballot case tossed in October — filed a lawsuit parallel to other GOP election challenges in the state, asking the court to stop the state from certifying its votes.

Angle is known for repeatedly pushing right-wing conspiracy theories, such as warning that American towns would fall to Sharia law and claiming fluoride in drinking water is a “communist plot to undermine Western democracy.”

In a radio interview ahead of the 2010 midterms, Angle, who at the time was running against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, alluded to armed insurrection as a remedy for a liberal Congress, saying — citing Thomas Jefferson — that “it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.”

“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?” Angle said. “I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

Pfizer is submitting an emergency use authorization request to the FDA for its vaccine candidate

Pfizer and BioNTech, a pair of pharmaceutical companies that announced earlier this month that they have developed a COVID-19 vaccine candidate which is more than 90 percent effective, are applying to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for an emergency use authorization that would allow for quicker distribution of their vaccine.

“Filing in the U.S. represents a critical milestone in our journey to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine to the world and we now have a more complete picture of both the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine, giving us confidence in its potential,” Dr. Albert Bourla, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, said in a joint statement released on Friday. “We look forward to the upcoming Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee discussion and continue to work closely with the FDA and regulatory authorities worldwide to secure authorization of our vaccine candidate as quickly as possible.”

Bourla also told NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday that once the vaccine is authorized by the FDA for emergency use, “we will be ready to start distributing our vaccine within hours.”

Pfizer and BioNTech are not the only pharmaceutical companies to make big vaccine announcements this month. On Monday the biotechnology company Moderna announced that its vaccine candidate is 94.5 percent effective at preventing the coronavirus infection that results in COVID-19. Then on Thursday Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced that their vaccine candidate is safe and provokes a strong immune response in elderly patients.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine candidate and the Moderna vaccine candidate are both similar in that they are mRNA (synthetic messenger RNA) vaccines. This means that they operate using mRNA, which is the part of a life form’s DNA that helps cells make proteins so that they can remain healthy. mRNA-based vaccines manufacture synthetic RNA that has been engineered to emulate the virus in question. Once injected into the human body, the vaccine trains the cells to produce proteins similar to those already found in the virus, which empowers the immune system to effectively fight it off.

At the time of this writing more than 57 million people worldwide have been infected with the coronavirus and almost 1.4 million of them have died, according to the Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. That number includes 11.8 million cases in the United States, of whom more than 250,000 have died.

The FDA has authorized the first home COVID-19 self-testing kit

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization on Tuesday for the first COVID-19 self-test that you can take at home, a potentially major breakthrough in helping fight the pandemic.

“Throughout the course of this pandemic, the nation has lacked adequate COVID testing capacity,” Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon by email. “This has hobbled our diagnostic, public health surveillance and community risk reduction (wearing of masks, physical distancing, handwashing) efforts. This approval represents the first of what we hope will be a new class of widely-available, rapid, accurate, affordable and easy to use, in-home Covid tests that will fill a critical ‘testing gap’ and add materially to the nation’s testing capacity.”

The test, known as the Lucira COVID-19 All-In-One Test Kit, allows users to collect nasal swab samples in their homes, swirl them in a vial and put them in a hand-held testing device. Within half an hour, a light on the device will inform users of whether they have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 infections.

“A comparable innovation would be the home pregnancy test,” Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wrote to Salon. “The first home pregnancy test, e.p.t. (for Early Pregnancy Test) was approved by the FDA in 1976. The kit itself included a test tube, 2 droppers, and a scaffold for the test tube with a mirror to help the user see the results.”

Because there were so many steps, “there was a lot of opportunity for error” in early at-home pregnancy tests, Doroshow noted. “Most physicians did not accept its results as ‘truth,’ requiring follow up testing in their offices. The development of sticks that can be held at one end, permitting the user to avoid contact with their own urine, increased the popularity of home pregnancy tests.”

Doroshow noted that there are “many parallels” between the early at-home pregnancy tests and the Lucira COVID-19 test, observing that “its accuracy will certainly depend on the home user’s ability to collect the sample correctly and follow the enclosed instructions. Its accuracy in a real world setting remains unknown, and clinicians may want to repeat positive tests in a health care facility.” She also pointed out that the test requires users to stick a nasal swab deep into their own nostrils, which could limit the broader public’s willingness to use it.

Dr. Naomi Rogers, a professor of the history of medicine at Yale University, told Salon by email that there are concerns about the efficacy of this test, “especially as the FDA’s current politicized decisions have threatened its reputation as an eminently reliable regulator of things medical.” Contextualizing the new at-home COVID-19 test within the broader history of at-home medical testing, Rogers echoed Doroshow in pointing to the approval of the at-home pregnancy test as a revolutionary one in “reproductive practice and decision making.” She also reflected that “it is noteworthy that [there] are not more at-home tests, such as for STIs. The current promotion of a colon cancer screening test (box) is interesting, clearly marketed to men, both white and African American. Less often to women, at least in ads I have seen.”

She added, “Diabetes at-home testing is part of diabetes management – [though] not, I think, of initial diagnosis.”

Dr. Rene Almeling, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University, also told Salon in writing that “in the past, the development of at-home tests for everything from pregnancy to HIV provoked initial calls for caution. But high-quality tests that can be done in the privacy of one’s own home can expand access dramatically.”

Doroshow also said that there is cause for caution when it comes to approaching this particular test.

“No one test is ever perfect, and this is no exception,” Doroshow explained. “First, an Emergency Use Authorization is not the same thing as FDA approval, nor it is saying the product is safe and effective. Simply, an EUA signifies that there is a serious or life threatening condition for which no approved or adequate alternative exists (in this case, a home testing kit) and that there is reason to believe the product may be effective and that the risks of using it most likely outweigh the benefits.”

She also pointed out that there are a number of caveats to the test, including that “its ability to detect the presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in [asymptomatic] people is unknown,” that it can only be obtained through a prescription and that it is heavily dependent on when you take it.

“We know that the virus incubates over several days, so a negative test 2 days after exposure to someone with COVID-19 does not rule out the possibility of developing the illness – and having a positive test – several days later,” Doroshow added.

Salon reached out to the FDA for comment and has not heard back as of the time of this writing.

“The Crown” presents Princess Diana of Wales, patron saint of tradition-defying divorcées

My mother was a dedicated tea drinker. That should have been a clue to the extent of her Anglophilia, I now realize, along with her emphatic insistence that her children “speak the Queen’s English” whenever we’d lapse into slang.

What sealed it was her reaction to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and worse, my lack of reaction to the news. It was evening when she burst in on me while I was getting ready to go out with friends, breaking the news with surface details about a car crash.

While I don’t remember how I replied, I can’t forget that her reaction let me know that whatever I said was insufficient. That feeling remains with me all these years later. She was shocked that I was still going out, dismayed that I didn’t come home afterward, and horrified that I attended a brunch the next day.

Even worse – though for me, even better – the hosts served sparkling wine for a memorial toast to honor Diana. They even created a banner that read, “Bye bye Di.” They did this out of affection, not as a joke. Didn’t matter. When I shared that detail with my mother she was disgusted. It was the ’90s, an age rife with young idiots styling tasteless stupidity into supposed irony. Distinguishing solemnity from flippancy was tough.

Much later, after swapping stories with other children of divorcees, I began to understand why my reaction was seen by her as sacrilege. To her and other women of a certain generation who mustered the courage to ditch abusive spouses despite the world insisting they remain in their marital misery, Diana validated their decision to leave and pursue happiness. She was a North Star of sorts, an example of how life could improve following a breakup.

Watching the fourth season of “The Crown” brought these memories rushing back, which is strange to consider given the context. The popular image of Diana carried forth in popular culture is that of a composed fashion icon in her 20s and 30s. The current season presents Diana, played by Emma Corrin, as young and coquettish. She meets and marries Prince Charles, a man 13 years her senior, and not long afterward the age gap said to have played a role in the couple’s relationship disharmony yawns open before us.

But so does Diana’s popularity with the masses.

Diana was a Boomer, and my mother belonged to the Silent Generation, an age cohort characterized by a general respect for authority and taught to bear life’s challenges quietly, work diligently and without complaint, and generally stuff it all down.

My mother’s marriage was already failing by the time I was born, and Diana Spencer wouldn’t be introduced to the world until almost a decade after I arrived. But somehow, even though we never had celebrity gossip magazines in the house or watched tabloid TV shows, she had some inkling that Charles and Diana’s relationship was on the rocks.

Owing to the time period in which the fourth season is set I see more of my mother in Olivia Colman’s portrayal of the Queen than I do in Corrin’s Diana, which makes sense. Mom would have been a teenager when Queen Elizabeth II married Prince Phillip and very likely watched the wedding or at least enjoyed photos of the ceremony.

Colman gives us Elizabeth in midlife, a sensible woman in her 50s who had lived through World War II and social revolutions and considered the weight of her obligations more important than children whining about not being loved enough. During that same time period my mother would have been only slightly younger, and although her own kingdom was a speck compared to the British commonwealth, she’d certainly seen some things.

This led me to joke with my husband during a scene in “Avalanche,” the ninth episode of the current season, that it felt as if I were watching two sides of my parent in conversation with each other. Diana was the part of her that tried so very hard to make things work, and that makes it painful to watch Corrin play her with eyes downcast and ready to take sole blame for a situation that was designed for her to get short shrift. Elizabeth in the meantime sits Diana and Charles down, ostensibly to counsel the couple.

“Something as important as the marriage of the future monarch simply cannot be allowed to fail,” Elizabeth crisply declares. “Your marriage, all of our marriages, are a reflection on the integrity of the crown. And if they show cracks, that they cannot be relied upon, then the constancy and stability that the monarchy is supposed to represent is called into question too.”

This expresses the weight, I suspect, of many crumbling marriages where children are involved, where the family unit’s constancy is paramount.

But once Diana’s apology is out and she declares she wants to commit to repairing the marriage, Elizabeth is ready to be out of there like a shot. “Good!” she chirps. “Well, that’s that then” – which is without a doubt the voice of a generation. My mother’s generation.

Her divorce stretched on for what felt like the better part of a decade, and its finalizing pre-dates Diana and Charles’ separation by only a handful of years. But I surmise that seeing that the world’s most famous princess was enduring an unhappiness that resembled her own must have given her some comfort.

And I’m betting it was Diana’s solo American tour that lit my mother’s torch for the princess. The season finale shows her famous visit to Harlem Hospital Center, where she spontaneously embraced a young boy with AIDS in an era when people were afraid to touch people living with the virus. To the world, moments like that made Diana accessibly human. To women like my mother, it lent extra value to the universality of maternal love and sacrifice.

Prior to this season’s premiere I wondered aloud why so many considered “The Crown” to be comforting television. The seasons leading up to the current installment are Peter Morgan’s lengthy examination and theorizing as to how monarchic duty transforms a person, a woman, into a national symbol, something more than common but perhaps less than human. This makes “The Crown” a graceful tragedy . . . until Diana.

Owing to her star power, her entry into the story lends a fresh tension to the story and suggests dimensions to her character and personality that the public may not have known. Morgan’s impressions of all the royals are several parts research and more than a few parts guesswork; it is fiction guided by biography.

The best fairy tales hold kernels of truth, however, which is why I found myself missing my mother and wondering what she would have made of Corrin and Morgan’s Diana. Because we know the sort of woman Diana evolves into once she’s rid of Prince Charles: a benevolent and gentle philanthropic icon, an exemplar of fashion and taste, an ideal for striving women who start over.

Granted, we’re not seeing the Princess she celebrated, the one who snuck young Harry and William out of the castle to get fast food or play with other children, the kind of simple treats mothers bestow upon their children to soothe and lend normalcy to a fraught home life. Still, I believe it would have validated her choice to look to the curated model of royalty to mold her children regardless of the fact that only one of her five children absorbed those lessons. (In case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about me.)

Such recollections sweeten the experience of this season by cracking open an understanding heretofore beyond my grasp – about my mother, about Diana and the Queen and their meaning to a world of women who never met them. And this is not a singular experience; a few years ago I told the “Bye Bye, Di” story to another friend whose mother, another woman who divorced later in life, would have been around the same age as mine. Her eyes widened in horror and she shook her head.

She understood what I didn’t, that I’d failed to honor the unofficial patron saint of emancipated ex-wives and mothers. Now I finally get it thanks to “The Crown,” and I say a prayer for my mother’s spirit: God save the Queen and Heaven help careless daughters like me.

Donald Trump Jr. in quarantine after testing positive COVID-19: report

Yet another prominent Republican in the president’s inner circle has caught COVID-19.

Donald Trump Jr. has contracted coronavirus, according to reporting by Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News, who has been the first to report many of the infections in Trump’s orbit.

The president’s son is reportedly quarantining.

Earlier this week @DonaldJTrumpJr
tested positive for coronavirus and has been quarantining at a private location, I’m told.

He’s following all medically recommended COVID-19 guidelines, a spokesperson says.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) November 20, 2020

Confirming @JenniferJJacobs, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. says he’s positive. “Don tested positive at the start of the week and has been quarantining out at his cabin since the result. He’s been completely asymptomatic so far and is following” medical guidelines.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 20, 2020

Inside Parler, the social media platform by and for Trump supporters

The first post I saw on Parler after joining would turn out to be exemplary of the culture of this relatively new social media platform. Republican Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted that she was giving away a gun. Not any gun, but the gun that (in her words) she had “featured” in a “warning to ANTIFA terrorists.”

“This is the same gun that TRIGGERED the Fake News Media all across America and got me banned by Big Tech,” Greene wrote. “Someone has to win it… might as well be you!”

The message linked to a page where users could enter the giveaway.

Greene was referring to a photo she posted on Facebook in early September. In the photo, she was holding an AR-15 standing next to three progressive members of Congress known as “The Squad”—Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Along with the photo, she attached a message stating that Americans must “take our country back” and “DEFEAT THE DEMOCRATS.”

After multiple outlets reported on it (including Salon), Facebook removed the photo for violating its policies—but it didn’t violate Parler’s.

That’s because Parler is a “free speech” platform, and its surging popularity appears to be an intended consequence of Facebook and Twitter cracking down on hate speech, violent rhetoric and misinformation. According to ABC News, the Parler app saw over 3.5 million active users last week and has nearly 8 million users total. Hashtags that often trend on the platform include #freemarket, #voterfraud, and #Tucker (as in Carlson); the same ones that can often be found on President Trump’s Twitter feed. Posts — known on the platform as “Parleys” — from far-right pundits like Sean Hannity easily and frequently get over one million views. If a right-wing figure’s tweet is flagged by Twitter, you can likely find it on Parler.

Parler was founded in 2018 by two computer programmers named John Matze and Jared Thomson, and is financially backed by Rebekah Mercer, whose father is Robert Mercer. Robert Mercer is the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica and a hedge fund manager. He’s also a major funder of Breitbart. According to the Wall Street Journal, sources said Parler was “a Mercer family investment.”

Parler’s platform combines many of the prominent features of both Facebook and Twitter. Users have a newsfeed and can follow influencers, but they can also post themselves. Unlike many social media platforms that have been created in the last year, including Clubhouse, the content on Parler is mostly political. It is filled with a lot of the far-right misinformation that would receive a warning label on either Twitter or Facebook— and that’s what Parler wants.

Recently, Rebekah Mercer emphasized that Parler is a platform for “free speech.”

“John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended, and also to create a social media environment that would protect data privacy,” Mercer said in a Parler post. “The ever-increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords demands that someone lead the fight against data mining, and for the protection of free speech online. That someone is Parler, a beacon to all who value their liberty, free speech and personal privacy.”

But as my colleague Keith A. Spencer once wrote, free speech isn’t really free on any platform, whether Facebook or Parler, just because it’s uncensored. As with any media platform, the ideas and beliefs of those with money are more apt to be shared and spread. The “freest” speech in a capitalist society is still mediated by those with means.

“While a deceptive political ad may be ‘free speech’ in the sense that no one is censoring it, very few people have access to the sums of money that could broadcast such a message far and wide,” Spencer wrote. “Speech is free, but the ability of it to be spread and propagandized is limited to those with cash; hence, the ideas and beliefs and politicians that favor the rich tend to be well-broadcast, while those that might benefit the rest of us are deflated, particularly on a platform like Facebook.”

Parler does have some restrictions, although it’s unclear how and if they’re being enforced (clearly Greene’s post giving away a gun didn’t make the cut). In its community guidelines, the platform states that it will remove content that could be used as a “tool for crime” or other “unlawful acts.” “Sometimes the law requires us to exclude content from our platform, once it is reported to our Community Jury,” the guidelines state. “Obvious examples: content posted by or on behalf of terrorist organizations, child pornography, and copyright violations.”

From a public relations-perspective, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have done more than they did in the 2016 election to censor misinformation. However, it’s worth asking if their efforts are too little, too late? Especially since Parler, which is run by conservatives and meant to not censor any misinformation, rises in popularity. A separate platform called Rumble is also being promoted on Parler as a “free speech” alternative to YouTube.

Fadi Quran, campaign director at Avaaz, a global civic organization that studies misinformation, told ABC News that there are “consequences with people using apps like Parler,” especially if Parler doesn’t survive and these users eventually return to Facebook and Twitter.

“Facebook and Twitter have to be ready when they come back because many of them will want to instigate violence and spread more misinformation,” Quran said. “Hate spreads; people are going to lose trust in the idea of community, they won’t be civil with people they disagree with.”

Hence, Parler has become a far-right echo chamber, giving people who are living in Trump’s alternate reality a place to organize. And that’s dangerous, as Ciarán O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VICE News.

“The risk in a mass migration to smaller, fringe platforms is that they do not enforce the same guidelines as older, more established platforms, meaning there is potential for not only echo chambers to form, but for extremist groups to make use of these spaces to organize offline activity or to promote more extreme material and beliefs than they might on larger platforms,” O’Connor said.

“Collective” is an urgent exposé of killer corruption & how journalism and the people fought back

Alexander Nanau’s extraordinary documentary “Collective” unfolds in the aftermath of a 2015 tragedy in the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv that gives this film its title. While 27 people died in the fire, more than 100 were injured and sent to area hospitals. However, an additional 37 of the 100-plus victims died as a result of bacterial infections while hospitalized. One father, seen in the film, explains that “a communication error” — the hospital refused transfers for patients — prevented his late son from being transferred to receive care that would likely have saved his life.

The outrage of this situation prompted protests, with people taking to the streets in response to corruption and the Social Democrats in power. However, it was the dogged efforts by heroic journalist Catalin Tolontan, from “Sports Gazette” that exposed the reality of what was happening. Tolontan and his team uncovered evidence that the disinfectant being used by Romanian hospitals was diluted to a tenth of its strength. The acting Minister of Health, Nicolae Banicioiu soon resigned. He was replaced by Vlad Voiculescu who pledges transparency. What comes to light is profound corruption that involves offshore fraud, doctor bribes, and accreditation scandals, as well as political pressures. Another situation, involving transplants being done cheaper outside the country also comes to plague Voiculescu.

Nanau captures all of this in an urgent, cogent manner. He follows Tolontan meeting with sources and attending press conferences, as well as scenes featuring Tedy Ursuleanu, one of the club’s burn victims as she reclaims her life after considerable physical injury. But Voiculescu comes across best, as a man put in a complicated, possibly untenable position, hoping to right a sinking ship.

The filmmaker chatted via Zoom with Salon about “Collective” — Romania’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film — which speaks truth to power.

How did you gain the access you did to tell this story? Catalin Tolontan and Vlad Voiculescu must be very dedicated to transparency?

We had our doubts that Catalin and his team would let us follow them, but we did research and saw they were great characters because they were the only ones who investigated and uncovered manipulation and the lies of the authorities. We contacted them, and met them, and Catalin and Mirela [Neag, his colleague] said, “There is no way. The newsroom has to be a protected room, we have information to protect and colleagues that don’t want to be filmed and we have whistleblowers that need to be protected. So, it is impossible to do an observational film on us or with us as characters.”

But after a while, he called me and said, “Let’s try it.” He saw we had our own investigative team that was developing the film, and our own sources from inside the system. They understood the way we were working was very professional. He told me later, after we released the film, that the younger generation doesn’t get information from newspapers anymore. If someone who has access to these people can put how journalism works in a film, maybe it can help and show the way journalists work. He gave us access. After we started filming, things went so fast it was a rollercoaster of revelations and corruptions.

With Vlad Voiculescu, the Minister of Health, it was the fact that he was not a politician that helped. He didn’t owe anything to anyone in the system. He was 32-33 at that time, and one of his goals was transparency. There is no reason for the Minister of Health to have secrets in front of citizens. They have all the right in the world to know the decisions are taken and the criteria for decisions made in favor or against their health. We were lucky he was a young, open-minded person.

Can you talk about your observational approach to telling the story?

That’s how I develop my filmmaking style up to now. I believe in this observational approach because nothing else can deliver authenticity. If you gain the trust of people, you are able to observe how they make decisions, and their attitudes are in certain situations in their lives. I make these films because I want to learn from other people and evolve and develop my own personality by learning and observing other people and understanding what it takes to stay yourself.

The film is a follow-the-money story in that greed and blatant disregard for citizens’ wellbeing prompted such widespread corruption. It extends not just to Hexi Pharma, which supplied the diluted disinfectant, or to the hospital management that needed reform, but to other areas of the government and even suggestions of mafia involvement. What are observations about the pyramid of greed?

There are different layers to it. Corruption is not new in Romanian health care system even at the level of doctors. When you enter a public hospital, you sometimes have to bribe the guard to let you in. It’s expected. Then the assistant, the doctor, and the surgeon are all expecting something. It’s a system built around bribes, coming out of the Communist system. Then it was realizing that people in power positions were lying in an organized manner to the people they were treating. It was to keep the money and spend it here and not on other burn units outside Romania. That was a shock, and the fact that someone can dilute disinfectants over such a long period of time. Politicians are watching. Hospital managers are watching and buying it. The lack of humanity — once humanity is gone completely there [are] no borders for corruption. You can see it in your country. The whole administration in Romania is built in a way that every hospital is administrated by the mayor of Bucharest. They appoint managers that will bring companies in and make acquisitions to steal money for political parties. The whole system is completely broken and in hands of very corrupt people.

“Collective” shows not just the value of investigative journalism, but also the importance of folks questioning how much they trust their government. How do you think your film has exposed or influenced public opinion?

After the fire in 2015 and the revelations in 2016, public opinion started to change. People wanted more and more change. There was a need for reform; one can feel it. We had record attendance in the two weeks in cinemas until the pandemic hit and cinemas closed down. Most viewers were very young, and we saw huge queues of young people. We’d sell out screenings. After the film was released, journalists say their daily inbox had messages from whistleblowers increase tenfold.

What can you say are the risks and rewards of exposing these harsh truths, both for you as a filmmaker but also for journalists like Catalin Tolontan and his team, whose families can be harmed by their actions?

There are always people menacing. Romania is still a country in the EU, so we like to believe that we are safe; it’s not Russia or China or the Ukraine. We knew we were surveilled, and our phones were tapped. We took measures to send footage to different sources and lock it in different places. We were prepared for someone to break into our studio. I can’t say I was afraid of being physically attacked [during filming] — that was more so after the release. In a country where corruption is so [rampant] what the politicians do is dismantle most of the judicial system.

It’s not unlike that here with Trump stacking lower courts with conservative Republican judges to protect his base and not the people at large.

We have the same here in Romania. There were lot of demonstrations against the Social Democrats. As in the States, they organized with the police to beat up non-violent protesters. It was an organized crime. At a certain time, they went and started beating everybody up.

“Collective” also addresses people’s efforts to protest and become politically engaged. But the film shows the backlash of that as well with the Social Democrats regaining power. It’s depressing! Can you talk about that aspect of the story?

It is depressing, but also what we learned – the learning curve of society is very different. Technocrats came in had a responsibility in showing that politics can be done differently, and they didn’t do that. They were very weak. There were very few Ministers like Vlad Voiculescu. The disappointment is that reform was not done as it was promised; the backlash of that is that people don’t vote or want to punish ones who promised change even more than folks who started the problem. Societies in democracies need to suffer a lot to understand it is no joke. Democracies can be taken apart, and quality of life can change.

What did you think of Vlad Voiculescu? He is put in a very difficult position, and even after he does good with the disinfectant case, is besieged by the transplant issue. He’s sympathetic but also discouraged.

As a storyteller, I was interested in the question: How would I, as a normal citizen, act and react if someone would invest me with this power and in this position. That’s the question to ask the viewer. We want to change things, but how would I do it? He’s a generally good person. I don’t think you can change anything — even if you are the Minister of Health — if you don’t have the support of the government or party behind them, and the party is aware that their mandate is given by citizens to govern or to use the power in favor of the citizens. It’s a whole complex system. In the States, it’s a systematic problem — half the country wanting one thing, the other half wanting another thing. Both parts have their rights and have the right to be right. They are voting against an establishment they were disappointed by. I don’t know how a handful of good-intentioned people can change something. The film is optimistic because I see in this rotten world so many good people, so many mensches fighting hard and the courage of the whistleblower and how one changed the healthcare system in Romania. One step forward and two steps back . . .

Can you talk about the inclusion of the sequences featuring Tedy Ursuleanu? It is important to show one of the victim’s perspectives, and she surprisingly does not hold a grudge following the tragedy.

For me this was also fascinating. Her looks were destroyed and so much more. She lost friends. I think that comes back to see that basically someone understands that they are still alive. But she’s not a different person because she was burned. She would not let the rest of her life be destroyed by holding a grudge or fighting what can’t be fought. She’s a symbol of evolution. She understands where she is now. “I’m still here, and I am myself, and I won’t let them poison me.” A lot of us, with less problems, do let ourselves be poisoned by ones who try to destroy society.

“Collective” opens in theaters, virtual screenings, and on demand Nov. 20.

Corporate capital and Trump’s coup: Will business elites take a stand?

The latest news out of Michigan — in which the current occupant of the White House has not only summoned Republican legislative leaders to meet with him but pressured two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers into attempting to rescind their votes to certify the election outcomes, potentially disenfranchising thousands of legitimate votes — makes clear that Donald Trump and his minions have opened a trap door in the foundation of democracy and are diving into an abyss of raw power and violence that none of us may escape. Joe Biden’s administration will have to grow brass knuckles to deal with what’s coming. Business and civic leaders, in the large corporations and the elite universities, should grow some brass knuckles, too. Other news of recent weeks makes one wonder if they will.

Thirty important CEOs of major corporations logged into an early morning, off-the-record Zoom meeting on Nov. 6 to explore responses to Donald Trump’s defiance of democracy. One of those was Robert Iger, the 69-year-old executive chairman of the studiously apolitical Walt Disney Company. He and the other chief executives, including three former U.S. cabinet secretaries, convened with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the peripatetic maestro of confidential executive conclaves and business-leadership programs who is a professor of management at Yale and a founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

The virtually assembled CEOs had been shaken by Trump’s delusional White House briefing room pronouncements about the election. So they listened intently as Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a scholar of 20th-century authoritarianism and the author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” explained how business elites’ inaction and prevarications about rising fascism in Weimar Germany and other countries had wound up facilitating Nazi and other fascist coups whose tactics Trump has been emulating, with eerie if somewhat loopy fidelity.

But after Snyder signed off, Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire CEO of the Blackstone private equity group, a key Trump confidant and mega-donor, and a Yale College alumnus whose $150 million gift to his alma mater prompted it to rename and repurpose its semi-sacred civic complex for him, defended the president’s legal right to challenge the election outcome. Schwarzman urged the CEOs to be patient, and not publicly critical of Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.

Although Disney’s Iger and most others at the meeting had no connections to Yale, the university’s background role in these conflicted reckonings isn’t a coincidence. It’s an emblem of the crisis itself.

First things first: Iger, born in Brooklyn and raised as a Democrat on Long Island — he co-chaired a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — switched his voter registration to independent soon after Trump’s victory. In a videotaped interview on Nov. 10, 2016, Iger praised the smooth transition then underway from Obama’s presidency to Trump’s, noting his hope for “a new tax policy” with lower corporate rates and better incentives to competition. “I think it’s too soon to say” whether Trump would deliver it, he added, but on Dec. 2, 2016, he joined the president-elect’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a business advisory council led by Schwarzman.

Yet Iger resigned from that group only six months later, when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, and expressed discomfort with Trump more generally after the Las Vegas massacre (in which a Disney employee was killed), saying that, “In this day and age, we get outraged when an athlete doesn’t stand for the national anthem — where’s the outrage here?” This year, he donated more than $250,000 to Joe Biden’s campaign.

Having worked for 25 years at Disney’s helm to expand its entertainment offerings and media properties, Iger and other CEOs were “alarmed,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Financial Times, by Trump’s duplicitous, nearly deranged remarks in the White House briefing room just after the election. Such behavior, compounding the COVID crisis, endangered corporate efforts to expand their markets and profits “intelligently,” by their lights, as demagogue-addled mobs destroyed the consumer-friendly, democratic comity that steady profit-making requires. CEOs “don’t want fractured communities. They don’t want hostile workplaces,” Sonnenfeld told the FT, and, the very next day, Nov. 7, the influential national Business Roundtable, some of whose members had logged into the Yale meeting, congratulated the Biden-Harris ticket on its clear victory.

But, echoing Schwarzman’s sinuous advice, the Roundtable statement also commended Trump “for a hard-fought campaign that has garnered over 70 million votes. We know the outcome is disappointing to his millions of supporters. While we respect the Trump campaign’s right to seek recounts, to call for investigation of alleged voting irregularities where evidence exists and to exhaust legitimate legal remedies, there is no indication that any of these would change the outcome.”

That statement exemplifies the tension between business leaders’ need to acknowledge democracy’s challenges to their tax-cutting, wage-cutting, public deregulatory and private surveillance agendas, on the one hand, and the public’s need to limit the dangers those agendas pose to democracy, on the other. The Roundtable’s statement certainly didn’t illuminate what executives like Iger have worked so hard to finesse: the cold reality that top-down political derangement such as Trump’s has been rising in America — at the hands of big business itself — since well before he emerged as a fake businessman on “The Apprentice” and in his many real but casino-like ventures. The Trumpism that has enveloped and devoured an entire political party is the result not only of his own pathologies but of systemic relations between the happy, confident consumerism that companies need and the accelerating decay of democratic legitimacy and comity that consumerism now promotes.

The crisis is systemic, not just driven by Trump or COVID, because so much recent corporate investment and marketing proactively dissolve democratic dispositions and batten onto the consequent social distress to profit by peddling ever more intimately degrading entertainments, drugs and other palliatives. Market pressures also drive corporate boards and managers to degrade the wages, benefits and working conditions of their employees, who become increasingly atomized, powerless “independent contractors” at Uber and Lyft or “associates” at retailers such as Walmart.

Another CEO at the Nov. 6 meeting, Alex Gorsky, chair of the Big Pharma company Johnson & Johnson, has been “actively involved” in a strategy to pay “kickbacks to induce Omnicare, the nation’s largest nursing home pharmacy, to purchase and recommend Risperdal” and other Johnson & Johnson products, according a 2012 Justice Department investigation described by Forbes and the Washington Post. Even conscientious, public-spirited CEOs like Disney’s Iger find themselves putting their all-too-human faces on shareholder- and algorithm-driven product development and marketing that incentivizes stressed Americans to become impulse-buying — in effect, addicted — consumers rather than deliberating, independent-minded citizens. It’s when delusions of “consumer sovereignty” displace citizens’ fading sovereignty that an enfeebled democracy produces a Trump.

* * *

The attempt by Yale’s Sonnenfeld to reconcile or at least mediate between the conflicting assessments of Trump by Yale historian Snyder and Yale alumnus and mega-donor Schwarzman reflected a crisis in Yale’s and other universities’ mission to temper their students’ preparation for capitalist wealth-making with commitments to scientific (originally, Puritan religious) truth-seeking and to the arts and disciplines of civic-republican governance. Although Schwarzman has lavishly funded, served and defended Trump’s deranged politics since 2016, Sonnenfeld defended Schwarzman’s attempt to steer the CEOs away from condemning Trump. He assured student reporters at the Yale Daily News that, in the meeting, “Schwarzman never defended President Trump’s assertion that this was an unfair election. … There was no parochial self-interest, no corporate strategic angles that [Schwarzman and the other CEOs] were arguing. This was 100 percent a spirit of patriotism and common concern that alarmed them.” A Blackstone spokesman assured the FT that “As an American, Steve believes the electoral system is sound and that the democratic process will play out in an orderly and legal manner, as it has throughout our nation’s history.”

But Sonnenfeld’s fervent defense of Schwarzman as a disinterested citizen, standing like Horatio at the bridge to defending the republic, can’t be reconciled with Schwarzman’s fervent support for and collaboration with Trump, his powerful beneficiary and benefactor. Although Schwarzman has now acknowledged that “it looks like Joe Biden” has won the election, his years-long collaboration with Trump accelerates the unraveling of Yale’s and other universities’ mission to balance their students’ (and some professors’) assiduous wealth-making with liberal education’s truth seeking and its great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit.

Although Yale recently renamed its John C. Calhoun College to cease honoring that champion of white supremacy and Black slavery, it just as recently repurposed and renamed its civic center as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center, honoring the man who bankrolls and counsels the current champion of white supremacy and, sotto voce, of Black death at the hands of rogue police officers and COVID.

The hypocrisy isn’t confined to private universities like Yale. Christopher Newfield, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a trenchant critic of misguided business policies that undermine higher education, showed recently in his authoritative blog Remaking the University that liberal Democrats capitulated decades ago to business leaders’ worst priorities and practices. The universities did little to offset their own growing sense of themselves as corporations in an education industry that incentivizes students to become self-marketing, indebted buyers and sellers instead of deliberating citizens. That sea-change in liberal Democrats’ own priorities is symbolized by Yale’s renaming of Commons, but it’s also devastating to the public universities fiscally and ideologically, as Newfield makes strikingly clear.

* * *

Democracy’s genuflection to plutocracy isn’t hard to detect in convergences among participants in Sonnenfeld’s meeting. He and Schwarzman grew up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s, albeit seven years apart, both attending public school in the Abington township, both working in their fathers’ small businesses (the Sonnenfelds’ men’s clothing store, the Schwarzmans’ dry goods store). Both sons went on to the Ivy League, Sonnenfeld to Harvard College and then to the Harvard Business School, which Schwarzman also attended after graduating from Yale. Both emerged as fanatical self-promoters, not only in business but also in education and public life. Schwarzman’s “edifice complex,” as egregious as Trump’s, has driven him to put his name on countless public institutions, as I reported in Dissent magazine.

Sonnenfeld, an effusive business pundit on MSNBC and in many other venues, is almost infamously ravenous for public attention and respect from business elites. “He’s the Oprah Winfrey of business schools,” the late political scientist Robert Pastor told Philip Weiss, a Harvard College classmate of Sonnenfeld who profiled him for The New York Observer. Although Sonnenfeld is acutely skeptical of Trump — in 2004, he disparaged “The Apprentice” for teaching wrong lessons about business leadership — it takes one to know one. Trump’s compulsive attention-getting rides more on combat than on connecting, but both he and Sonnenfeld have had to fight maniacally to restore and embellish almost-ruined careers — Trump through bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and Sonnenfeld owing to an incident at Emory University in 1997 that ended with his vindication only after an excruciatingly long fight that impels him to advise CEOs on how to stage comebacks from career disasters. It’s worth noting that Trump got his BA in Sonnenfeld’s native Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School.

* * *

Historian R.H. Tawney characterized the hypocrisies of leaders who try to put a righteous face on their uncontrollable power-lust and greed:

“Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert,” Tawney wrote in 1926. “That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of ethical superiority. … The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy … roaring after its meat and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause.”

Plutocrats and their apologists don’t exactly “roar” after their meat at redoubts such as Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival and Sonnenfeld’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Surveying the degradation and ruin of the democratic public that their own practices and premises have demoralized, they sigh sagely and wonder piously how “the people” might return to self-government, even as plutocrats like Trump show that they can barely govern themselves, let alone anyone else.

Democracy benefits only fleetingly when some plutocrats oppose others who’ve gotten out of hand: The historian Snyder, writing recently in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, contends that Trump is driven now by desperation to escape the legal and economic ruin that awaits him when he loses presidential immunity against civil and criminal indictment. Trump has come very close indeed to derailing the election with more than a little help from his Republican Party, thanks to which even Congress won’t uphold the rule of law unless public resistance to current arrangements moves beyond episodic looting and assaults and beyond tweeting, texting, signing petitions and writing articles like this one.

Ultimately there’s no substitute for disciplined, humane democratic movements such as those led by Mahatma Gandhi, Adam Michnick, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and the founders of the American republic. They’ve reconfigured and sometimes replaced national-security states and regimes built on grinding inequality and corruption. Often, as in Eastern Europe and the American South, they’ve done it without perpetrating violence: Even the American Revolution “was effected before the War commenced … in the Minds and Hearts of the People,” wrote John Adams.

Perhaps the clearest assessment of such movements is the late Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.” He recounts how leaders of such movements discovered that power flows ultimately not from the few who are daunting, dazzling or wealthy but from seemingly powerless masses who stop obeying and who reconfigure their lives together without official permission or reward, through disciplined non-cooperation that’s nonviolent but all the more effectively coercive. Time and again, Schell wrote, rulers driven by power-lust and greed respond to such movements “with refreshed ignorance”: A state that militarizes its police and floods its streets with soldiers, surveillance and thugs ends up displaying its impotence before massive but principled non-cooperation.

There’s no revolutionary thrill in discovering that America has come to this. Elites, too, must act, but in ways that heal and empower others, not just by pouring money into Democratic Party coffers. And universities that fund institutes and programs for elite leadership and grand strategy-making should fund more courses like the one on nonviolence and power that Schell taught at Yale for years, along with programs that prepare organizers for the movements that democracies everywhere need now.

Hairstylists share the important lesson to be learned from Rudy Giuliani’s disastrous TV appearance

Like many viewers, hairstylists watched in horror as brownish-colored hair dye, or maybe even makeup or remnants of a spray tan, dripped down the sides of Rudy Giuliani’s head on national television. Serving as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and lead counsel over his post-election legal battle, Giuliani spewed more baseless claims based on conspiracy theories as he sweated and dripped at the podium.

But despite the seemingly awkward visual, a new editorial published by The Daily Beast highlights the lesson that can be learned from Giuliani’s disastrous press conference.Multiple hairstylists have weighed in on what they witnessed as they shared their takeaways.

“We saw it,” said Patti O’Gara, a Blackstones colorist and educator told the publication. “It was a collective ‘Ewwww.’ We were like, ‘It’s just so gross and it won’t stop dripping.'”

Another stylist, Mirko Vergani, creative color director at The Drawing Room New York salon, also echoed similar sentiments saying: “I watched it, and I was like, ‘How can this person work in politics and appear on TV like this?’ It was kind of funny. It looked really weird. Also, whoever applied the dye put in way too much and did not blend it properly. It was a big dark patch, and then we saw what happened.”

However, most stylists agree that it is time for Giuliani to let go of the hair antics and embrace a more natural look. Based on the hairstylists’ remarks, the latest debacle is actually making it harder for people to take Giuliani seriously.

“He would look better if he did let it go gray and have a more appropriate haircut, and he would look better if he didn’t spray tan himself, and if he wasn’t orange. But it won’t happen. He hasn’t changed his hair, no matter how much fun is made of it or how much the wind f**ks it up. This is his look. That’s why everyone can play him at Halloween. He’s like a guy in costume.”

That sentiments could also be said about the legal battle he is embroiled in. Instead of influencing Trump’s antics, it might be beneficial to embrace what is likely to come. Based on the results of the election, Trump has lost the presidency and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Geraldo Rivera wants to name COVID-19 vaccine after Trump to make him feel better about the election

Fox News pundit Geraldo Rivera on Friday proposed naming a coronavirus vaccine after President Donald Trump as a “nice gesture” after his election loss.

Rivera, a longtime friend of the lame-duck president, suggested that naming the vaccine “The Trump” might boost the president’s spirits as he attempted to overturn the will of voters in multiple states in an effort even some Republicans have denounced as “undemocratic.”

“I had an idea: With the world so divided, and everybody telling him he has to give up — and time to leave, and time to transition and all the rest of it — why not name the vaccine ‘The Trump’?” Rivera suggested on Friday’s edition of “Fox & Friends.” “Make it: Have you gotten your ‘Trump’ yet? It would be a nice gesture to him, and years from now, it would become kind of a generic name. ‘Have you got your Trump yet?’ ‘I got my Trump. I’m fine.’ I wish we could honor him in that way.”

Geraldo WHAT: "I had an idea with the world so divided and everybody telling [Trump] he's gotta give up and time to leave and time to transition … why not name the vaccine The Trump, make it, like, 'have you gotten your Trump yet?' It would be a nice gesture to him." pic.twitter.com/UjdMXGiBYb

— The Recount (@therecount) November 20, 2020

Rivera’s comment drew a torrent of mockery on social media.

“But we want people to actually take the vaccine,” Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., quipped.

“Rivera may be the biggest fool in this country not named Trump or Guiliani,” former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, the co-founder of The Lincoln Project, wrote.

Some Twitter users suggested that “COVID-19 should be named after Donald Trump” instead, after the president’s heavily criticized response to the pandemic resulted in the deadliest outbreak in the world.

Rivera said the vaccine should be named after the president, because he is “definitely the prime architect of this Operation Warp Speed.”

“But for him, we’d still be waiting, you know, into the grim winter for these amazing, miraculous breakthroughs,” the Fox News host claimed.

Rivera’s comment about Project Warp Speed, which received $10 billion from Congress for vaccine and treatment research, came after Pfizer announced it would seek emergency use authorization for its vaccine after completing a large-scale clinical trial showed it was 95% effective. But, as an Associated Press fact-check points out, “Pfizer notably did not accept government money to develop, test or expand manufacturing capacity under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.”

Though Pfizer signed an agreement with the government to eventually sell it 100 million doses, the company partnered with the vaccine’s original developer, German-based BioNTech, in March, months before Trump had even announced Operation Warp Speed.

The project did fund Moderna’s effort to develop a similar vaccine, which was co-developed with government scientists. Researchers have also credited much earlier investments years before the coronavirus pandemic for helping develop its technology, including funding from singer Dolly Parton.

Rivera has pushed back on Trump’s false claims about the election, mocking Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories and slamming Fox News colleagues for “giving false hope to people.” But he’s also insisted that Trump’s attempt to subvert the election was just his process for coping with loss.

Rivera said on Twitter last week that Trump, during a “heartfelt” conversation, told him that he was a “realist” who would do the “right thing” but wanted to see “what states do in terms” of certification.

“He sounded committed to fighting for every vote & if he loses, talking more about all he’s accomplished,” Rivera wrote.

“He’s hoping they steal the election for him through partisan certification shenanigans, but other than that, he’ll totally ‘do the right thing.’ Comforting,” Vox’s Andrew Prokop responded.

“Cannot get over that the peaceful transition of power,” joked ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman, “might have been reliant on a call from Geraldo.”

Republicans aren’t scared of the Trump & Rudy show — they love this stuff

Donald Trump and his, uh, lawyer Rudy Giuliani are moving into the next phase of Trump’s attempted coup, which entertainingly involves Giuliani sweating out the previous day’s martinis into his hair dye while barking incomprehensible conspiracy theories at bewildered reporters.

Unfortunately, the less amusing and more worrisome aspect of the whole ordeal involves Trump’s efforts to lean on Republican-run state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors in states where Joe Biden clearly won.

Like most people reading this, I, too, wish I had a crystal ball and could look into the future at Jan. 20, 2021, to see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, the main point of concern is that nearly all Republican politicians are, to one degree or another, supporting Trump’s efforts. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are flirting with openly seditious behavior by actively trying to get legal ballots thrown in the trash. Most, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are playing word games to avoid saying who they think will be or should be sworn as president in two months. The only Republican senator to speak out so far is Mitt Romney of Utah, who was also the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump after his impeachment trial earlier this year.

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The common theory in the political class is that this silence is borne out of fear of Trump and his tweeting fingers. Former President Barack Obama, who has been blunt in his concerns about the threat Trump represents to our democracy, characterized the GOP’s passive consent to this coup exactly this way.

“I’m more troubled that you’re seeing a lot of Republican officials go along with it, not because they actually believe it, but because they feel intimidated by it,” Obama told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart on Thursday.

Obama is right on two out of three counts. It’s true that Republican officials don’t believe a word of Giuliani’s sweaty conspiracy theories, which Heather Digby Parton has described as “going full Infowars.” It’s also true that this GOP compliance is the real problem here. As I explain in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, successful coups rely on various bureaucrats and lower level politicians who go along. If Trump pulls this off, it will be entirely because he has the tacit support of both state and congressional Republicans all along the way.

But Obama is wrong on the third front: Republicans aren’t doing this because they’re scared of Trump. They’re doing this because most of them, on one level or another, want him to succeed. And even if he fails, they appreciate him advancing the idea that voters in certain areas — notably, cities where Black people outnumber white people — shouldn’t really have the right to vote.

Let’s face it: The reason Trump has gotten this far is that he’s building on decades of Republican antipathy to democracy, an antipathy borne out of resentment that people they deem as “less” American than themselves — people of color, urban people, people who know what “tempeh” is — have the right to vote at all.

For instance, look at this 2016 article from Heritage Foundation writer John Merline, who argued that Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead in that election didn’t really matter, because if “you take California out of the popular vote equation, then Trump wins the rest of the country.”

Breitbart writer Joel Pollak made a similar argument regarding this year’s election, claiming on Twitter, “Biden won the popular vote — unless you exclude California.” He went on to say that “you shouldn’t” exclude California, but implied that this alleged fact is “worth noting,” which is only true if you believe California voters are somehow less American than other voters. (For the record, this isn’t even true. Biden’s overall popular-vote lead now exceeds his 5 million-vote lead in the Golden State.)

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This belief of Republicans that some voters shouldn’t really be voters is especially evident in their enthusiasm for voter suppression, which has kicked into high gear ever since 2013, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This kicked off a flood of GOP-sponsored efforts clearly aimed at stopping as many people of color as possible from exercising their right to vote.

While it’s become routine these days for pundits to lament Giuliani’s supposed fall from grace, the reality is the man was always a virulent racist. As Radley Balko reminded readers of the Washington Post in 2016, Giuliani kicked off his 1993 New York mayoral campaign by helping to incite a racist police riot aimed at denying that elected Black leaders should have any authority over the NYPD. Giuliani led the drunken and armed crowd of cops as they blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, waving signs with racist cartoons of then-Mayor David Dinkins, and calling Black elected officials the n-word. The cops also physically terrorized two Black city council members.

Trump and Giuliani’s official arguments for why Trump deserves to invalidate the election are a bunch of incoherent and baseless conspiracy theories. The actual argument underlying all that, however, is simple: The coalition Joe Biden built is composed of people who don’t deserve the right to vote.

The reason the larger Republican Party isn’t pushing back is that they largely agree with this underlying argument. Whatever personal distaste many Republicans may have for Trump’s gauche behavior or the alcohol content of Giuliani’s shoe polish sweat, they’re inclined to see only upside for themselves in letting this play out.

Maybe Trump pulls off a miracle and succeeds in his coup, which means their party captures the White House for four years — or more.

But even in the far likelier event that the Trump coup fails, it’s a win-win for most Republicans: He has done an immense amount to advance the goal of delegitimizing huge swaths of the American electorate that prefer Democrats. Besides, “establishment” Republicans don’t have to go out to dinner with Trump anymore and listen to his vainglorious monologues. So of course Republicans aren’t standing up to him. Why mess with a good thing?

Ivanka Trump accuses prosecutors investigating her earnings for potential fraud of “harassment”

New York prosecutors have expanded their investigations of President Donald Trump and his businesses to include millions of dollars in tax write-offs for consulting fees, including some which were paid to his daughter Ivanka Trump.

New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance both issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for documents related to the fees, according to The New York Times.

The subpoenas were issued after a Times investigation into decades of Trump’s tax records revealed that the president had paid no federal income taxes for years and his company deducted $26 million in questionable consulting fees. Some of those fees appear to have been paid to Ivanka, even though she was a senior executive at the company.

The Times linked the fees to Ivanka’s 2017 financial disclosure, which showed a consulting company she co-owned had received $747,622 in consulting fees — the same number that the Trump Organization claimed as tax deductions for its hotel projects in Hawaii and Canada.

Ivanka insisted on Twitter that there was “no tax benefit whatsoever.” She alleged that the probe was “harassment pure and simple” as she claimed that the investigation by “ruthless” New York Democrats was “100% motivated by politics, publicity, and rage,” even though “they know very well there’s nothing here.”

Alan Garten, an attorney for the Trump Organization, similarly told The Times that “this is just the latest fishing expedition in an ongoing attempt to harass the company.”

“Everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts,” he said. “All applicable taxes were paid, and no party received any undue benefit.”

The Times noted that there is “no indication” that Ivanka is the “focus” of either investigation, but the arrangement has raised questions about whether the payments were a “tax-deductible way for [Trump] to compensate his children or avoid gift taxes he might incur from transferring wealth to them.” An earlier Times investigation found that Trump’s father implemented a similar legally dubious scheme to pass down his wealth to the president and his siblings. Trump’s sister, former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, abruptly retired when the scheme came under investigation.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor who now serves as a legal analyst for CNN, said it was “ridiculous” that Ivanka Trump was paid consulting fees by “a company she already worked for.”

CNN host John Berman on Friday noted that Ivanka Trump “can’t be pardoned by the president” in the matter.

“This is a state investigation, so state investigators are going to find out the truth here,” he said, “and there’s not much that any kind of pardon can do about it.”

The two wide-ranging probes have continued to expand in recent months. The criminal investigation led by Vance began more than two years ago. It initially focused on hush-money payments made to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged an affair with the president. The prosecutor has sought Trump’s tax returns for months, and he told a judge earlier this year that the probe is now also focused on potential bank and insurance fraud and tax evasion, among other financial crimes.

James is leading a civil investigation focused on Trump’s businesses, which began last March after former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump falsely inflated his wealth to banks in order to get loans while understating his income to evade taxes.

James is looking at whether Trump failed to pay income tax on more than $100 million in debt that was forgiven when he reportedly refused to pay up, and whether appraisals of an estate Trump vowed to conserve after failing to develop it were inflated to score bigger tax breaks.

“The outcome of the election will have no impact on our investigations,” James told MSNBC earlier this month. “No one is above the law. We will just follow the facts and the evidence, wherever they lead us.”

Vance’s office previously built a criminal case in 2012 after investigating whether Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. had lied to prospective buyers in a Trump condo project. Trump and his co-defendants settled a lawsuit related to the matter, agreeing to pay back millions to buyers in exchange for not having to admit wrongdoing.

Vance ultimately dropped the criminal case in spite of extensive evidence showing Trump’s children had “intentionally inflated” numbers to “make more sales” after he received a $25,000 campaign donation from a Trump lawyer. Vance has repeatedly denied the contribution influenced the case.

James previously led an investigation which forced Trump’s so-called charitable organization to shutter and pay $2 million to nonprofit groups after the president admitted to funneling money raised for veterans to his 2016 campaign and using the charity’s funds to settle lawsuits.

The settlement also required Ivanka, as well as Don Jr. and Eric Trump, to receive “training on the duties of officers and directors of charities so that they cannot allow the illegal activity they oversaw at the Trump Foundation to take place again.”

Rudy Giuliani’s demented “strike force” fights to overturn election: Could it possibly work?

Back in September, Politico’s Anita Kumar reported that for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare “prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots.” The effort was led by “a 20-person team of lawyers” from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in “key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.” It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having “his” judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don’t think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump’s crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit or threw in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described “elite strike force” led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy’s performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon’s Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as “America’s mayor” fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn’t been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the “elite strike force”: Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don’t have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and “save democracy” from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It’s a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on “faithless electors” last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the “strike force” held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and “communistic” countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn’t work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the “strike force” to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani’s face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

On Trump's official YouTube page, just now:

"Can they hear us on the stream? I guess not."
"I don't think so…"
"You see fuckin' Rudy's hair dye dripping down his face?"

h/t to @Fer_Echavarri for catching https://t.co/YvRrs57a0Z

— Lorie Meacham (@LorieMeacham) November 19, 2020

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

Sidney Powell: "The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump" pic.twitter.com/gA6aFVhvdt

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) November 19, 2020

You’ll notice that she just blithely uses the term “overturn,” as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn’t work, the “strike force” are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can’t send Biden’s required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state’s delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. It’s tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

The enraging deja vu of a third coronavirus wave

There’s a joke I’ve seen circulating online, over and over during this pandemic, that goes along the lines of, “Months this year: January, February, March, March, March, March, March…”

My lips pull into a smile, but my heart’s not in it.

I was on the phone two weeks ago with a nurse who lives in Missouri, where cases have risen from 1,100 per day in August to about 3,400 daily in November. Her husband works in the ER of a rural hospital. Every time a patient suspected of having COVID-19 walks in, the sample is sent to be tested in St. Louis, an hour and a half away. Results take eight hours or more to process.

Medical workers don’t get enough protective equipment. “They’re given one N95 mask and have to keep it in a bag to reuse for days,” the nurse said, fretting about her husband’s safety. “He should at least get a new mask for every shift, right?”

I looked at the calendar: It was Oct. 30, but it might as well have been March.

I could still hear the voice of another nurse, Sarah, in Illinois, who poured out her fears to me on March 2, when the coronavirus was just starting to make its presence known in her city.

Sarah told me she had been instructed to write her name on a brown paper bag and put her mask in it to reuse for the week. “There’s this feeling like, we’re just going to get it,” she told me, sounding more resigned than scared.

As a health reporter covering the pandemic, I’ve experienced too many moments of deja vu. This summer, as the virus swept through the South, news footage of overwhelmed hospitals in Houston turning away ambulances recalled similar scenes from March and April in New York City. Now, we’re in the so-called third wave of the pandemic, with the virus slamming into Midwestern states, and this week, Dr. Gregory Schmidt, associate chief medical officer at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, said his colleagues are converting 16 hospital beds into new ICU beds in anticipation of an influx of COVID-19 patients. “People in leadership are starting to say things in meetings like, ‘I have a sense of impending doom.'”

I’m exhausted and infuriated to be doing the same interviews and hearing the same stories for a third time. Why haven’t we learned? What have we been doing between March and November?

Why is Dr. Peter Wentzel, in Grafton, West Virginia, only now able to order a point-of-care test system for his community clinic, just to be told that the cartridges for it will arrive in December at the earliest? Why are clinicians at Mountain Family Health Centers in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, once again facing seven- to 10-day wait times for their patients’ test results?

I remind myself that many things have improved since March. An incredible amount of scientific knowledge has been amassed about the virus itself. Thanks to detailed contact tracing studies around the world, we’ve learned that the virus can be spread beyond 6 feet via small particles suspended in the air, teaching us the importance of good ventilation to decrease transmission risk. Thanks to antibody studies, we’re learning that reinfection, while possible, is likely rare.

We now use ventilators less aggressively and know the benefits of steroids like dexamethasone, while other treatments like hydroxychloroquine have lost favor thanks to rigorous studies that have debunked anecdotal hype. This week, an antibody therapy developed by Eli Lilly was granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. Trials have shown that it can help mild to moderate COVID-19 patients reduce hospitalizations. And Pfizer shared encouraging, early news from its ongoing trial, saying its vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing people from getting sick. It is thanks to the work of so many career scientists and medical personnel that if one gets infected with the coronavirus today, the chance of survival is higher than in March.

Yet while some material supplies have increased since March (we thankfully have more COVID-19 tests, though still not enough), humans are a fixed resource, and the skilled labor of a veteran respiratory therapist or an ICU nurse is hard to come by. Before the pandemic, America already had a nursing shortage. Now, this dearth is becoming acutely felt.

A ER nurse who lives in Wisconsin told me that her hospital is starting to run out of beds, but more urgently, it is running out of staff, in part because some workers have gotten sick and others are in quarantine. “The state keeps talking about how many beds there are, but that doesn’t mean there’s staff for them,” she said.

When no hospital beds are available, the emergency department gets full, she explained to me; she’s had to board patients there for 20 hours. Meanwhile, she wields a faulty forehead thermometer at the door. Her own temperature recently read 84.9 F — hypothermic, if true. Staff members were given plastic water bottles emblazoned with the hospital’s logo as a thank you.

“It’s so demoralizing,” she told me. “I would take getting punched on a daily basis rather than what we’re going through now.”

Tim Size, executive director of the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative, said some of his 43 member hospitals are seeing “significant staff shortages.” Initially, he said, they were able to hire from staffing agencies, which recruit traveling nurses to work short-term contracts, but now that the virus is surging in multiple states, hospitals all over are competing for the same personnel. “So people are working more overtime, which is causing more fatigue, which will lead to more burnout,” Size said. “If we don’t stop the growth…” He shook his head.

Schmidt, at the University of Iowa, tells me he’s concerned not just about overwork, but also about the psychological toll on medical staff. “You watch patients who are young and who should have had good lives die without their families by them, and their families being distraught, and then you go out through your community and you see people partying and going to bars.”

He paused, then added. “We can do anything for two months,” he said. “But surge after surge, it’s hard for everybody.”

One thing that’s burned into my head is what Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, told me when I asked her whether the constant struggles to get on top of the coronavirus have simply been because this pandemic is so unprecedented that nobody could have prepared for it.

“We would be overwhelmed to some extent,” she told me. “But it didn’t have to be this bad.”

So much has fed into our quagmire: a lack of national leadership, the perpetuation of misinformation. The nurse in Missouri told me about a man with preexisting conditions who ended up in the ICU because he believed that the virus would go away by Nov. 4 and went out to eat at restaurants. Of course, it didn’t go away that day. Instead, we hit a record high of 103,067 cases, the first time we broke six digits; 1,116 people died. It didn’t have to be this bad.

I don’t want to hear the same stories in a fourth wave, a fifth wave, to feel like we are trapped in an endless spiral, unnecessarily repeating our own mistakes. New leadership is coming to the White House; Joe Biden’s first move as president-elect was to announce a COVID-19 advisory board. I hope it will amplify the voices of our public health leaders, depoliticize the pandemic and deliver for all of the weary front-line workers.

But we don’t have to wait until then. The best way to help our medical workers isn’t to stand at our windows at 7 p.m. cheering or to give them thank-you water bottles. It’s to stay out of their ERs and ICUs by keeping ourselves and our neighbors safe.

People are proving to be the weakest link for apps tracking COVID exposure

The app builders had planned for pranksters, ensuring that only people with verified COVID-19 cases could trigger an alert. They’d planned for heavy criticism about privacy, in many cases making the features as bare-bones as possible. But, as more states roll out smartphone contact-tracing technology, other challenges are emerging. Namely, human nature.

The problem starts with downloads. Stefano Tessaro calls it the “chicken-and-egg” issue: The system works only if a lot of people buy into it, but people will buy into it only if they know it works.

“Accuracy of the system ends up increasing trust, but it is trust that increases adoptions, which in turn increases accuracy,” Tessaro, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who was involved in creating that state’s forthcoming contact-tracing app, said in a lecture last month.

In other parts of the world, people are taking that necessary leap of faith. Ireland and Switzerland, touting some of the highest uptake rates, report more than 20% of their populations use a contact-tracing app.

Americans seem not so hot on the idea. As with much of the U.S. response to the pandemic, this country hasn’t had a national strategy. So it’s up to states. And only about a dozen, including the recent addition of Colorado, have launched the smartphone feature, which sends users a notification if they’ve crossed paths with another app user who later tests positive for COVID-19.

Within those few states, enthusiasm appears dim. In Wyoming, Alabama and North Dakota, some of the few states with usage data beyond initial downloads, under 3% of the population is using the app.

The service, built by Google and Apple and adapted by individual countries, states or territories, either appears as a downloadable app or as a setting, depending on the state and the device. It uses Bluetooth to identify other phones using the app within about 6 feet for more than 15 minutes. If a user tests positive for COVID-19, they’re given a verification code to input so that each contact can be notified they were potentially exposed. The person’s identity is shielded, as are those of the people notified.

“The more people who add their phone to the fight against COVID, the more protection we all get. Everyone should do it,” Sarah Tuneberg, who leads Colorado’s test and containment effort, told reporters on Oct. 29. “The sky’s the limit. Or the population is the limit, really.”

But the population could prove to be quite a limit. Data from early-adopter governments suggests even those who download the app and use it might not follow directions at the most critical juncture.

According to the Virginia Health Department, from August to November, about 613 app users tested positive and received a code to alert their contacts that they may have exposed them to the virus. About 60% of them actually activated it.

In North Dakota, where the outbreak is so big that human contact tracers can’t keep up, the data is even more dire. In October, about 90 people tested positive and received the codes required to alert their contacts. Only about 30% did so.

Researchers in Dublin tracking app usage in 33 regions around the world have encountered echoes of the same issue. In October, they wrote that in parts of Europe fewer people were alerting their contacts than expected, given the scale of the outbreaks and the number of active app users. Italy and Poland ranked lowest. There, they estimated, just 10% of the app users they’d expect were submitting the codes necessary to warn others.

“I’m not sure that anybody working in this field had foreseen that that could be a problem,” said Lucie Abeler-Dörner, part of a team at the Big Data Institute at Oxford studying COVID-19 interventions, including digital contact tracing. “Everybody just assumed that if you sign up for a voluntary app … why would you then not push that button?”

So far, people in the field only have guesses. Abeler-Dörner wonders how much of it has to do with people going into panic mode when they find out they’re positive.

Tessaro, the University of Washington computer scientist, asks if the health officials who provide the code need more training on how to provide clear instructions to users.

Elissa Redmiles, a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems who is studying what drives people to install contact-tracing apps, worries that people may have difficulty inputting their test results.

But Tim Brookins, a Microsoft engineer who developed North Dakota’s contact-tracing app as a volunteer, has a bleaker outlook.

“There’s a general belief that some people want to load the app so that they can be notified if someone else was positive, in a self-serving way,” he said. “But if they’re positive, they don’t want to take the time.”

Abeler-Dörner called the voluntary notification a design flaw and said the alerts should instead be automatically triggered.

Even with the limitations of the apps, the technology can help identify new COVID cases. In Switzerland, researchers looked at data from two studies of contact-tracing app users. They wrote in a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper that while only 13% of people with confirmed cases in Switzerland used the app to alert their contacts from July to September, that prompted about 1,700 people who had potentially been exposed to call a dedicated hotline for help. And of those, at least 41 people discovered they were, indeed, positive for COVID-19.

In the U.S., another non-peer-reviewed modeling study from Google and Oxford University looking at three Washington state counties found that even if only 15% of the population uses a contact-tracing app, it could lead to a drop in COVID-19 infections and deaths. Abeler-Dörner, a study co-author, said the findings could be applicable elsewhere, in broad strokes.

“It will avert infections,” she said. “If it’s 200 or 1,000 and it prevents 10 deaths, it’s probably worth it.”

That may be true even at low adoption rates if the app users are clustered in certain communities, as opposed to being scattered evenly across the state. But prioritizing privacy has required health departments to forgo the very data that would let them know if users are near one another. While an app in the United Kingdom asks users for the first few digits of their postal code, very few U.S. states can tell if users are in the same community.

Some exceptions include North Dakota, Wyoming and Arizona, which allow app users to select an affiliation with a college or university. At the University of Arizona, enough people are using the app that about 27% of people contacted by campus contact tracers said they’d already been notified of a possible exposure. Brookins of Microsoft, who created Care19 Alert, the app used in Wyoming and North Dakota, said that offering an affiliation option also allows people who’ve been exposed to get campus-specific instructions on where to get tested and what to do next.

“In theory, we can add businesses,” he said. “It’s so polarizing, no businesses have wanted to sign up, honestly.”

The privacy-focused design also means researchers don’t have what they need to prove the apps’ usefulness and therefore encourage higher adoption.

“Here there is actually some irony because the fact that we are designing this solution with privacy in mind somehow prevents us from accurately assessing whether the system works as it should,” Tessaro said.

In states including Colorado, Virginia and Nevada, the embedded privacy protections mean no one knows who has enabled the contact-tracing technology. Are they people who barely interact with anyone, or are they essential workers, interacting regularly with many people that human contact tracers would never be able to reach? Are they crossing paths and trading signals with other app users or, if they test positive, will their warning fall silently like a tree in an empty forest? Will they choose to notify people at all?

Colorado’s health department said it’s issuing thousands of COVID codes a day. As of Wednesday, 3,400 people have used the codes to notify their contacts, it said. An automated system issues codes for positive COVID-19 tests even if the infected people don’t have the app, making it impossible to know how many users are acting on the codes.

“I have hope that the vast majority of Coloradans will take this opportunity to give this gift of exposure notification to other people,” said Tuneberg. “I believe Coloradans will do it.”

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