Shahid Buttar, left-challenger to Pelosi, started his campaign with a bang — and ends with a whimper

This year, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faced what many San Francisco progressives hoped would be a real challenge from the left from Shahid Buttar, an organizer and civil liberties lawyer who placed second in California’s ranked-choice voting in the March 2020 primary. A throng of volunteers canvassed for him in early 2020 as endorsements from progressive groups piled up. Hopeful staff and organizers felt they actually had a shot at Pelosi’s seat. The media buzzed; both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones interviewed him, and The Intercept said he posed a “spirited challenge” to the Speaker of the House. The surprising energy that Buttar commanded raised questions — about what Americans thought of their House Leader, and about the tensions between corporate Democrats and more left-leaning candidates.

That was how Buttar’s campaign started. Then, over spring and summer, Buttar lost momentum, endorsements and likely votes, after separate allegations of sexual harassment and of a toxic workplace environment within his campaign. Media interest in Buttar waned afterward, despite the rush to defend Buttar from some prominent figures. In These Times described Buttar’s campaign as having been “hobbled by accusations of mistreatment and sexism by members of his former staff” — accusations Buttar unequivocally denies.

When the dust settled in November, few national newspapers even reported on the inevitable results: an estimated 77.7% of voters in California’s 12th District reelected Pelosi for what will be her 18th term in the U.S. Congress.

Before the March primary, and before any accusations of anything surfaced, Salon reported on the momentum behind Buttar’s campaign. It was Buttar’s second bid to represent California’s 12th District in the U.S. House. At that point, Buttar had received donations from 13,000 individuals and amassed over 1,500 volunteers in San Francisco. Progressives hoped that Buttar, if elected, would become a sort of west-coast equivalent to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, who in 2018 famously unseated Rep. Joe Crowley, a nine-term Democrat closely aligned with the party establishment; or Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., who unseated 10-term Democrat incumbent Rep. Michael Capuano. Buttar shaped his messaging to reach lefties who didn’t see Pelosi as progressive enough. Often his messaging focused on the criticisms and flaws of his challenger.

Yet his campaign was also topical to what was happening in America. Buttar penned a 20-point criminal justice reform platform that included, as he explained to Salon in February, “creating a national registry of killer cops” and defunding and disarming the police; this was before the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide civil rights protests calling for police reform. Buttar’s campaign also focused on immigration reform — appropriately so, given his background as a civil liberties lawyer, and a Muslim immigrant himself.

In February 2020, when Buttar’s star was untarnished, Salon interviewed him in a noisy cafe in San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood; no masks, no social distancing — just the excitement of the beginning of a year marking an extra important election season. In the middle of the conversation, a young man approached Buttar like he was a celebrity.

“I really think one of these days it’ll happen, and no one will see it coming, where it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, this dinosaur lost by a huge margin,'” the stranger said, referring to Pelosi. The energy and enthusiasm for his campaign was palpable.

Then, almost overnight, Buttar went from local political celebrity to a progressive insurgent candidate people wanted to distance themselves from when allegations of sexual harassment in progressive circles surfaced online. His campaign manager quit during a dispute over his leadership, which she characterized as sexist, and a flood of staffers following her out the door.

The entire political saga is a complicated narrative that ultimately clashes with key progressive ideals. It’s a cautionary tale about how allegations that lack evidence can ruin a campaign. It’s a story about campaigning against run-of-the-mill politics, then becoming swept up in them. Few allegations were proved definitively by Salon, and how readers take in the lessons will depend on who they are more likely to trust. But the narrative is as fascinating as it is reflective of the 2020 political zeitgeist, and speaks to bigger issues that Millennial and Gen Z progressives face. Amid debates over the political alignment of the Democratic Party, the rise and role of the #MeToo movement, identity politics and systemic racism, Buttar’s campaign — its rise and fall — epitomizes ongoing criticisms of the left, and the Democratic Party in general. An examination of Buttar’s campaign turmoil offers some lessons for the future of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but no easy answers.

* * *

On July 20, 2020, Salon received an email from a comedian and writer named Elizabeth Croydon with the subject line “Shahid Buttar Sexually Harassed Me.” One day later, Croydon published a detailed Medium post about an alleged exchange in the early aughts in which she said Buttar verbally harassed her for choosing to be celibate. The post came days after Croydon began been publicly tweeting about the allegations. Croydon also alleged that Buttar “pursued” her for sex “repeatedly.” Croydon alleged that in one specific encounter with Buttar, he “cornered” her “with his body and got so close and brushed up against” her breasts, a move she believed was meant to “intimidate” her.

“The left can do better than Shahid Buttar,” Croydon declared.

Buttar immediately denied the allegations, while calling sexual harassment “despicable.”

Then a series of Medium posts published by Jacqueline Anne Thompson, a blogger and podcaster, put the validity of the allegations into question. An open letter in support of Buttar was shared by journalist Katie Halper, host of “The Katie Halper Show”; in it, supporters of Buttar alleged that Croydon was “well-known” among D.C. activists, including Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, and “has a long history of fabricating attacks against innocent people.” (Buttar echoed this allegation months later in an interview with Salon.) In a recent interview with Salon, Croydon said that while she has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), any attempts to paint her as “unstable” are “untrue.”

In July, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Medium post by Croydon but did not offer any secondhand corroboration of Croydon’s story. The Bay Area Reporter reported that a person close to Croydon, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Croydon had disclosed the alleged encounters with Buttar to them about seven years ago. But Croydon’s allegations weren’t the only claims being made against Buttar. Prior to the allegations against Buttar outlined in Croydon’s Medium post, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) San Francisco chapter had already begun the internal process of distancing themselves from Buttar’s campaign on July 18, 2020.

Unlike in many cities, San Francisco’s local chapter of the largest American socialist organization wields considerable political power: they were a major organizing force in propelling progressive city supervisor candidate Dean Preston to a victory in 2019. The local DSA chapter’s political power comes from its volunteer army of organizers, who are called on to phone-bank and door-knock for endorsed politicians — and who would no longer be mobilized to help Buttar.

On July 22, a local organization of socialists of color called the Rose Movement rescinded their endorsement on Twitter, followed by Preston, who rescinded his endorsement the same day. The San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters, which endorsed Buttar in 2018, said said on Twitter they were taking them into consideration. (Ultimately, they didn’t endorse Pelosi or Buttar.; “Given the various summer 2020 revelations about Buttar’s campaign management and personal conduct, he does not have our endorsement,” the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters stated on its 2020 “cheat sheet”).

Buttar complained to Salon about the rescinded endorsements and how quickly some media outlets were to report on Croydon’s allegations.

“Everyone presumed the allegations to be legitimate because they were spoken, and that’s just absolutely ridiculous,” Buttar said. “I’m not the first man of color to be falsely accused by a white woman of having done something wrong; I’m not the first one to be judged guilty.”

On August 4, DSA officially rescinded its endorsement via a resolution that cited Croydon’s allegations, and also claimed that Buttar demonstrated a “belittling, demeaning, hyper controlling and abusive manner,” toward female staffers. On that same day, Buttar’s former campaign manager Jasper Wilde published a piece on Medium detailing her experience working for Buttar, and why she, and at least 13 other contractors and staffers, say they left the campaign. “We left because of Shahid’s disrespect, gaslighting, public humiliation, blaming, and dismissal of us, women and men alike, but especially the women on his team,” Wilde wrote.

But her exit from Buttar’s campaign wasn’t new. Wilde gave her notice on March 30; she didn’t officially leave the campaign until April 30.

In an interview, Wilde told Salon that her “final straw” came back in the spring after the primary, when, she said, she and other staffers grew tired of Buttar “challenging every decision” in “demeaning” ways that she alleged were sexist and misogynistic. Specifically, Wilde said she and her colleagues were, during the primary, focused on placing second. Then, there was concern that John Dennis, the Republican Party’s candidate who faced off against Pelosi in the 2020 primary, was going to win. Wilde said she focused on traditional tactics like knocking on doors — the “basics of campaigning,” she said — and that Buttar was often resistant to them. Wilde said it was “incredibly demoralizing” to hear him say that what she and other staffers continued to suggest had no impact on the election.

“He was incredibly disrespectful and hurtful, he lashed out quite a bit at everyone on the team,” Wilde told Salon. Wilde said that she and other staffers outlined a list of stipulations, threatening to quit if they weren’t met. Wilde says Buttar verbally agreed, but says they didn’t stick. “We didn’t feel it was ethical to continue taking money from donors to run a campaign that was essentially his vanity project,” she added.

Wilde left, which then caused a “ripple effect.” Nearly a dozen more staffers left.

In response to Wilde’s allegations about mistreatment at work, Buttar told Salon: “My former campaign manager had very strong opinions about how to run the race.”

Buttar added he “was doing things that the staff wouldn’t do,” and said there was a lot of “unfortunate clashing at the strategic layer.” Buttar said he was running his campaign like a “social justice movement,” and it was important for him to spend his time showing solidarity around the city.

“One point of tension,” Buttar said, was attending in-person events. “I built the campaign by being a very frequent face at events, any march, rally, protest, discussion, community meeting about climate change, wars, universal health care over the last three years I’ve been at, and I go there with people and I recruit them — that was another strategy that my staff didn’t understand,” he said.

Gloria Berry, who worked on Buttar’s campaign and who currently serves as the chair of San Francisco’s Democratic Party Black Lives Matter committee, told Salon she recalled a lot of “tension in the office,” especially compared to previous campaigns she worked on.

“There were a lot of people saying how things needed to be, how things should be done, and so forth,” Berry said. “A lot of the staff did not realize that he was an activist — they wanted him to be more of a politician — but I was actually drawn to him because I was an activist like him.”

In July, after her departure, Wilde said she was contacted by current Buttar staffers regarding Croydon’s tweets alleging sexual harassment. Wilde said she didn’t hear about the allegations until then. A group of former and current staffers discussed the allegations and how to handle them, which is when they got permission from Croydon to share her story with the San Francisco DSA chapter.

“We were wanting to get in front of it before the story came out,” Wilde said. But she needed to work on it in secret because she was held to a non-disparagement clause in her consulting agreement. Once she was released of the agreement, which Salon has viewed, she published her piece in Medium in August.

When a progressive candidate’s campaign faces allegations of sexual harassment and sexism in the workplace, their response can make or break a campaign. James Taylor, a professor of politics at University of San Francisco who has studied Bay Area politics for over 20 years, told Salon that for any candidate running against a powerful candidate, such allegations are a “death knell,” regardless if they’re corroborated or not.

“It’s like going for the heavyweight champion; he went up against one of the most powerful modern politicians in the American system,” Taylor told Salon. Taylor said allegations like what Buttar faced can be a “deal breaker” for campaigns. “They do great damage,” Taylor said, nothing that President Donald Trump is the “exception.”

Buttar believes that the allegations kept his campaign from a real chance at snagging Pelosi’s seat, but he also believes that a “smear campaign” was being coordinated by staffers who left. He said he didn’t understand what the spring staff departures had to do with the July sexual harassment allegations and why, in media reports, the two were always linked together. He said that people who described his campaign as “roiled by departures” were wrong.

“Every objective metric confirmed that we only grew dramatically when I managed to get off my team the people that didn’t align with my vision who’ve now come forward to try and bring it down,” Buttar told Salon.

When asked about the smear campaign allegations, Wilde wrote via Facebook messenger: “I think he’s just looking for something to stick, and unfortunately it’s easy to discredit women who come forward about men in power by calling them attention seeking, power hungry, or liars.”

Taylor told Salon that the fact that Buttar didn’t get along with his campaign manager was a “rookie error.” “He has to find someone who has the same vision as him, and the fact that he ends up fighting with his number two is his fault — Nancy Pelosi isn’t fighting with his number two,” Taylor said. “That’s the bottom line — he’s not ready for San Francisco.”

Another reason Buttar believed a smear campaign was being coordinated by former staffers was because a text message exchange surfaced of a volunteer allegedly being recruited to join in smearing him. In one text message exchange, viewed by Salon, a volunteer — who asked to be anonymous — was confronted about a rumor floating around the campaign that Buttar allegedly tried to set her up on a date with a donor. The volunteer told Salon that the story was false, and even when she tried to tell former staffers that it was false, she felt her story was being taken out of context and used without her permission as an example of Buttar’s behavior. She said Buttar was always professional around her.

In a post-election statement after his loss, Buttar focused on momentum the campaign gained and the challenge they faced in going against such a powerful politician as Pelosi before the allegations surfaced.

“We’re the first Democrats ever to challenge the sitting Speaker of the House in a General Election over her entire 33-year career representing San Francisco in Congress,” Buttar said in the statement. “Even as underdogs, we’ve punched well above our weight.”

As Taylor pointed out, some politicians can weather sexual harassment allegations. Trump is seemingly unscathed by numerous sexual harassment and assault allegations. Tara Reade’s allegations against President-elect Joe Biden didn’t keep him from winning, either. Notably, Trump and Biden are white men; Buttar is a man of color, which perhaps changes the social calculus.

In any case, Buttar said he remains profoundly disappointed in how various progressive groups reacted.

“I think that progressive and socialist groups owe it to their own principles and their members to embody those principles, by maintaining some fidelity to the process — otherwise, you’re just reduced to being a mob,” Buttar said. “The presumption of guilt is the problem.” “Millennial entitlement” could have been part of the problem, too, he said.

* * *

As establishment attempts to derail Bernie Sanders in 2016 revealed, those who lean too left in the Democratic Party often find themselves at odds with the party’s leadership. Despite what the establishment demands, left-leaning candidates tend to be incredibly popular: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders himself attest to this.

Thus, the 2020 election brought many progressive wins, suggesting Democratic voters are selecting more diverse and younger candidates who embrace progressive policies. Missouri’s Democratic Representative-elect Cori Bush unseated Lacy Clay, a 10-term member of Congress. Yet Buttar, who ran in one of the most progressive parts of the country, didn’t become part of that narrative.

Men’s harassment and abuse of women are systemic issues, and so is racism. In the case of Buttar’s campaign, these issues appeared to stack up against each other, instead of intersecting. Even though racism and sexual harassment both arise from the same unjust, biased system, progressive circles have failed to explore the nuances around how different forms of inequalities can exacerbate each other. Should there have been a more proper due process for Croydon’s allegations? Or was what Wilde and the other staffers claimed happened enough for progressives to distance themselves? Would this have looked different if Buttar was a white man?

These are questions this reporter can’t answer. While many involved are still looking for answers, one that does come to mind is this: politics is still politics. Any nuances between progressive and establishment are lost when allegations around abuse and harassment surface. Like Taylor told me: “In a situation like this where you have an upstart campaign, you can’t afford those kinds of allegations.”

The myth of the Latino vote and what newsrooms must learn from 2020

In 2016, when it became clear that Donald Trump would become president, media outlets across the U.S. were blindsided by the results. They pledged to do better representing the larger communities that make up America. That included conservatives, those in rural areas (a complex group on its own) and, yes, Latinos.

Four years later, though Trump did not win reelection, former Vice President Joe Biden’s narrower margin of victory in spite of polls predicting a landslide have media outlets asking similar questions all over again. The increased percentage of Latino voters for Trump in particular caught many off guard. How could pollsters get it wrong again? And is the media, and a lack of diversity in newsrooms, part of the problem?

Last time around, a national publication made a show of announcing it was expanding its coverage teams and hiring people that brought those unique perspectives. I applied for a spot to cover immigration even though I knew that coming from a smaller newspaper, it would be a long shot. Still, if it was serious about diversifying the newsroom, I thought, I had a chance.

I’m a first-generation immigrant, born in Ciudad Juárez and raised across the border in El Paso, in a middle-class family. While my dad had been an engineer in Mexico, he became a life insurance salesman when we emigrated, then a truck driver, something he is still doing in his mid-60s. There’s no 401(k) for him, there’s no deep savings account or a fully paid mortgage.

When I applied for the position, I had been an immigration reporter for about a decade; I had experience writing about immigrants and refugees from a dozen countries. Spoiler alert, I didn’t get the job, neither did another person of color.

It didn’t have to be me, by any means, but we’ve made so little progress in diversifying our newsrooms. Newsrooms are a window into America. Journalists have the great power — and responsibility — to choose whose voices we represent and how. We are part, or should be, of the communities we cover.

While Hispanics are credited with helping Biden in Arizona, Trump made significant gains in the Hispanic vote in Florida and Texas. That jump was particularly stark in South Texas, where Biden won in most counties but by a much narrower margin than Hillary Clinton did four years ago.

As a country, we continue to be surprised that Latinos are not a monolithic group and that not all vote for Democrats. Since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection, Republican candidates have pretty consistently received one-quarter to one-third of the Hispanic vote, according to Geraldo L. Cadava, an associate professor at Northwestern University who wrote a book on the topic.

The reasons that Latinos voted for Trump in Florida are different from those who did so in Texas. For Cuban Americans and Venezuelans, among other issues, it was the perceived threat of “socialism” from Biden, while for Mexican Americans in Texas the pull was in part secure borders and support for law enforcement.

The press, pundits and politicians at the national level still see immigration as the key issue for Latinos. If you want to win “their” vote, talk about Dreamers, talk about citizenship, talk about the border. But just as for any other group, there are so many other issues that are important. More than 18% of the U.S. population is Hispanic — 40% in Texas — yet we represent roughly 7% of the newsroom workforce, according to the News Leaders 2019 Diversity Survey. Latinos account for 10% of the staff at ProPublica, 21% at The Texas Tribune and 30% of our joint newsroom partnership.

When trying to make a point about the diversity within this community, I often turn to my family. My grandfather was born in New Mexico to a father who worked at a smelter. At some point his family went back to Mexico, where my grandfather grew up, got married and had kids.

Eventually, he returned to the U.S. for work. The older siblings — including my mom — didn’t fully learn English, prefer to watch Telemundo and identify more as Mexican than American. The younger siblings, though, graduated from high school in El Paso, speak Spanglish and have a split identity between both countries.

And their children? Well, out of all the cousins very few of us can still communicate fluently in Spanish, and even fewer of us can read and write in our parents’ native tongue. Most grew up with “Sesame Street” and not “El Chavo del Ocho” and prefer Flaming Hot Cheetos instead of Churrumais. They have few ties to their parents’ country.

Within the family, there are small-business owners, a nurse, mechanics, military members — even a journalist. There are those who support Trump, those who are religious and conservative, those who are apathetic and disillusioned. There are those who sympathize with immigrants but feel “we” have our own problems here, and those for whom the border should be an imaginary line. Abortion, health care and equal rights are all defining issues — just like for the rest of America.

That’s what we fail to understand. That even within one group, such as Mexican Americans, there can be a wide range of views, of beliefs, of priorities. Growing up in El Paso, immigration or the Border Patrol didn’t control my life, even when you could see Juárez from our backyard. That’s not what my parents talked about at the kitchen table. They worried about paying the mortgage and making sure we graduated.

When I became a border reporter, I strived to go beyond the important but well-covered stories of migrant deaths in the desert, about unauthorized migration and Border Patrol shootings. It was hard, and I didn’t always succeed. In this country, immigration is often covered as a problem, as a wave of people coming across, an invasion. The story of assimilation or divergent views and experiences among immigrant families is much tougher to tell and to sell, but they are now more important than ever.

These areas, these communities, are vibrant places with issues including limited access to well-paying jobs, quality education, health care and civic engagement. But that’s not the story of the border we are generally exposed to.

My hope is that once again, as journalists reflect on what we did well and what we can improve on, we remember that immigrants, border communities and people of color are not homogenous and we must engage them as readers, as voters, as residents, day in and day out, not just before an election.

Only then will we, as a country, have a better understanding of who we are and what we represent. Only then will we stop covering immigrants, Latinos, rural communities, conservatives, Native Americans as something more than “us” versus “them.” Only then, will it be “we.”

This secret ingredient creates the flaky layers you crave in biscuits without the chewy texture

I have messed up a lot of biscuits in my time. I’ve overthought, overworked, underbaked, and overbaked more biscuits than anyone could reasonably justify. I’ve used the wrong flours and added too little fat—or too much (sure, there’s an argument to be made that there’s no such thing as too much fat in a biscuit, but nevertheless). I’ve made biscuits that come out like cake and biscuits that would make better ornamental rocks than food.

After seventeen years of professional baking and being surrounded by crazy-talented folks like former Willa Jean baker Mike Carmody (one of the most talented bakers I’ve ever worked with, whose influence and passion have made me a better cook and person), I learned that Italian-style 00 flour gives biscuits the strength they need without the chew.

So-named for how millers grade the texture of flour, 00 flour is most often used for making pizza and pasta, but it works great in biscuits because it absorbs the butter and buttermilk just right, creating the perfect flaky layers you want in a biscuit without the chewy, toothsome texture.

My other secret? I always freeze these biscuits before baking and take them straight from the freezer to the hot oven: The colder they are, the higher they rise. You know what they say: the higher the hair, the closer to God.

***

Recipe: The Baker’s Biscuits

Makes 12 large biscuits

6 cups 00 flour, preferably Italian Antimo Caputo flour (cake flour works well, too)
1⁄4 cup plus 2 tablespoons baking powder
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
3⁄4 cup plus 3 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, grated on the large holes of a box grater and placed in the freezer
3 cups cold buttermilk plus 1⁄4 cup for brushing on top
All-purpose flour for dusting

In a large bowl, mix the 00 flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Add the butter and use your hands to cut it into the flour, smearing the mixture between your fingertips to create flakes; there should be a combination of large and small flecks of butter, and the flour will start to take on the color of the butter. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add 11⁄2 cups of the buttermilk. Using a rubber spatula, stir the dry ingredients from the edges into the buttermilk until incorporated. Add the remaining 11⁄2 cups buttermilk and stir just until a shaggy dough forms.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Dust your work surface liberally with all-purpose flour. Turn the dough out of the bowl and pat it into a rectangle; it’s okay if the dough barely holds together. Fold one-third of the dough to the center, then fold the other third on top, like folding a letter. Using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll the dough into a 6 by 13-inch rectangle and repeat the folding process. Roll again to a 6 by 13-inch rectangle, until about 1 inch thick. Cut the dough into 12 biscuits; each one should be a little less than 3 inches square (there might be some leftover dough). Transfer the biscuits to the prepared baking sheet. Place the baking sheet in the freezer for at least 12 hours and up to overnight, covering the biscuits with plastic wrap once they’re frozen.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Bake the frozen biscuits for 40 minutes, rotating the baking sheet after 20 minutes, until the biscuits have risen, are golden, and sound hollow when you flick the bottoms. Serve hot. Store wrapped loosely in foil or plastic wrap at room temperature up to overnight.

What’s Mine Is Yours: I dust the sticks of butter in flour before I grate them so they’re easier to handle.

Click here to purchase a copy of “The Good Book of Southern Baking.”

Ann Coulter tells Texas crowd “a second term of Trump would have killed us”: “I’m glad he lost”

According to a report from Breitbart, far-right conservative Ann Coulter told a college crowd that she was happy to see Donald Trump lose to former Vice Presiden Joe Biden, saying another four years of Trump would have been devastating for the country.

Coulter who had a highly-publicized falling out with the president, spoke at the University of Texas at Austin on Thursday night and lashed out at the president saying she likes what he stands for — but can’t stand the man.

Calling the election results the “best of all possible worlds,” the conservative gadfly reportedly told the crowd, “The reason I’m very happy that [President] Trump lost – and lost narrowly – is that a second term of Trump would have killed us. What we want, and what I think we can get in four years, is Trumpism without Trump.”

Continuing in that vein, she added, “We have to take care of our own first. That’s Trumpism. And it hasn’t been tried. It certainly hasn’t triumphed. [W]ith Trump . . . He’d say these wild things that we’d get blamed for, he’d get attacked on, and then actually did nothing. Trump thinks, ‘I tweeted it. Therefore, it’s done’.”

“Talking about it isn’t the same as doing it,” she added. “Much like as he tweeted out, ‘Law and Order,’ and yet cities are still burning across the nation. [He] didn’t do anything about it. It’s like he didn’t know he was president.”

You can read more here.

How Trump’s anti-abortion zeal shook fragile health systems around the world

In Ethiopia, health clinics for teenagers once supported by U.S. foreign aid closed down. In Kenya, a decades-long effort to integrate HIV testing and family planning unraveled. And in Nepal, intrepid government workers who once traversed the Himalayas to spread information about reproductive health were halted.

Around the world, countries that depend on U.S. foreign aid have scrapped or scaled back ambitious public health projects, refashioning their health systems over the past four years to comport with President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-abortion restrictions that went further than any Republican president before him.

The effects have been profound: As groups scrambled to meet the administration’s strict ideologically driven rules, they severed ties with health care providers that discuss abortion in any way, deleted references to abortion on websites and in sexual education curricula, and stopped discussing modern contraception for fear of forfeiting vital American aid.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reverse the policy when he takes office, and he campaigned on a promise to enshrine abortion rights in federal law. But for many foreign aid groups, the changes may be permanent.

“The U.S. has lost its position as a leader and lost its credibility,” said Terry McGovern, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who has overseen research of the Trump policy in multiple countries.

Since Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents have barred foreign aid organizations from using U.S. global health funds to counsel women about abortion or refer them to a safe abortion provider. But the Trump administration vastly expanded those anti-abortion restrictions, known as “the global gag rule” by opponents. Under Trump, the rule applies to some $9 billion of aid touching nearly every facet of global health funding, including groups working on HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and water sanitation. Under President George W. Bush, the policy applied to a fraction of that, $600 million in foreign aid.

The Trump administration proudly touted these efforts to protect “the unborn abroad,” but the rules have left international aid groups deeply skeptical of U.S. promises and deepened the nation’s rift with European countries that have long viewed abortion access as vital to women’s health and safety.

Some major organizations opted out of any U.S. funding rather than comply with the new strictures, including Marie Stopes International and International Planned Parenthood Federation, among the largest providers of reproductive health care in the developing world. Untold numbers of front-line health care workers — in large cities and remote villages alike — have been confused by what seem like sudden swings in American policy.

And that trepidation may not be quick to dissipate even with a Democrat in the White House.

“Biden and Trump may seem radically different to Americans,” said Jennifer Sherwood, a policy manager at Amfar, the Foundation for AIDS Research. “But if you’re a small organization in sub-Saharan Africa, you may not understand what this new [Biden] administration means and if you can trust the United States.”

The restrictions intentionally constrict the activities of foreign aid groups, many of which have worked in close coordination with American counterparts for decades. The rules also have a ripple effect on their funding: U.S. funding to foreign groups is contingent on their not accepting money from other countries, or even private foundations, to underwrite abortion-related services. They are not allowed to subcontract with other organizations that run separate abortion-related projects.

Trump telegraphed the worldwide anti-abortion gains in appeals to evangelical Christians. In early October, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touted the policy during a speech to the Florida Family Policy Council, a conservative anti-abortion group, calling it an “unprecedented defense of the unborn abroad.”

“Our administration has drawn on our first principles to defend life in our foreign policy like no administration in all of history,” said Pompeo, who is an evangelical Christian.

The hard-right policies of the Trump administration stand in stark contrast to the steady liberalization of abortion laws in countries around the world over the past two decades. Since 2000, more than two dozen countries have eased abortion laws, including Ireland, South Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Even in countries where abortion is forbidden, the rules are having an impact on reproductive health care. In Madagascar, where abortion is illegal with no exceptions, the largest provider of contraception, Marie Stopes, turned down U.S. money, endangering its ability to offer unfettered medical care to women, ending support for nearly 200 public and private facilities.

Mamy Jean Jacques Razafimahatratra, a researcher at the Institut National de Santé Publique et Communautaire in Antananarivo, found that led to shortages of contraception, in a poor country where travel to nearby towns is difficult.

“The women asked us, ‘What is the cause of this rupture?'” said Razafimahatratra. “We tried to explain to them the reason, and [they say], ‘But that regulation is for abortion, so we don’t understand why we are also penalized?'”

Researchers at Amfar and Johns Hopkins, in a study published in Health Affairs, found the anti-abortion policies could have deadly consequences, specifically in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. Sherwood said young African women face the highest risk of HIV and many clinics had combined HIV testing and treatment with family planning services.

But, fearing they would run afoul of the Trump policy and thus forfeit funding, clinics have curtailed family planning for patients, reducing the number of women seeking care in African countries.

“A lot of the times, they want contraception,” said Sherwood. “That is what’s on their mind, and HIV is the secondary thing, something we can tack on to meet their needs all at once.”

Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at KFF said, “I have no doubt some groups are going to say, ‘We are not going to play there anymore.'” (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

The practical challenges of restarting these programs are steep: rehiring staff, reopening clinics, retraining employees, rewriting curricula.

“You can imagine being a health care worker that was under threat of losing their funding for counseling a patient on abortion,” Sherwood said. “To us, it’s like a light switch that can turn off and on, but to them, this is a very opaque and confusing process. It’s not how health systems work. You can’t just change the way they work overnight.”

A secretive Republican group called Amish PAC ended the election cycle with money in its pocket

A Super PAC founded by Trump-supporting Republicans who tried to make inroads with Amish voters in Pennsylvania has ended the 2020 cycle in the black. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has finished down more than 65,000 votes in the state so far.

Amish PAC, funded in large part by a secretive Colorado billionaire and a Louisiana-based oil executive, was created during the 2016 Republican primary by a pair of GOP strategists. One of them was a former member of the socially conservative community, who saw an opportunity for voter outreach.

“The PAC’s founders saw that the GOP was doing nothing to reach out to a large and growing potential voting bloc that shared its values of limited government, focus on rural issues and small business empowerment, and saw a need to engage them,” a PAC spokesperson told Salon in an email.

The spokesperson said “the team has since changed a bit” since then. Both co-founders — Ben Walters and Ben King — are no longer active members of the PAC.

The PAC’s website does not disclose the group’s current members. The only publicly available information can be found in the group’s filings with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), which list Taylor Swindle as its treasurer. Swindle is also treasurer of Troops Abroad PAC, which shares an Arlington, Va., address with Amish PAC, according to the groups’ websites.

Amish PAC raised $57,803 in the 2018 cycle and $181,762 in the 2020 election cycle. Of the funds raised for 2020, most came in small sums, but three donors accounted for about one-third of the total.

Frank “Scotty” Moran, who runs Moran Oil, gave more than $46,000 to the 2020 cycle. Reclusive Aspen billionaire Tatnall Hillman has contributed a total of $15,000. Christopher Carlino, who identifies himself in his filing as an “investor” and appears to be a partner in a Philadelphia construction firm, gave the group $10,000 on Sept. 11, 2020. Carlino does not appear to have made any political donations prior to June 2020, when he began giving to Trump, according to federal filings.

Though they are all Republican donors, internet searches conducted by Salon did not turn up connections between the three men and the Amish community.

(Weight loss industry mogul Jenny Craig also contributed $3,000, filings show.)

The PAC said it put that money towards billboards and ads in Amish newspapers, encouraging members of the community to register to vote.

“At a time when there’s been billions of dollars flooding into TV and Facebook ads, it’s been refreshing to focus on old-fashioned Amish friendly mediums,” a group spokesperson told Salon.

This cycle, however, the group chose not to promote a specific candidate.

“We didn’t want to be perceived as telling Amish who they should vote for,” the spokesperson said. “The goal was simply to answer their questions about getting registered to vote and let them make up their mind from there.”

The PAC said it focused its ads issues of concern to the Amish community.

“This year, the Lancaster Amish were impacted by a high-profile kidnapping and likely murder that shook their community,” a spokesperson said, pointing also to “racial protests in Lancaster;” trade fluctuations, which affected farming; and coronavirus shutdowns, which impacted the tourism industry.

“So we’ve found that while voting has still not been widely embraced by the Amish, they have plenty of reasons to become more engaged in choosing their representatives,” the spokesperson said.

As for its successes, the group said its hotline received “hundreds of calls” from Amish curious about registration.

“The calls far outnumbered what the PAC received in 2016,” the spokesperson said, adding that while community interest appears to be growing, participation would likely not increase dramatically without the endorsement of church leaders.

Going into 2020, Dr. Kyle Kopko of Elizabethtown College, an expert on the Amish, calculated that of the 15,055 Amish eligible to vote in Pennsylvania, only 2,052 were registered. Of those registered voters, only 1,016 cast a ballot in 2016.

The turnout record among the Amish was set in 2004, when former president George W. Bush visited the community during his re-election campaign and openly courted its vote. A total of 1,300 voted that year, the spokesperson said.

As for whether they beat that number, the spokesperson said, “We’ll evaluate whether we did once the dust settles.”

“In 2016, we almost never heard from Amish women,” the spokesperson added. “This year, we heard from countless Amish women. They’ve traditionally been much, much less likely to vote than men, but that’s changing! We’re very excited to see women becoming so much more engaged and making their voices heard.”

As for its spending, Open Secrets data shows the group’s biggest vendor is a company called District List Company LLC, which is registered in Delaware and otherwise untraceable. The only other group to use District List as a donor? Swindle’s Troops Abroad PAC. Amish PAC said District List handled all of its media buys.

“Keep in mind that this breakdown doesn’t include any of our October spending on media,” the PAC spokesperson said, adding that the group had spent “a ton” ahead of voter registration deadlines that month.

The PAC placed billboards, mainly in rural Lancaster, as well as Holmes County, Ohio. Newspaper ads targeted Lancaster.

“Basically, if calls kept coming, and the Amish showed interest, we kept the ads going,” the spokesperson said.

As for its accomplishments, the spokesperson was vague.

“We know for sure we registered new voters this year,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson would not disclose to Salon who ran District List Company LLC.

Joe Biden can’t bring back “normal” politics — nobody can. We need to reinvent it

Analysts are still grappling with the fallout from the U.S. election. Trumpism proved a far more enduring and alluring phenomenon than most media pundits expected. Defying predictions, Donald Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women.

But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the U.S. economy — the incumbent’s “trump” card — was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for COVID-19, Trump — not Biden — would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.

Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic Party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning — on the rare occasions he appeared — suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.

But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: Maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. Were Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush not enough to persuade us that any halfwit who can string together a few cliches from a teleprompter will suffice?

No return to “normal”

The narrowly-averted Trump second term has at least prompted liberal pundits to draw one significant lesson that is being endlessly repeated: Biden must avoid returning to the old “normal,” the one that existed before Trump, because that version of “normal” was exactly what delivered Trump in the first place. These commentators fear that, if Biden doesn’t play his cards wisely, we will end up in 2024 with a Trump 2.0, or even a rerun from Trump himself, reinvigorated after four years of tweet-sniping from the sidelines. They are right to be worried.

But their analysis does not properly explain the political drama that is unfolding, or where it heads next. There is a twofold problem with the “no return to normal” argument.

The first is that the liberal media and political class making this argument are doing so in entirely bad faith. For four years they have turned U.S. politics and its coverage into a simple-minded, ratings-grabbing horror show. A vile, narcissist businessman, in collusion with an evil Russian mastermind, usurped the title of most powerful person on the planet that should have been bestowed on Hillary Clinton. As Krystal Ball has rightly mocked, even now the media are whipping up fears that the “Orange Mussolini” may stage some kind of cack-handed coup to block the handover to Biden.

These stories have been narrated to us by much of the corporate media over and over again — and precisely so that we do not think too hard about why Trump beat Clinton in 2016. The reality, far too troubling for most liberals to admit, is that Trump proved popular because a lot of the problems he identified were true, even if he raised them in bad faith himself and had no intention of doing anything meaningful to fix them.

Trump was right about the need for the U.S. to stop interfering in the affairs of the rest of the world under the pretense of humanitarian concern and a supposed desire to spread democracy at the end of the barrel of a gun. In practice, however, lumbered with that permanent bureaucracy, delegating his authority to the usual war hawks like John Bolton, and eager to please the Christian evangelical and Israel lobbies, Trump did little to stop such destructive meddling. But at least he was correct rhetorically.

When I’m speaking to foreign leaders, I’m telling them: America is going to be back. We’re going to be back in the game.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 10, 2020

The Guardian declares: 'A new start', with a 'Free 16-page Joe Biden souvenir supplement inside'.

Before we get too dewy-eyed, look at how the Guardian did exactly the same job of rebranding the US in 2008. Obama went on to bomb seven Muslim countries:https://t.co/ah4NIgIbtV pic.twitter.com/Hp8olGzcpo

— Media Lens (@medialens) November 11, 2020

Equally, Trump looked all too right in berating the establishment media for promoting “fake news,” especially as coverage of his presidency was dominated by an evidence-free narrative claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the election. Those now bleating about how dangerous his current assertions of election fraud are should remember they were the ones who smashed that particular glass house with their own volley of stones back in 2016.

Yes, Trump has been equally culpable with his Twitter barrages of fake news. And yes, he cultivated rather than spurned support from one of those major corporate outlets: the reliably right-wing Fox News. But what matters most is that swaths of the American public — unable to decide who to believe, or maybe not caring — preferred to side with a self-styled maverick, Washington outsider, the supposed “underdog,” against a class of self-satisfied, overpaid media professionals transparently prostituting themselves to the billionaire owners of the corporate media.

Once voters had decided the system was rigged — and it is rigged, toward the maintenance of elite power — anyone decrying the system, whether honestly or duplicitously, was going to prove popular.

Endebted to donors

Trump’s appeal was further bolstered by styling himself a self-made man, as his campaign riffed on the long-standing myths of the American Dream. The U.S. public was encouraged to see Trump as a rich man prepared to gamble part of his own fortune on a run for the presidency so he could bring his business acumen to USA Inc. That contrasted starkly with Democratic leaders like Clinton and Biden who gave every appearance of having abjectly sold their principles — and their souls — to the highest-bidding corporate “donors.”

And again, that perception — at least in relation to Clinton and Biden — wasn’t entirely wrong.

How can Biden not end up trying to resurrect the Obama years that he was so very much part of during his two terms as vice president, and which led directly to Trump? That was why corporate donors backed his campaign. They desire the kind of neoliberal “normal” that leaves them free to continue making lots more money and ensures the wealth gap grows.

It is why they and the media worked so hard to pave Biden’s path to the presidency, even doing their best to bury political stories embarrassing to the Biden campaign. Maintaining that “normal” is the very reason the modern Democratic Party exists.

Even if Biden wanted to radically overhaul the existing, corporate-bonded U.S. political system — and he doesn’t — he would be incapable of doing so. He operates within institutional, structural constraints — donors, Congress, the media, the Supreme Court — all there to ensure his room for maneuver is tightly delimited.

Had his main rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, been allowed to run instead and won the presidency, it would have been much the same. The important difference is that the existence of a President Sanders would have risked exposing the fact that the “world’s most powerful leader” is not really so powerful.

Sanders would have lost his battles trying to defy these structural constraints, but in the process he would have made those constraints far more visible. They would have been all too obvious had someone like Sanders been constantly hitting his head against them. That was precisely why the corporate class and the technocratic leadership of the Democratic Party worked so strenuously to make sure Sanders got nowhere near the presidential nomination.

Resistance posturing

Biden will do his best to achieve what his donors want: a return to the neoliberal “normal” under Obama. He will offer a sprinkling of initiatives to ensure progressive liberals can put to rest their resistance posturing with a clear conscience. There will be some “woke” identity politics to prevent any focus on class politics and the struggle for real economic justice, as well as some weak, corporation-friendly Green New Deal projects, if Biden can sneak past them past a Republican-controlled Senate.

And if he can’t manage even that … well that’s the beauty of a system tailor-made to follow the path of least financial resistance, to uphold the corporate status quo, the “normal.”

But there is a second, bigger problem. A fly in the ointment. Whatever Biden and the Democratic Party do to resurrect the neoliberal consensus, the old “normal,” it isn’t coming back. The smug, technocratic class that has dominated Western politics for decades on behalf of the corporate elite is under serious threat. Biden looks more like a hiccup, a last burp provoked by the unexpected pandemic.

The neoliberal “normal” isn’t coming back because the economic circumstances that generated it — the postwar boom of seemingly endless growth — have disappeared.

Plutocracy entrenches

A quarter of a century ago, the Cassandras of their day — those dismissed as peddlers of false conspiracy theories — warned of “peak oil.” That was the idea that the fuel on which the global economy ran either had peaked or would soon do so. As the oil ran out, or became more expensive to extract, economic growth would slow, wages would fall, and inequality between rich and poor would increase.

This was likely to have dramatic political consequences too: resource wars abroad (inevitably camouflaged as “humanitarian intervention”); more polarized domestic politics; greater popular dissatisfaction; the return of charismatic, even fascist, leaders; and a resort to violence to solve political problems.

The arguments about peak oil continue. Judged by some standards, the production peak arrived in the 1970s. Others say, with the aid of fracking and other harmful technologies, the turning point is due about now. But the kind of world predicted by peak-oil theory looks to have been unfolding since at least the 1980s. The crisis in neoliberal economics was underscored by the 2008 global economic crash, whose shockwaves are still with us.

On top of all this, there are looming ecological and climate catastrophes intimately tied to the fossil-fuel economy on which the global corporations have grown fat. This Gordian knot of globe-spanning self-harm urgently needs unpicking.

Biden has neither the temperament nor the political maneuvering room to take on these mammoth challenges and solve them. Inequality is going to increase during his term. The technocrats are again going to be exposed once again as impotent — or complicit — as plutocracy entrenches. The ecological crisis is not going to be dealt with beyond largely empty promises and posturing.

There will be lots of talk in the media about the need to give Biden more time to show what he can do and demands that we keep quiet for fear of ushering back Trumpism. This will be designed to lose us yet more valuable months and years to address urgent problems that threaten the future of our species.

The age of populism

The ability of the technocratic class to manage growth — wealth accumulation for the rich, tempered by a little “trickle down” to stop the masses rising up — is coming to an end. Growth is over and the technocrat’s toolbox is empty.

We are now in the age of political populism — a natural response to burgeoning inequality.

On one side is the populism of the Trumpers. They are the small-minded nationalists who want to blame everyone but the real villains — the corporate elite — for the West’s declining fortunes. As ever, they will search out the easiest targets: foreigners and “immigrants.” In the U.S., the Republican Party has been as good as taken over by the Tea party. The U.S. right is not going to repudiate Trump for his defeat: They are going to totemize him because they understand his style of politics is the future.

There are now Trumps everywhere: Boris Johnson in the U.K. (and waiting in the wings, Nigel Farage); Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; the Le Pen dynasty in France; Viktor Orbán in Hungary. They are seeding the return of xenophobic, corporate fascism.

The corporate media would have us believe that this is the only kind of populism that exists. But there is a rival populism, that of the left, and one that espouses cooperation and solidarity within nations and between them.

Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. are the first shoots of a global reawakening of class-conscious politics based on solidarity with the poor and oppressed; of renewed pressure for a social contract, in contrast to the worship of survival-of-the-fittest economics; of a reclaiming of the commons, communal resources that belong to us all, not just the strongmen who seized them for their own benefit; and, most importantly, of an understanding, lost sight of in our industrialized, consumption-obsessed societies, that we must find a sustainable accommodation with the rest of the living world.

My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020

This kind of left-wing populism has a long pedigree that dates back nearly 150 years. It flourished in the inter-war years in Europe; it defined the political battle lines in Iran immediately after the Second World War; and it has been a continual feature of Latin American politics.

Warped logic

As ever, the populism of the nationalists and bigots has the upper hand. And that is no accident.

Today’s globalized wealth elite prefer neoliberal, technocratic politics that keep borders open for trade; that treat the laboring poor as human chattel, to be moved around on a global chessboard as a way to force wages down; and that ensure the elite can stash its ill-gotten gains away on island sanctuaries far from the tax man.

But when technocratic politics is on its death bed, as it is now, the corporate elite will always settle for the populism of a Trump or a Farage over the populism of the left. They will do so even if right-wing populism risks constraining their financial empires, because left-wing populism does much worse: It upends the warped logic on which the corporate elite’s entire hoarded wealth depends, threatening to wipe it out.

If the corporate elite can no longer find a way to foist a neoliberal technocrat like Biden on the public, they will choose the populism of a Trump over the populism of a Sanders every time. And as they own the media, they can craft the stories we hear: about who we are, what is possible and where we are heading. If we allow it, our imaginations will be twisted and deformed in the image of the deranged totem they choose.

We can reclaim politics — a politics that cares about the future, about our species, about our planet — but to do so we must first reclaim our minds.

State of chaos: Trump knew us better than we knew ourselves

In 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a billionaire (or wannabe billionaire or in-hock billionaire, not to mention a liar, a cheat and a scoundrel), but from the beginning he appealed to the forces of order in America that were also, as it happened, the forces of chaos. Donald Trump entered the presidential sweepstakes, or to be completely accurate rode an escalator into it, from stage right. In another universe, he could have entered from stage left and he wouldn’t have given a damn either way.

After all, there never really was a left, right or center for the king of apprentices. There was never anything but the imposing figure known as The Donald, the man of the hour, any hour, past, present or future. Whatever his political position of the moment, he reflected one thing above all: the underlying chaos and bad faith of a world of wealth, power and ever-growing inequality, a world, as it happened, just waiting to go down.

Now that he’s defeated, count on one thing: He’ll take as much of this country with him as he can. If he has his way, when he finally decides to jump ship, money in hand, he’ll leave the rest of us at a vast mask-less rally with death running wild in our midst. From the beginning, he was always the orange-faced, yellow-haired personification of chaos. Now, just as the Republican Party did in 2016, this country has taken on his chaos as our own and, in the wake of the recent election, one obvious question is: Are we, too, scheduled for the ventilator of history?

Do I sound extreme? I damn well hope so. We’re in a gridlocked, post-election moment of previously unimaginable extremity in an increasingly over-armed, ever more divided country that used to be known as the “last superpower” on Planet Earth. It matters (but not enough) that that aged Democratic centrist Joe Biden has taken the presidency and, if all goes faintly as previously expected, will make his way into the future White House. Without a Senate majority, however, and with a reduced majority in the House, without the Democrats having taken a single state legislature from the Republicans, and with Donald Trump’s America still fully mobilized and ready for … well, who knows what … don’t count on good tidings ahead.

The personification of carnage

From the start, he was imperial America’s candidate of decline, even if few recognized it at the time. Still, it should have been obvious enough in 2016 — it was to me anyway — that his trademark slogan, Make America Great Again, was nothing short of an admission that this “exceptional,” “indispensable” nation of ours, the greatest superpower in history (or so this country’s politicians then liked to believe), had, in fact, seen better times.

Donald Trump was then, and remains, a vengeful, preening peacock sent by God knows whom to make that reality obvious to one and all. That was certainly true of the slice of white, heartland, working-class America that decided to embrace the billionaire bankuptee and reality-TV host. In a land of already staggering inequality, he was the one who would somehow give them back their lost status, their lost sense of American well-being and of a future that they could embrace for their children and grandchildren. And if he didn’t do that for them, he would at least be emotional payback when it came to all the loathed powers-that-be in Washington who had, they felt, taken them down.

His “base,” as they came to be known in the media, whom he abhorred, adored and played like an accordion, embraced the man who, in the end, was guaranteed to leave them holding the bag without the slightest compunction. In those years, they became his property, his very own apprentices, like the political party he also absorbed without a second thought.

When it came to that base, he became, after a fashion, their god or perhaps their demon, and so he remains today, even in defeat. Of course, he won’t care if he ends up bankrupting them, leaves them in a ditch, or continues to rev them up at future rallies that, though they may spread death, leave him feeling whole and good and top of the line.

On the other hand, when Joe Biden, the definition of an old white man, finally limps into the Oval Office, he’ll represent a return to normalcy in Washington, the retrieval of an America that was. The only problem: the America that was — if you’ll excuse the repetition of a verb — was an America in decline, even if its leaders didn’t know it. It was a country on course for a previously un-American version of inequality and instability that once would have been unimaginable.

Who can doubt that Donald Trump himself was the personification of hell on Earth? He was the witch in the wardrobe. He was a satanic art-of-the-dealer (every deal, by definition, meant only for himself). He was what this country vomited up from the depths of its disturbed innards as a uniquely symbolic president. From the moment he delivered that Inaugural Address of his on Jan. 20, 2017, he would also be the personification of carnage.

And yes, goad me a little more, and believe me I could go on. But you get the drift, right?

And yet give Donald Trump the credit he deserves. However intuitively, he grasped just where this country was and was going (and, of course, how he could benefit from that). He understood its fault lines in a way no one else did. He even understood how to run a campaign for — instead of against — a pandemic in a way that should have left him 20,000 leagues under the sea, not floating in a heated pool at Mar-a-Lago.

There couldn’t be a grimmer moral to the American story than this: He knew all of us so much better than we knew ourselves. To so many Americans, he spoke what felt like reality itself. It mattered not at all that he looked like, felt like and was a con man in a great American tradition, or that he had stiffed the government with those tax returns he’d never release. After all, whatever he was, he was the genuine (fraudulent) thing in a world where increasing numbers of Americans already felt conned by the 1% politics of a Washington that was filled with con artists of a different sort.

Now, despite the scads of lawyers he’s called into action to screw the works, Donald Trump has missed his chance for a second round in the Oval Office and, as a result, rest assured, we’ll all be left holding the bag. In the midst of the pandemic from hell — don’t doubt it for a second — this will be another kind of hell on earth.

A vote for doom

Now, let’s look on the bright side, because at such a moment who wants to just read a screed of negativity? So here’s the good news: Thanks to President Trump’s defeat in election 2020 (however long it may take to play out in court), the world will go down more slowly, though how much more slowly remains to be seen. After all, there was one factor in any Trump second term that was going to be unlike any other.

Though it may not seem like it to us, the rest of what we would have seen from a Trump second term — autocratic behavior, raw racism, a red-hot version of nationalism (white and otherwise), aggrieved masculinity, all amid the pandemic of the century — would have been just another passing chapter in human history. In that long tale, autocrats and nationalists of every grim kind have been a dime a dozen, and even nightmarish pandemics anything but unknown. Give it a decade, a century, a millennium, and it would be as if nothing had happened at all. Who but the historians (if they still exist) would even remember?

Unfortunately, that’s not true of one factor in election 2020, though it played the most modest of roles in the campaign itself. That was, of course, the phenomenon of climate change, the human heating of the planet through the never-ending release into the atmosphere (and the oceans) of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.

Certainly, since the coal-fired industrial revolution began in England in the 18th century, the warming of this planet has been sparked and fed by us humans, but it is not, in fact, part of human history. It will operate on a timescale likely to leave that history in the dust. Once released, and if not brought under some reasonable control (as is still possible), it’s a phenomenon that will stand, in the most devastating fashion imaginable, outside human history altogether. Unlike any other Trumpian phenomenon, once it truly sets in, give it a decade, a century, even a millennium, and it will still be working to ensure that Earth, to one degree or another, becomes a distinctly unlivable planet for humanity.

It’s little short of passing strange — you might actually call it suicidal — that Donald Trump (and the crew he brought to power) would be quite so intent not just on ignoring or “denying” climate change, as is often charged, but on amplifying it by, in essence, actively setting this planet afire. The president’s term for it was “unleashing American Energy Dominance.” How strange, however, that his intent to destroy a habitable planet proved quite so popular, not once, but twice — and who knows about a third time in 2024?

After all, a vote for Trump was, in essence, a vote for doom. At some level, it wasn’t even complicated, but from a base that seemed to glory in those mask-less, chanting lovefests for their One and Only, perhaps none of this should have been a surprise at all.

If Donald Trump has become something like a god to his supporters, then perhaps it’s worth asking what kind of a god would be quite so intent on setting fire to the planet (and while he was at it murdering his own apprentices with COVID-19)? Perhaps we need to think of him, in fact, as our very own boatman Charon on the River Styx, paddling us all to what someday could quite literally be a hell on Earth.

After all, I’m writing this piece in New York City on a November day when it’s 74 degrees outside (and, no, that’s not a misprint). Yet another fierce tropical storm in a record year of them has drenched parts of Florida, a place that’s no longer a swing state but, like Mar-a-Lago, property of The Donald. Meanwhile, parts of the West, having burned and smoked and flamed in a historic fashion across millions and millions of charred acres amid heat waves galore, are still smoldering (though hardly noticed by anyone), and the world couldn’t be less together.

In a Senate controlled by Mitch McConnell, green new deals or $2 trillion climate plans will become more fantastic than Donald Trump himself. Still, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at least partially running a deeply divided country in the midst of a pandemic and an economy that’s gone to hell, the pyromania will ease up somewhat. Some modest steps might even be taken toward alternate forms of energy and some to save the environment, as well as a humanity in distress. It won’t be what’s needed, but it won’t be a torch either and that’s the best thing to be said about our moment and why it truly mattered that Donald Trump was not re-elected.

Now, return for a moment to 1991, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. America’s power brokers then (including Joe Biden), believing themselves alone and powerful beyond imagining on Planet Earth, the inheritors of everything that had gone before, launched what would become disastrous forever wars, sure that this planet was theirs for the taking, even as history itself — just imagine — was ending.

Almost three decades later, that same last superpower is a democracy in decline, not to say chaos; an imperial power in decline globally; a military power that can’t find a winning war to fight (even as Congress, no matter the president, appropriates yet more funding for the military-industrial complex). We have a 78-year-old man getting ready to inhabit the Oval Office and another 78-year-old preparing to oppose him in the Senate, while an 80-year-old runs the House. Doesn’t this tell you something about a country swept away by a pandemic — 100,000 or more cases a day — and, despite assurances from Donald Trump, without a turnable “corner” in sight? And none of this would be the end of the world, so to speak, if it weren’t for climate change.

Admittedly, COVID-19 has turned this country into a kind of hell on Earth, having been left to roam in an unprecedented fashion by a killer president. Cases are soaring, hospitals overwhelmed, deaths rising, and almost half of America can’t think about anything but crowding together for presidential rallies, living mask-less lives, and “opening” the economy.

Trumpism has split America in two in a way that hasn’t been imaginable since the Civil War. The president and the Senate are likely to be in gridlock, the judicial system a partisan affair of the first order, the national security state a money-gobbling shadow empire, the citizenry armed to the teeth, racism rising and life everywhere in an increasing state of chaos.

Welcome to the (Dis)United States. Donald Trump led the way and, whatever he does, I suspect that this, for at least the time being, is still in some sense his world, not Joe Biden’s. He was the man and, like it or not, we were all his apprentices in a performance of destructive power of the first order that has yet to truly end.

How a Biden administration could push companies further on climate

Over the past year or so, as the Trump administration continued to roll back or weaken as many climate regulations in the United States as it could get its hands on, the corporate world seemed to be doing the opposite. A steady stream of companies — from tech giants like Apple to oil majors like BP to retail behemoths like Amazon — announced major commitments to decarbonize their businesses. Pledging to go net-zero became the new gold standard for corporate sustainability.

While many companies haven’t yet matched their net-zero promises with specific action plans, that could change under the administration of President-elect Joe Biden. With the executive branch and the private sector pulling in the same direction on climate, experts expect progress on corporate pledges to continue.

“Companies and investors really struggle with uncertainty,” said Tom Murray, who advises companies on reducing emissions for the Environmental Defense Fund. “They often use it as an excuse for inaction. So by making climate change a top priority, president-elect Biden is putting an end to that uncertainty and calling for real action.”

Murray and other experts on corporate sustainability pointed to some key actions that Biden may take that will enable companies to keep up the momentum.

Perhaps the easiest one is rejoining the Paris Agreement, which the former Vice President has made clear he intends to do. “That’s so much more than symbolic,” said Mindy Lubber, CEO of the sustainable investing nonprofit Ceres. “It creates a goal for all of us, a North Star to get to net-zero emissions by 2050. Companies want to go there, but they want to know the government’s going there as well.”

Lubber and Murray also expect Biden to use his executive power to reverse a number of Trump’s rollbacks, like reinstating fuel economy standards for vehicles, putting controls on power plant emissions, and reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The first step on many companies’ journeys to net-zero is to reduce emissions from their operations, whether that’s greening the electricity powering their offices and factories or the vehicles they use to make deliveries. Lubber said companies may be more likely to throw their weight behind stricter regulations now than they have been in the past. “The opportunity to rethink and rebuild those regulations is crucial,” Lubber said. “It will take time, there’ll be disagreements, but I think we will have not only political, but corporate support for doing that.”

Rolf Skar, campaign director for Greenpeace, recommends that the Biden administration negotiate trade agreements with climate targets in mind — a move that could help companies clean up their supply chains. “Global supply chains that are dependent on things like palm oil from Indonesia, paper from Indonesia, soy and beef from the Amazon,” Skar said. “Companies pretty early on realized this is a PR disaster for us, we’re literally fueling the fires in these rain forests.”

But the proliferation of pledges by companies to stop deforestation aren’t working. The EU recently took bold action, blocking a major trade deal with South American countries until Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, agrees to do more to reduce deforestation and wildfires in the Amazon. “If the U.S. were to exert that sort of pressure as well, then countries like Brazil will be motivated by dollars to make some changes, potentially,” Skar said. “That in concert with companies acting in good faith to try to address these problems could really get us somewhere.”

But many companies won’t be able to fully decarbonize in just 30 years and will need to pay to remove carbon from the atmosphere to make up for continued emissions. Today, the technology to do this is far too expensive. Giana Amador, the managing director of Carbon 180, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal, said the Biden administration could accelerate the development of negative emissions technologies to help bring costs down. Biden has already made this a priority in his transition plan, and he can pull from the same playbook he used to develop solar technology in 2009, like increasing research and development funding, offering loan guarantees, and supporting early demonstration projects. He would need support in the Senate, but Amador said there’s already interest in carbon removal on both sides of the aisle.

“I think we’ve really seen a significant step change over the last five years since we were founded in 2015,” Amador said. “Not just the growing recognition that carbon removal is a central pillar to climate action, but it’s one of the areas where we’ve really been able to make bipartisan climate progress.”

Carbon removal may be bipartisan, but most climate policies are not. Murray said the private sector is going to need to start lobbying Congress if they companies want to make good on their pledges. “That’s the big new task,” said Murray. Biden has promised to put the country on a path to a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035 and to shore up the electric vehicle market with 500,000 charging stations, but those two goals can’t happen through executive action alone. Murray said companies have to be “champions for a smart climate and clean energy policy, and incentives that help move their companies, and the whole economy, toward climate stability.”

The other big test for companies that have committed to net-zero will be to see who steps up in moving from a net-zero commitment to a detailed net-zero roadmap. “I really want to see companies with transition plans with clear and specific milestones along the way for 2030, 2035 and 2040, for how they’re going to get there,” Murray said.

How “Bob’s Burgers” uses “foxhole humor” to keep the American dream alive after 200 episodes

If I had one sentence to describe the appeal of the Fox animated sitcom “Bob’s Burgers” as it releases its 200th episode on Sunday, I would simply say that it somehow always manages to find the technicolor heart beating inside everyday doldrums.

In the world of “Bob’s Burgers” it’s not just a teenager going through puberty, it’s soloing for the “The Hormone-iums.” Scholastic mock trial is replaced with a student body-led investigation into yogurt theft. A seemingly futile search for a two-butted goat turns into an exploration of coming-of-age motivations and fears (and still ultimately delivers said two-butted goat).

The show also, as I’ve written before, excels at capturing the love and craft of cooking just as genuinely as more “serious” food television. In an age of prestige culinary media — from the Vivaldi-scored “Chef’s Table” to quietly contemplative documentaries like “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” — “Bob’s Burgers” is almost always at its strongest when the creators train their focus on Bob’s dreams of running a better restaurant and making the best burger.

This has led to standout episodes like the aptly named “Best Burger” and “Boys Just Wanna Have Fungus,” and has also traditionally placed the show in a different category from other adult animation like “South Park” and (to a somewhat lesser extent) “The Simpsons,” which actively engage with current events and politics on a week-to-week basis.

But then the pandemic hit.

Local restaurants across the country have struggled for nearly nine months to survive amid government-mandated closures and reductions of service. Owners have had to get creative — transforming into bodegas, creating to-go cocktail kits, streaming culinary how-to videos from their empty kitchens. And, especially as someone who writes about food, when watching Bob (H. Jon Benjamin), Linda (John Roberts) and the kids (Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman and Dan Mintz), it’s hard not to wonder what they would do in a similar situation.

It’s something that the show’s creator, Loren Bouchard, has thought about, too.

“Poor restaurants. I feel for all of them, even the chains,” Bouchard told Salon. “Well, some of the chains.”

He continued: “Every time a restaurant goes out of business, that’s someone’s dream dying. And if they were buying good ingredients that means they’re connected to a whole bunch of small farms and suppliers who were counting on those orders. It’s all so fragile even in the best of times. It’s beyond tragic what’s happening now.”

And while “Bob’s Burgers” isn’t going to have a “pandemic-themed episode” — though “Worms of In-Rear-ment,” in which Gene contracts pinworms, comes close enough — Sunday’s 200th episode is a timely nod to the challenges restaurants are facing right now, and, more importantly, the people who are keeping them running.

We’re at a place where another level of government restrictions, without the promise of any kind of government bailout, could easily bankrupt a locally owned restaurant. That level of precarity is something that this episode, called “Bob Belcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Kids” understands.

It opens the day before the Ocean Fest, a small business showcase, combined with an art crawl, and Bob is counting on that foot traffic to turn a profit.

But a dramatic, upsetting incident occurs at the restaurant that impacts the restaurant’s ability to serve food. Then, on top of it all, Bob’s flattop breaks. It’s a one-two punch that leaves Bob wondering how the restaurant is going to make ends meet if they can’t even make burgers.

“Bob Belcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Kids” isn’t as splashy as the series’ star-studded 100th episode, “Glued, Where’s My Bob?” but it’s perhaps more indicative of the show’s heart. The spotlight is on the family’s resiliency and their joint commitment to making their American dream of owning a small business work.

“I guess one thing we think about differently on ‘Bob’s’ — one thing among many I’m sure — is how we present that little spark of hope and grit and optimism that keeps the family going in tough times,” Bouchard said.

Tough times are abundant. I mean, the restaurant industry is hard. Products are expensive — as viewers saw in episodes like “They Serve Horse, Don’t They?,” where Bob is on the hunt for premium protein at a better price, and ends up accidentally serving horse burgers. Good help is hard to find, which is how the Belchers briefly ended up hiring Mickey, an ex-bank robber who once held Bob hostage.

The restaurant kitchen always looks kind of broken-down, especially when compared to those of much nicer restaurants, like the one hidden away in Felix’s jazz club, which Bob gets to briefly cook in during this season’s episode “Copa-Bob-bana.” That’s a reality that Bouchard said likely won’t ever change. “They can’t afford much of an upgrade,” Bouchard said. “But in an upcoming episode, [they go] to great lengths to get a used sink.”

But the Belcher family remains hopeful even when all odds are against them, which, Bouchard said, if not written well “could feel trite and small when the whole world is going through tough times.”

“We have to present their optimism as a choice that’s hard fought, and well-earned and would hopefully make sense both in their narrative and in ours,” Bouchard said.

And one of the reasons that it does make so much sense is the familial support system that the writers have created through the show’s 11 seasons — specifically the relationship between Linda and Bob.

“Part of the core of their relationship, in my opinion, is humor,” he said. “It’s not ‘ha ha’ humor, the way they use it. It’s more like foxhole humor — the kind of humor that I imagine doctors in emergency rooms have.”

That’s what gives Bob’s “Oh my God”s so much of their charm, Bouchard said.

“If Bob and Linda express exasperation, it’s only funny because you never question their commitment to each other or to the family,” he said. “And by expressing it now and then, it’s like a little wink, as if to say, ‘We’re in this together — it’s good, but it’s hard, right?'”

That’s why there’s no question in viewers’ minds that Bob, Linda and the kids would do what needed to be done to keep the restaurant afloat — which is a big part of the 200th episode — because that’s also their way of demonstrating their care for each other. That’s why it’s also heartwarming when members of the community rally around Bob’s Burgers to keep the restaurant’s doors open.

Especially amid the pandemic, when things are tough for so many people, it’s some nice fantasy fulfillment to watch things turn around for genuinely good people through a combination of personal drive and community care. Put another way, the people behind “Bob’s Burgers,” led by Bouchard, understand that in the world they’ve created, it’s not just about the trials and tribulations of the titular restaurant. It’s a micro-view of the ways the people behind those restaurants are the heartbeat of a thrilling, thankless, industry.

“Bob’s Burgers” airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 p.m. on FOX and is currently available for streaming on Hulu.

Trump says Biden “won” as he again spreads baseless conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election

In the midst of a flurry of tweets on Sunday morning, Donald Trump may have slipped up and gone off message and admitted that former Vice President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Linking to a clip from Fox News, the president– referring to Biden — wrote: “He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!”

You can see the tweet below:

He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more! https://t.co/Exb3C1mAPg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

America — and the Democrats — won’t have a future if Joe Biden adopts a centrist agenda

President-elect Joe Biden has called the November 2020 U.S. election a “battle for the soul of the nation.” In offering himself up as a contrast to President Donald Trump, Biden made a clear distinction between his political agenda and statesman-like behavior, and that of Trump. Ultimately, millions more Americans chose Biden over Trump and gave him a larger mandate than any other presidential candidate in American history. Biden’s victory was possible in large part due to an alliance between Bernie Sanders–backing progressives and the centrist liberals who longed for a return to the Obama years. Now begins a battle for the soul of Joe Biden.

For years, the two major parties had tacked toward the center when running candidates for president. It seemed logical to assume every four years that most American voters would prefer someone who tried to appeal to the mass of voters in the middle rather than one end of the political spectrum. But since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has shifted further and further to the right, culminating in Donald Trump’s extremist right-wing presidency — a “reign of terror” that looks like none other in history. To keep up, Democrats moved to the right as well, hoping eventually they would catch up to a now-mythical centrist majority that would ensure their electoral victories. Instead, Americans were becoming disillusioned with politics and simply not participating. In 2016, there were three blocs of eligible voters: those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Clinton, and those who didn’t vote. While Trump’s share was the smallest of the three, the latter was the largest grouping.

After three years of watching Trump’s disastrous presidency unfold, progressives worked hard alongside liberals and even anti-Trump Republicans this past year to convince disillusioned American voters that everything was at stake in 2020 and that the future of the nation depended on their participation. Voter turnout surged all over the nation, but it grew particularly in swing states among those demographics who identify as progressive — such as young people of color.

For example, in Philadelphia, whose Democratic votes helped deliver the critically important state of Pennsylvania for Biden, a young Black organizer with the Working Families Party named Nicolas O’Rourke wrote, “As usual, the Democratic Party played to a mythical swing voter while taking Black and brown voters for granted.” He explained, “It was up to our progressive movement to street canvass Philadelphia’s early vote centers and distribute water and face masks and answer voters’ questions.”

Although Biden clearly and decisively won the presidency — notwithstanding pandemic-related delays to casting and counting votes — his party did not win much beyond the White House. Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to win an outright Senate majority as they had hoped. The centrists wasted no time in blaming progressives for those losses. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in an interview with the New York Times countered with cold hard facts: “Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker.” Indeed, the ranks of young progressives of color in Congress increased.

While one can indeed counter that it is easier to run as a staunch progressive for lower office in densely populated diverse urban centers than it is to run for president of the entire nation, Trump proved that even with a narrow agenda and forceful populist rhetoric, it is possible to win a national election. Indeed, Biden won voters all across the nation by running on a platform that was deeply influenced by progressives.

Now, Biden’s task is to make sure that the Democratic Party’s political future is assured in two years at the 2022 midterm elections, and just as importantly in four years, as Trump has already considered launching a new White House bid for 2024. More importantly, he needs to ensure that millions of Americans do not fall through the financial fissures wrought by the devastating pandemic, that climate catastrophe can be avoided, that the torture of immigrants can end, that devastating wars are terminated and more.

He can protect both his party’s political future and his people’s well-being by moving decisively to the left, not to the right (which is often erroneously labeled “the center”). It is progressive policies like Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy and corporations, adopting the Green New Deal, legalizing immigration, and ending wars that are actually popular. But forceful red-baiting propaganda unleashed by right-wing forces have scared centrist Democrats like Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), whose explanation of her party’s down-ballot losses was the use of the word “socialism.” Spanberger lashed out against progressives, saying, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.” But Biden did not use those words during his campaign, except to unequivocally denounce the idea of “socialism.” He reveled in the fact that he beat the socialist candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the primary elections. None of the down-ballot candidates explicitly identifying as socialists lost their races, and in fact, the left did quite well on election night.

The fact is that Republicans will say and do anything to win elections and label Democrats “socialist,” whether or not it is true. Allowing the extremist right wing to dictate the direction of the Democratic Party simply gives Trump and his backers the leverage that they can and will use to crush liberals and progressives alike.

Biden and Democrats can and should thread the needle by proudly adopting progressive and popular policies and brushing off accusations of being socialist without taking the bait. If Medicare for All is socialist, then so is ‘Medicare for Some,’ which is what we currently have. If raising the minimum wage is socialist, then Florida voters just proudly claimed the mantle in deed while denouncing it in word. The Green New Deal is as socialist as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original plan for which it is named. If ending war is considered socialist, then so is Trump, who pledged to bring troops home. It is not difficult to make the case for progressive policies simply because they are popular. The only case to be made against tacking left is through fearmongering propaganda, which Republicans are adept at.

Will Biden do what needs to be done to ensure his party and nation’s future? Among the first items on his agenda appear to be reversingmany of Trump’s worst executive orders. This is an easy and uncontroversial first step. But Biden faces serious pressure to veer rightward. He appears to be bending to Republican power in forming his Cabinet. According to an Axios report, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “would work with Biden on centrist nominees but no ‘radical progressives’ or ones who are controversial with conservatives.” Conservative and centrist media pundits have warned Biden repeatedly that he would need to tack to the right. They cite Biden’s talk of “unity” as a reason to justify landing in the center.

But voter concerns do fit not neat geometrical shapes where the right and left can be folded into a middle ground that means rejecting both ends of the spectrum. The middle ground can be centered on a rejection of cruelty, abuse, corruption, corporate greed, war, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and dishonesty. The middle ground can be centered on popular policies that directly benefit people. In other words, Biden needs to reshape himself into a left-wing populist, and he can do so without explicitly labeling himself as such. The future of the nation and planet depend on it.

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

To truly recover, US needs 400% more coronavirus relief than McConnell is offering, economists say

The next coronavirus stimulus bill needs to be at least four times larger than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) $500 billion proposal, economists told Salon.

Congress remains deadlocked on a bill after McConnell repeatedly rejected the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act passed by the House back in May, and the $2.2 trillion compromise offer House Democrats approved last month.

McConnell said this week that a bill “dramatically larger” than his $500 billion proposal is “not a place I think we’re willing to go.” Yet economists say the country needs at least $2 trillion to help the economy recover back to where it was before the pandemic, just as the US enters the worst wave of the coronavirus pandemic yet.

McConnell’s delays threaten to worsen the issues that the stimulus bill is supposed to relieve.

“The delay in providing the stimulus almost surely will increase the amount of money necessary to restore the economy,” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-prize winning economist and Columbia University professor, told Salon. “Balance sheets of households and firms get eroded and firms go bankrupt. Digging yourself out of a deep hole is much more expensive than preventing a decline into a deep hole — another instance in which the aphorism an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is applicable.”

The rise in coronavirus infections in recent weeks has compounded the problem. The number of new confirmed cases in the country topped 150,000 for the first time on Thursday, though the true number is likely far higher since positivity rates in certain states suggest testing is missing a massive number of cases.

The issue should not be a matter of cost but an issue of need, argued Michael Graetz, a former senior Treasury Department official and co-author of “The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It.”

Small businesses are closing around the country and, despite many re-openings, there are still more people unemployed than at any point since the Great Depression. “So we need to do what we did in the CARES Act,” said Graetz, who is now a professor at Columbia. That includes additional loans and grants to keep businesses open, enough money to provide at least $300 to $400 per week in federal unemployment benefits, funding to help struggling hospitals, another round of $1,200 checks to help people pay rent, and funding to help state and local governments that have “run out of money.”

All of those measures add up to close to $2 trillion, he estimated.

“You’re talking about serious problems that need to be addressed,” Graetz said. “It’s like going shopping for your children when school starts. You don’t ask how much am I going to spend, you ask what do they need.”

Graetz argued that the government must get the economy through the next six months until there is an “effective vaccine” that is widely distributed.

That view is shared by a large number of economists. The left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that it would take at least $2 trillion to provide $400-per-week unemployment benefits, food and housing aid, and state and local government aid without taking into account funds for virus testing and other pandemic-related efforts. Other economists estimate it may take $3 trillion to $4 trillion to help the economy recover.

Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argued that the path to recovery would take years and far more funding than is being discussed for the next round of relief.

Restoring the unemployment rate to the 3.5% it was before the pandemic would require about $800 billion per year in stimulus funding totaling between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion if it was for “very effective” stimulus measures like federal unemployment benefits and state and local aid, he told Salon.

“Then, however, we can’t just turn it off like a spigot, because that would be a big fiscal cliff,” he said, adding that it would take another $400 billion per year over several years to “slowly manage the transition of demand being stimulus-led from private-sector led.”

Aiming toward an even lower unemployment rate would require at least another $100 billion per year over several years, he estimated.

A major impasse in negotiations has been over the size of the unemployment benefits. Democrats have been steadfast in their demand to keep the $600-per-week federal boost that was included in the CARES Act while Republicans are pushing for a figure closer to $300 to $400 per week. Republicans have argued that the higher number is a disincentive to workers to return to their jobs even though studies have repeatedly found that the generous federal boost had no impact on the labor market. EPI’s research estimated over the summer that reducing the benefits to $400 would shrink the economy and cost millions of jobs.

But with so many months since the benefits expired, Graetz said Democrats should cave and agree to a lower figure in the interest of getting the money out sooner to the people who need it.

“I think they should agree to do less in order to get the money out the door. Every week that passes that is $400 less that people who are unemployed have,” he said. “Their households are at stake. If you can’t get $600, you have to accept $400. The American democratic system is built on compromise.”

Another impasse has been over aid to cash-strapped cities and states. Tax revenue for local governments dried up amid the shutdowns and the damage is only expected to get worse as the country enters what is expected to be a devastating winter. While Democrats have sought $1 trillion for aid to city and state governments, McConnell has deemed the proposal a “blue state bailout.” He suggested earlier this year that the country should “let states go bankrupt,” which is illegal, and pushed to exclude any new money for states in his September proposal.

Graetz said that failing to save struggling cities and states would “absolutely” worsen the problem by resulting in more layoffs.

“We’re looking at six more months at least of state and local governments not getting the revenues that they need to function,” he said. “I don’t understand why Congress, which has the ability to provide the money, has decided that it would like to see this as an occasion for layoffs of public workers. There’s this myth that state and local governments can balance their budgets if they just cut out fraud, waste and abuse. But instead, they’re going to cut out teachers, policemen and firemen.”

Graetz pointed out that while mostly Democratic-led states were hit hardest in the spring, the areas where hospitals are now filling up are in “Republican states.”

“Republicans governors need money as much as the Democratic governors do,” he said. “This is not a red state-blue state divide when it comes to addressing this problem.”

Graetz said he shares Republican concerns over the long-term impact on the debt and deficit but “this is an emergency and it needs to be addressed.”

“The human costs are just enormous,” he said. “I think this is an emergency. The government needs to respond to emergencies. It responded to 9/11. The scope of this is far greater than the damage of 9/11. And it needs to respond. We spent $10 trillion fighting wars in the Middle East in response to 9/11. We need to spend what we need to spend now.”

Bivens urged lawmakers to consider other long-term implications of coronavirus relief measures.

“These cost-estimates are basically things laser-focused on normalizing unemployment,” he said. “We need a lot more than that to have a generally decent society that provides broad-based economic security.”

Those measures include “deeper social insurance,” including working to “delink health insurance and jobs,” he said, as well as investments in early childhood care and carework, and regulations and rules that “empower workers to get a bigger piece of the pie.”

“The pre-Covid low unemployment rate basically disguised just how rotted our economy had become in its potential to deliver genuine security for all,” he added.

But it’s impossible to predict the full scope of the relief measures needed because of the uncontrolled spread of the virus across the country that shows no sign of slowing.

“Obviously the big danger to everything in next couple of months is the virus,” Bivens said, “and we cannot spend enough money in efforts to contain that.”

Trump campaign workers turn on the president following vote fraud hotline debacle

According to a report from the Daily Beast, workers who manned the vote fraud hotlines set up by Donald Trump’s campaign in the wake of his loss to former Vice President Joe Biden are lashing out at the president for the conditions they worked in and for providing them with no protections from abusive callers.

With one worker calling it the “room from hell,” the Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng reports the “bare, depressing communal office space tucked away on a floor of the Team Trump headquarters in Arlington, Virginia,” was shut down on Friday after days of employees being forced to sit and listen to death threats and pranksters calling to tell operators that the president lost when they weren’t making bogus reports.

“When the room first opened for business, staffers worked in rotating shifts, from 7 a.m. ET to 1 a.m. the following day, a source with knowledge of the matter said. No complimentary food was regularly provided. And the phones were constantly ringing in the dreary, dull hell-space,” the report states. “According to three people familiar with the situation, the hotline was inundated for nearly a week by crank callers impersonating public figures such as Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, anti-Trump callers launching into vulgarity-laden tirades, pranksters making sounds of flatulence, and others issuing threats of physical violence at the lower- and mid-level Trump 2020 staffers.”

The report states that employees often took breaks to go sit in the bathroom and cry, with many leaving work at the end of the day looking visibly upset.

According to one former staffer who wished to remain anonymous, “It’s misery. It’s one of the worst ways to end a campaign that you could think of.”

“The fiasco of Team Trump’s hotline was a perfect microcosm of the ongoing flailing of the president and his senior officials’ efforts to play make-believe that Trump had actually won the election,” Suebsaeng wrote. “Some Team Trump staff have talked amongst themselves about filing for unemployment next week, as many contracts were set to expire on Nov. 15 and the campaign undergoes downsizing. Senior officials offered scant guidance about what was coming next, though the human resources department did tell them that many of their campaign emails would soon be shut off. And in keeping with Trump’s delusion of an imminent second term, the situation froze several more senior officials from even offering themselves up as listed references to junior staff scrambling to find another job for fear that they’d get in trouble for aiding with some informal transition.”

According to the report, an email did go out to the employees on Friday morning thanking them for their work, but one of the staffers told the Beast it was “too little, too late.”

You can read more here.

Ire for Trump after 130 Secret Service agents reportedly infected or under Covid-19 quarantine

As the U.S. continues to hit daily records in coronavirus cases—and with at least 40 people within the president’s inner circle having been infected—the Washington Post reported Friday that more than 130 Secret Service officers are now in quarantine because they either tested positive for Covid-19 or had exposure to a co-worker who tested positive.

The infections of Secret Serves staffers, according to the Post, are “believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation.”

The new reporting sparked fresh condemnation for Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.

“He cares about no one. Not a soul,” tweeted advocacy group Public Citizen.

He… Doesn’t… Care… https://t.co/qWqkbnEOEF

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) November 13, 2020

“Trump’s total disregard for the lives of his protectors, supporters, and aides shows how dangerous his extreme selfishness has become,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in a statement. “The virus is spreading freely across the country, and Donald Trump has only made it worse by holding super-spreader rallies and events like the Election Night party, which appears to have infected several of his closest associates.”

“Trump was warned repeatedly that failure to take precautions could threaten the safety of those around him,” said Beyer, “but as he makes clear every day, he is only capable of thinking about himself.”

Beyer added that “Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize reality, both in the election outcome and in the pandemic, is killing people.”

And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted:

Unbelievable. GOP doesn’t even care for the lives of the people protecting theirs. https://t.co/5OFFrKiZOC

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 13, 2020

CNN also reported Friday on the spread of Covid-19 among Secret Service officers, though the outlet put the number of affected officer at “several dozen.”

How Reagan’s notions of a “good society” resonate with Trump supporters today

If a ballooning federal deficit, tax breaks for the wealthy, rising income inequality, structural racism and cowboy diplomacy sound familiar, it’s because they were big issues in the 2020 presidential race.

But they’re not new. They also dominated the 1984 contest between Ronald Reagan and his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale.

Then, as now, Americans faced a bevy of social, economic and political issues that, depending on presidential leadership, would define who they were as a nation. And then, as now, millions voted out of concern for their personal finances rather than address the challenges roiling much of the country.

My research on Ronald Reagan, religion and the news media explores how the 40th president deployed religious ideas to shift Americans’ notions of a good society. Many leaders have invoked God to justify their policies and cement their power.

Reagan was more successful than most, but President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence use a similar strategy.

God, Mammon and America

Reagan’s vision of politics, economics and religion replaced the worldview introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Seeking relief for Americans during the Great Depression, FDR launched a series of federal programs called the New Deal. These programs provided jobs, social security and provisions for labor unions.

FDR’s policies reflected the economic and political realities of the 1930s and 1940s. But they also tapped into the Social Gospel, a vein of American religion that advocated for social as well as individual salvation through justice and systemic change.

FDR’s welfare liberalism lasted through the 1970s, when social turmoil and economic recessions made many Americans fear for their financial well-being as well as the nation’s. But Ronald Reagan’s message of hope and his belief in America’s divine destiny helped him win the 1980 presidential race.

Reagan linked American exceptionalism, particularly its role as a “shining city on a hill” to neoliberal ideas including a limited government, tax cuts and reduced social services. At its heart, neoliberalism views every aspect of civic, social and cultural life in terms of the market economy.

According to Reagan, God blessed democracy, free markets and religious liberty. Therefore, Americans should, too.

It’s the economy, stupid

In September 1983, William Raspberry, at the time one of the country’s few Black columnists, wrote in The Washington Post, “Forget war and peace, forget fairness, forget the federal deficit. None of it matters for this election. The only thing that matters is whether individual voters think their personal finances are more likely to improve under a Mondale administration or a second Reagan term.”

Raspberry predicted the rise of “pocketbook selfishness” after seeing a Washington Post-ABC poll that revealed many voters would put their own interests above those of the nation.

A majority of respondents said that Democratic candidate Walter Mondale was more likely than Reagan to “reduce the threat of nuclear war” and “be fairer to all segments of the population.” They agreed with Mondale’s political views and felt the “national economy was getting worse under Reagan.” But they still backed the incumbent. They explained their support by saying that Reagan would ensure they were “better off financially.”

Noting that voters typically explained their choice of candidates as a product of aligned views, Raspberry surmised, “Reagan has made greed an acceptable attitude.”

A Washington Post feature story put Midwestern names and faces to the poll. Several suburban housewives explained why they were voting for the incumbent. Sue Daniels of Mequon, Wisconsin, for example, said: “I’m going for Reagan because now I’m one of the haves and he’s gonna take a little less from me and give a little less to some of the people who don’t have. Mondale’s going to give my money to everybody, whether they’re down and out because they’re lazy or because they’re not.”

Vision of moral growth

Voters knew Mondale’s policies were “fairer” than Reagan’s, but many did not seem to care.

Those who did care were public service workers whose income and benefits were affected by federal cutbacks, and low-income citizens who knew that Reagan’s policies penalized them. According to the Post’s reporters, “the strongest feelings on the fairness issue are heard in the black community on (Milwaukee’s) Northside.”

Local statistics underscored why: failing schools, packed soup kitchens, and swelling welfare rolls. But, according to Reagan, whose views were mainstreamed by the news media, many Americans were on government assistance. That’s why he wanted to cut taxes. If the IRS collected less money, then the budget for social services would be reduced, which would force welfare recipients to find jobs.

In the neoliberal worldview, Reagan was doing a favor for the millions on welfare. He was fostering their moral and religious growth by making them find jobs and become responsible citizens.

Making America Great Again

Trump and his supporters like to compare him to Ronald Reagan; both were former Democrats, entertainers and, in their third act, bedrock conservatives. Trump even borrowed Reagan’s campaign slogan, shortening “Let’s Make America Great Again” to the “Make America Great Again” meme.

On Tuesday, some 69 million voters likely agreed that Trump was making America great, when they cast votes for his second term.

The majority of those voters are not white supremacists, evangelicals or members of QAnon. They are white, Black and brown men and women who believe that Trump is a good businessman and that his economic policies will help them.

In the words of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which endorsed the president, “Isn’t the real question whether he has been taking the country, and the economy of this region, in the right direction these last four years? Can we separate the man from the record?”

Americans may disagree on whether the country’s pre-COVID-19 economic boom was a result of Trump’s policies or those put in place by the Obama administration. But, as I see it, one thing is clear: The nation’s commitment to greed and selfishness remains strong.

Reagan’s spiritual neoliberalism, sanctioned and sanctified by God’s blessings and accepted even by some atheists, secularists and non-Christians, still holds many Americans in thrall.

Joe Biden and the 73 million-plus Americans who voted him will need to counter that worldview with a different vision of what it means to be a good American in a good society.

Diane Winston, Associate Professor and Knight Center Chair in Media & Religion, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

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

After a close race, Biden will lead a deeply divided nation

We have a winner in Joe Biden. The streets immediately erupted in elation in New York, Washington and other U.S. and international cities with the announcement. Redder, more rural areas held vigils and the White House itself went silent, unresponsive to cheering for Biden outside its gates.

Still, Donald Trump, who went golfing, will not quietly leave the stage. Indeed, he doubled down on his promised, if frivolous, legal challenges before electors certify the election results in December.

It was a day with outbreaks of spontaneous joy. Biden and Kamala Harris played to an emotional parking lot crowd in Wilmington, Del., with uplifting messages of healing.

Realities of division, deep social problems and pandemic temper any immediate cheer. Yet the urban half of the country can show relief about ousting Trump, for choosing the moderately left Biden, for greeting the historic first woman and first Black vice president. They can relax seeing the end of 24/7 news coverage underscoring a flashing red-blue election map.

Threading the needle toward the kind of healing that Biden preaches will require balancing a lot of simultaneous political pressures from left and right. It takes a lot more than sloganeering. The hope is that Biden, who knows his way around the government and the Senate, knows how to do this work and has a keen focus on practical solutions.

Biden’s prize for surviving the elongated vote in multiple battleground states is that we now expect impossible miracles to bring together a deeply divided nation, to right what went awry during these Donald Trump years and to put a different set of issues on the public table. We expect that we will have a new masked face on coronavirus and science, newfound empathy on immigration, new reason toward the environment, climate and health care.

Good luck. During this voting count, another 400,000 Americans tested positive for coronavirus, for example.

It will be a busy Day One ordering masking, rejoining climate accords, launching a healthcare legislative effort and addressing police-community relations. Biden served notice that he will start in even this week.

We Can Agree

All sides should be able to agree that this election, mostly under rules in battleground states set by Republican policymakers, has been a slugfest, with Biden more outlasting Trump than finding widespread consensus. But Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., already is talking about blocking Biden’s best ideas, statements which are unfortunate for bipartisanship.

Unlike Trump, Biden won the popular vote as well as hitting the Electoral College mark. Please don’t gloss over the fact that 70 million Americans just voted for Trump and Trumpism.

The current president got votes despite serious failures to address the pandemic, despite policies that take children from immigrant parents at the border, despite continuing joblessness and despite persistently amplifying the voices of racism and gun-toting hate.

Yes, I wanted this election to be a statement that there has been enough lying, enough incompetence, enough twisting of self-serving truth, enough personal promotion, enough snubbing of allies and embrace of foreign dynasts and enough bullying and settling of private scores with taxpayer money and authority.

Dropping Trump is only a good start. But 70 million times, voters refused to say No to the Crazy Train.

Fortunately, 74 million did, braving disease and hours of wait to do so.

Expect a Raucous Good-Bye

This vote will end Trump’s term, but it is not necessarily an endorsement of Biden and Kamala Harris; they now need to earn their leadership jobs through action.

To the last moments of the voting countdown, Trump showed us repeatedly that what he cares about is Trump. His flailing about unproven allegations of widespread fraud is as devoid of reality as his blindness to the coronavirus, of the unequal effects of his economy or even to the normal practices of vote-counting. If he had cared about the results of mail-in balloting, perhaps he should have jawboned Republican state legislators to count those first and actually have gotten the U.S. Postal Service to do its job.

We can expect Trump will not stop efforts to undercut Biden, with legal and political campaigns that get increasingly shrill, possibly including an attempt to have Pennsylvania legislators replace electors altogether with a slate of their own.

We can expect two months of transition in which rather than work for peaceful turnover, Trump will continue to ignore the realities of a pandemic now striking 100,000 a day, to take punitive actions against individuals like Dr. Anthony Fauci whom he perceives as enemies. Expect Trump to create lots more executive actions to worsen immigration, health care, environment, income inequality and racism — all while the lame-duck Senate Republican majority shoves through more conservative federal judges with lifetime terms.

Trump may be going, but not Trumpism, goes the new adage.

What Could Happen?

Keep an eye on Trump’s now-outward rift with scientists over what to do about the coronavirus exploding into this winter wave of disease. The nation reported a record 134,000 new cases on Saturday and another 1,100 deaths. There is nothing in Trump’s tool bag to suggest that he will deviate now from the path leading to thousands of more cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Watch immigration adviser Stephen Miller use the remaining time to further hector both legal and illegal migrants; we can expect no action to reunite 545 children with their families.

Take note as Trump takes executive orders to make permanent policies that ruin the environment, pay off the wealthy and undercut health care. Expect a slew of Trump-loyal appointees to federal jobs to start the clock on becoming permanent deep-state replacements expecting protection under the same Civil Service that Trump wants excised.

And yes, wait for Trump to move on pardoning himself and family members preemptively from as many criminal charges as possible.

Mostly, watch for what comes of our palpable fear that Trump’s troops will resort to violence toward insisting on their version of truth.

It’s too early for the accounting of the Trump years, but their impact will not go away soon. Trump’s own children are talking about four years out. There are plenty of Trump scars, from the last-minute Supreme Court appointment to the pandemic, that will last a lifetime.

We have a new president-elect and vice president-elect. Let’s wish them well before the swamp of Trumpism and McConnell politics try to swallow them.

Understanding the Trump voters: Here’s why nobody is doing it right

Based on the last two presidential elections, there is clearly a failure in reporting, polling and understanding of almost half of America. Perhaps liberals would simply like to govern and run for office by only mobilizing their half of the population and overlooking that other half, but I would imagine this country won’t get closer to equal opportunity with that type of thinking. It’s true that much of the divisive language comes from Trump supporters who seems to enjoy Trump’s deplorable approach to life and politics. Does that embody every single person who voted for Donald Trump in the last two elections? If you think that, then you are as lost as the narrow reporting and polling I have witnessed during the last four years.

My life has brought me across the lives of many other people, which has allowed me to understand the viewpoints of both sides in a more personal and complicated way. I’m a former pastor, and my favorite family in one of my churches was one that actually attended a Glenn Beck rally. Do you realize how kooky you need to be to travel from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to attend a Glenn Beck rally as a family? Yet I have nothing but warm feelings for them: Best family in the church by far. They were close to each other, kind and down to earth — and as far from me politically as anyone I have ever met. My least favorite family was full of hate, judgment and self-righteousness — yet I agreed with them on every single political issue. In fact, that liberal family is the sole reason I left formal ministry.

As a high school teacher in a predominantly first-generation and low-income Latino community, I noticed something very interesting. First, my fellow teachers, who were naturally very educated, very liberal and quite talented teachers, and usually came from serious financial privilege, barely survived the Trump presidency emotionally. In real life their lives didn’t change a bit. They still went to Europe during the summer, went out to eat all weekend, shopped at Whole Foods and lived in the heart of expensive liberal-bastion neighborhoods like Cambridge and Somerville. In fact, I bet their financial lives improved during the Trump presidency, or at least their parents’ lives did.

Meanwhile, the students whose lives were actually affected by Trump winning in 2016 acted like it was nothing. The reason for this reaction was not political ignorance but real-life understanding. Many liberals suffering from what they call “implicit bias” — or, as I call it, racism — claimed that these poor, uneducated immigrants simply didn’t know what had just happened. The truth is that the community members knew exactly what had happened: Nothing. Their city has had a bad school system for the last 40 years and it will continue down that path no matter who is president. Their city has gangs, dilapidated housing and crime everywhere, just as it did over the last 40 years. Trump as president just affirmed what they always suspected about this country: It doesn’t care about their community. Except when, over the next 20 years, the poor Latino community is forced out by gentrification, which has already started.

Now comes my own failure, and the failure of the people with labels just like me. I am a Bible-believing Christian minister, I am blue collar, and I have been a committed member of the working-class poor most of my life. Many of my people support Trump and will continue in four years to support the next Trump type if the Democratic Party doesn’t start changing its approach. By the way, the Trump type is here to stay. Trump brought in more votes than any other Republican ever — the Republicans aren’t just going to wash their hands of him now. That’s just a pipe dream of the left. The true path to defeating Trumpism forever lies within the blue-collar, working-class poor of this country.

If I had any political network besides a bunch of package handlers at FedEx I would start a new political party called the Blue Collar Party, the leaders of which would only be front-line workers around this great country. The laborers, the line workers, the waitresses, the janitors, the shovel holders and anyone else suffering from holding up this country. These people understand this country more than any reporter, politician or entertainer with a voice and a big salary ever could. The best part of that blue-collar fight is that it empowers all races, since class doesn’t have a color. Naturally enough, providing upward mobility to the working-class poor will predominantly bring hope to many people of color and will potentially show a new sense of unity that could break down some of the barriers between races.

I have worked side by side with the working-class poor who love Trump, and I promise you there is hope in reaching them. Hell, Obama reached them a little, and Bernie Sanders did more so. Even Bill Clinton did, but for the most part they feel forgotten by the Democratic Party. In spite of all this, the liberal media simply wants to explain away half the country as racist, sexist and ignorant voters. God forbid the vote they gave for Trump had a genuine purpose. I admit it may have been a flawed purpose but it’s one that needs to be addressed before the country completely loses sight of itself.

On my own end, I would love to reach out to my fellow evangelical followers to re-educate them on the Bible and what it truly means to follow Christ. The evangelical leaders are lost and beyond my help, but the followers are not. The Bible commands its followers to champion liberal causes and certainly not the two non-biblical issues that have been forced onto the public over the last 40-plus years. The issues around welcoming the foreigner, healing the sick, equality for all and supporting the causes of the least of these needs to be the new foundation of the public voice of the church.

I feel there are a great number of people in the country that simply feel unseen, and in desperation they reach out to anyone who even appears to care about them. I know it is easier to put people we disagree with into various categories. I do it all the time. It saves a lot of time and energy. However, as a minister I know I need to hold myself to a higher standard. I also know what I have seen and the people I have met in my life. People are complicated. In fact I barely understand myself half the time. At age 43, I hiked across Spain hoping to “find myself” on my own Camino de Santiago. I didn’t find myself in Spain but it was certainly enlightening. I know my own personal journey is complicated and the same can be said about the millions of people living their lives across this Country. People are looking for a sense of belonging, looking to be heard, looking for professional and educational opportunity, looking to feel valued and loved. I can only hope that in the next few years this country will start to understand itself just a little bit more than it does now.

Stanford vs. Harvard: Two famous business schools’ opposing tactics on COVID

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Northern California, the stories got weird almost immediately upon students’ return for the fall semester. Some said they were being followed around campus by people wearing green vests telling them where they could and could not be, go, stop, chat or conduct even a socially distanced gathering. Others said they were threatened with the loss of their campus housing if they didn’t follow the rules.

“They were breaking up picnics. They were breaking up yoga groups,” said one graduate student, who asked not to be identified so as to avoid social media blowback. “Sometimes they’d ask you whether you actually lived in the dorm you were about to go into.”

Across the country in Boston, students at the Harvard Business School gathered for the new semester after being gently advised by the school’s top administrators, via email, that they were part of “a delicate experiment.” The students were given the ground rules for the term, then received updates every few days about how things were going. And that, basically, was that.

In the time of COVID-19, it’s fair to say that no two institutions have come to quite the same conclusions about how to proceed safely. But as Harvard’s and Stanford’s elite MBA-granting programs have proved, those paths can diverge radically, even as they may eventually lead toward the same place.

For months, college and university administrators nationwide have huddled with their own medical experts and with local and county health authorities, trying to determine how best to operate in the midst of the novel coronavirus. Could classes be offered in person? Would students be allowed to live on campus — and, if so, how many? Could they hang out together?

“The complexity of the task and the enormity of the task really can’t be overstated,” said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, head of student health services at the University of Southern California and a past president of the American College Health Association. “Our first concern is making sure our campuses are safe and that we can maintain the health of our students, and each institution goes through that analysis to determine what it can deliver.”

With a campus spread over more than 8,000 acres on the San Francisco Peninsula, Stanford might have seemed like a great candidate to host large numbers of students in the fall. But after sounding hopeful tones earlier in the summer, university officials reversed course as the pandemic worsened, discussing several possibilities before finally deciding to limit on-campus residential status to graduate students and certain undergrads with special circumstances.

The Graduate School of Business sits in the middle of that vast and now mostly deserted campus, so the thought was that Stanford’s MBA hopefuls would have all the physical distance they needed to stay safe. Almost from the students’ arrival in late August, though, Stanford’s approach was wracked by missteps, policy reversals and general confusion over what the COVID rules were and how they were to be applied.

Stanford’s business grad students were asked to sign a campus compact that specified strict safety measures for residents. Students at Harvard Business School signed a similar agreement. In both cases, state and local regulations weighed heavily, especially in limiting the size of gatherings. But Harvard’s compact emerged fully formed and relied largely on the trustworthiness of its students. The process at Stanford was unexpectedly torturous, with serial adjustments and enforcers who sometimes went above and beyond the stated restrictions.

Graduate students there, mobilized by their frustration over not being consulted when the policy was conceived, urged colleagues not to sign the compact even though they wouldn’t be allowed to enroll in classes, receive pay for teaching or live in campus housing until they did. Among their objections: Stanford’s original policy had no clear appeals process, and it did not guarantee amnesty from COVID violation punishments to those who reported a sexual assault “at a party/gathering of multiple individuals” if the gathering broke COVID protocols.

Under heavy pressure, university administrators ultimately altered course, solicited input from the grad student population and produced a revised compact addressing the students’ concerns in early September, including the amnesty they sought for reporting sexual assault. But the Stanford business students were already unsettled by the manners of enforcement, including the specter of vest-wearing staffers roaming campus.

According to the Stanford Daily, nine graduate students were approached in late August by armed campus police officers who said they’d received a call about the group’s outdoor picnic and who — according to the students — threatened eviction from campus housing as an ultimate penalty for flouting safety rules. “For international students, [losing] housing is really threatening,” one of the students told the newspaper.

The people in the vests were Event Services staff working as “Safety Ambassadors,” Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda wrote in an email. The staffers were not on campus to enforce the compact, but rather were “emphasizing educational and restorative interventions,” he said. Still, when the university announced the division of its campus into five zones in September, it told students in a health alert email that the program “will be enforced by civilian Stanford representatives” — the safety ambassadors.

The Harvard Business School’s approach was certainly different in style. In July, an email from top administrators reaffirmed the school’s commitment to students living on campus and taking business classes in person in a hybrid learning model. As for COVID protocols, the officials adopted “a parental tone,” as the graduate business education site Poets & Quants put it. “All eyes are on us,” the administrators wrote in an August email.

But the guts of the school’s instructions were similar to those at Stanford. Both Harvard and Stanford severely restricted who could be on campus at any given time, limiting access to students, staff members and preapproved visitors. Both required that anyone living on campus report their health daily through an online portal, checking for any symptoms that could be caused by COVID-19. Both required face coverings when outside on campus — even, a Harvard missive said, in situations “when physical distancing from others can be maintained.”

So far, both Harvard and Stanford have posted low positive test rates overall, and the business schools are part of those reporting totals, with no significant outbreaks reported. Despite their distinct delivery methods, the schools ultimately relied on science to guide their COVID-related decisions.

“I feel like we’ve been treated as adults who know how to stay safe,” said a Harvard second-year MBA candidate who requested anonymity. “It’s worked — at least here.”

But as the experiences at the two campuses show, policies are being written and enforced on the fly, in the midst of a pandemic that has brought challenge after challenge. While the gentler approach at Harvard Business School largely worked, it did so within a larger framework of the health regulations put forth by local and county officials. As skyrocketing COVID-19 rates across the nation suggest, merely writing recommendations does little to slow the spread of disease.

Universities have struggled to strike a balance between the desire to deliver a meaningful college experience and the discipline needed to keep the campus caseload low in hopes of further reopening in 2021. In Stanford’s case, that struggle led to overreach and grad-student blowback that Harvard was able to avoid.

The fall term has seen colleges across the country cycling through a series of fits and stops. Some schools welcomed students for in-person classes but quickly reverted to distance learning only. And large campuses, with little ability to maintain the kind of control of a grad school, have been hit tremendously hard. Major outbreaks have been recorded at Clemson, Arizona State, Wisconsin, Penn State, Texas Tech — locations all over the map that opened their doors with more students and less stringent guidelines.

In May, as campuses mostly shut down to consider their future plans, USC’s Van Orman expressed hope that universities’ past experiences with international students and global outbreaks, such as SARS, would put them in a position to better plan for COVID-19. “In many ways, we’re one of the best-prepared sectors for this test,” she said.

Six months later, colleges are still being tested.

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

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

Report finds over 100 rebellions in jails and prisons over COVID conditions

U.S jails and prisons, already death traps, have been completely ravaged by COVID-19. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S. As of this writing, over 252,000 people in jails and prisons have been infected and at least 1,450 incarcerated people and officers have died from the novel coronavirus. Evidence suggests these figures are underreported, however. (The entire state of Wisconsin, for example, isn’t releasing any information to the public.)

In response, incarcerated people have shown strong solidarity, coming together to demand baseline safety measures and advocating for their release, only to be met with brutal repression and punishment.

According to a new report released by the archival group Perilous: A Chronicle of Prisoner Unrest on November 13, incarcerated people in the U.S. collectively organized at least 106 COVID-19 related rebellions from March 17 to June 15. Perilous, a volunteer collective project that tracks information on all prison uprisings, riots, protests, strikes and other unrest within carceral facilities, described this activity as “clearly one of the most massive waves of prisoner resistance in the past decade.”

Duncan Tarr, a researcher at Perilous, tells Truthout, “Since corrections departments and ICE contractors are unwilling to prevent the spread of the virus, prisoners and detainees have been taking action themselves to draw attention to the dangerous situation they find themselves in and to resist the system of incarceration that is killing them.”

Perilous’s analysis found that people rose up inside federal and state prisons, jails, juvenile carceral centers, and Immigration Detention Centers in 39 states. Immigrant Detention Centers rebelled most frequently, with 45 separate events. Thirty-tworebellions took place in private prisons (25 of which had contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a disproportionate response as less than 9 percent of prisons in the United States are privately operated. Louisiana, with a rich history of work stoppages, rebellions and an indefatigable support infrastructure, was the state with the highest frequency of COVID-19-related prison rebellions. California and Washingtonwere the second and third most rebellious respectively.

Common demands have included that guards wear masks and that departments provide individuals with protective items like soap, masks, and hand sanitizer.

In early April, an estimated 120 to 180 detainees inside GEO Group’s Adelanto ICE “Processing Center” in California went on hunger strike after two individuals exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms were sent to the hospital. Striker Marcos Duran told Perilous that the private prison’s guards weren’t wearing masks. Detainees did not have access tosoap or shampoo, were forced to eat alongside 50-60 other detainees, and slept in the same room as seven others, Duran said. As of October 7, according to Desert Sun, nearly 20 percent of detainees at Adelanto had contracted COVID-19.

Beyond hunger strikes, Perilous documented 21 “uprisings” in American prisons, defined as collective acts of rebellion that exceed the usual scope of a protest through unpredictable or chaotic means.

In Monroe, Washington, after six incarcerated people and five staff members were diagnosed with COVID-19, an estimated 100 to 200 incarcerated people staged a protest over inadequate protective measures and a downplaying of the virus in the recreation yard at Monroe Correctional Complex on April 8. Joshua Vermaat, an incarcerated person at MCC, described his concerns in a letter to a friend, excerpts of which were published in KUOW, NPR. He said the Department of Corrections was transferring uninfected incarcerated people into contaminated tiers. He wrote, “We’ve been safe until now, but because of their lack of foresight and proper planning, now they need rooms for more vulnerable inmates and they want us to go into the ‘hot zone’ to make room for them.”

“They tried to bribe us with McDonald’s food. Are you flipping kidding … if you would do anything I ask you to tell this to the news and to the governor, this isn’t right.”

Some people refused orders to move. Their grievances were met with chemical weapons, rubber bullets and sting balls, according to the Department of Corrections. Demonstrators were ultimately forced to surrender.

The next day Vermaat said the resistance led to a change in tone from the DOC, but that the facility went on lock down. “No one here wants violence, NO ONE, but at the same time you’ve got 400+ … who are now being backed into corners.”

One month later, a guard at Monroe Correctional died from COVID-19.

Cook County Jail in Chicago, a site with the largest outbreak of any location in the state of Illinois, rebelled on six separate occasions including one uprising and several hunger strikes. On at least one occasion some detainees attempted or threatened to attempt suicide.

Over the course of April, the jail had released nearly a fourth of its population, decreasing it from 5,604 to 4,301. But, despite early resistance, Cook County Jail’s population has crept up again to nearly pre-pandemic levels.

COVID-19 flareups behind bars have undoubtedly contributed to the United States’ abysmal failure to control the virus. Despite urgent calls for action from public health scientists in The Lancet, the ACLU and countless other organizations, Democratic and Republican politicians alike, from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, have largely refused to reduce prison populations by any meaningful margin. In the ACLU’s evaluation of state efforts to prevent COVID-19 deaths behind bars, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia received the best scores, all with a “D-“. After sustained activism and a mounting death toll, on November 4, New Jersey released more than 2,000 incarcerated people who were already nearing the end of their sentences.

In the face of negligence, Ivan Von Staich, an incarcerated person at the notoriously brutal San Quentin State Prison, filed a lawsuit in May against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation alleging “deliberate indifference to the risk of substantial harm to inmates by failing to immediately reduce the prison population of San Quentin by releasing or transferring at least 50 percent of the population of the prison.” After the filing, San Quentin suffered an outbreak of at least 2,500 cases and at least 29 deaths. On October 20, the First District Court of Appeal in California ruled in Von Staich’s favor, ordering the release or transfer of nearly 1,500 incarcerated people. The court wrote, “If necessary to achieve this reduction, respondents are ordered to revise their expedited release programs to include inmates over 60, who have served at least 25 years of their sentences and are eligible for parole, such as life prisoners eligible for parole and second or third strike prisoners, even if such prisoners are serving a sentence for a violent offense.”

Incarcerated people and public health experts warn, however, that transfers increase the spread of COVID-19. San Quentin’s massive outbreak resulted from transfers. “The best way to help keep prisoners from contracting the virus would be mass releases,” Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated man at Monroe previously told Truthout. “Absent those, it is essential to cease transfers and provide incarcerated people with adequate supplies.”

Instead of mass releases, as the U.S. enters its third wave, many departments’ chosen preventative measures continue to be “lockdowns,” or confining people in their cells for 21 to 23 hours a day. It’s estimated that 300,000 people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are in lockdown or solitary confinement conditions. Many incarcerated people have lost phone privileges and (already scant) programming. As budgets are slashed without complementary mass releases, healthcare services behind bars will continue to deteriorate, according to Perilous’ report.

Prior to COVID-19, experts considered U.S. prisons to be ‘ticking time bombs.’ Baseline volatile conditions remain and the virus is an accelerant. There is some hope that the virus will be better managed once Biden and Harris take power, although they have not yet released a plan that puts people over profit.

Tarr hopes that the Perilous report will bring some attention to the struggle behind bars during this chaotic time. “As the national political crisis continues to play out over the next few months, it is important that some of the most vulnerable to COVID-19 — those locked up by our government — are not forgotten and that their cries for help and freedom do not go unheard,” he said. “And a close look at the first few months of their resistance to the pandemic can shed some light on how we might move forward in preventing more unneeded deaths inside prison walls.”

Trump supporters destroy Black Lives Matter memorial in front of White House

Supporters of President Donald Trump rallied in Washington, DC on Saturday — one week after the networks declared President-elect Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

The rally was covered by The Washington Post under the headline, “Thousands of mask-less Trump supporters rally in D.C., falsely claiming president won election.”

“They were urged on by Trump, who refuses to concede or allow a formal transition to President-elect Joe Biden to begin. On Saturday morning, as his devotees remained in D.C. to fight for him, the president headed to Trump National in the Virginia suburbs for a round of golf,” the newspaper reported.

Thousands of Trump supporters are here in DC for the “Million MAGA March.” So far I’ve seen plenty of Proud Boys, QAnon supporters, and admiring references to Kyle Rittenhouse. pic.twitter.com/Z8UJDIy1IZ

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 14, 2020

“The president’s backers, who include white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and far-right activists from across the country, carried Trump flags and signs demanding action that was already being taken: ‘Count the legal votes.’ One man, dressed in camouflage and a red ‘MAGA’ hat, waved an American flag attached to a baseball bat,” The Post reported.

Out in DC for the MAGA protest. There are thousands here and signal is jammed so my posting will be a bit delayed. Some fights already broke out (someone had a split lip) and have seen Boogaloos , Oath Keepers and Proud Boys pic.twitter.com/h5qGdzFmeZ

— Tess Owen (@misstessowen) November 14, 2020

“On a day when the president’s supporters touted a vast array of falsehoods, his spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, offered perhaps the most ludicrous. ‘More than one MILLION marchers for President @realDonaldTrump descend on the swamp in support,’ she tweeted, exaggerating the crowd size by a factor of about 200,” the newspaper noted.

“Among the protesters were members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group known for their black and yellow colors and endorsements of violence. Some wore flak jackets and helmets. ‘Stand Back, Stand By,’ read some of their shirts, referencing the president’s directive to them at a September debate,” the newspaper noted.

The Proud Boys have started marching in DC pic.twitter.com/DlP7aOBTrI

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) November 14, 2020

Monuments to Black lives have no value without justice and meaningful change

It seems like performative activism is here to stay. America seems just fine with white people, corporations and other organizations simply saying “Black Lives Matter” and doing nothing more. In fact, in the months since I first said I was tired of performative bullshit, it’s gotten worse. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, even though Americans have decided it’s over. Jared Kushner thinks that Black people need to want to be successful to survive – and the presidential election has shown us that America’s inherent racism is alive and well. We have a white supremacist majority in the Supreme Court that threatens to dismantle what’s left of democracy, and a new justice with a highly-questionable résumé that a Black woman would be sent home immediately for even producing. And the response? Though it was nice to have people from all walks of life join us at protests, white folks still appear to be marching themselves into the abyss months later.

A few of us thought this moment might be different because we were hanging onto a thread of hope that white people might actually get themselves together and make real change. But alas, here we are … I’m still tired.

Protestors across the country have been taking down statues of slave owners and oppressors. But now, people have also decided it’s a great idea to monument us in addition to making empty statements about our lives mattering. The response to this moment cannot just be erecting more statues and producing artifacts for Black lives that should have never been lost in the first place.

Commissioners in Miami-Dade County are renaming the street outside of Travyon Martin’s high school after him. Though it is a nice gesture, that’s exactly the kind of performative action that makes people in power feel good, but doesn’t actually address systemic racism and injustice. Earlier this fall, the Minneapolis City Council decided to name a part of the street where the horrific murder of George Floyd happened after him — the same City Council that called for defunding the police department immediately after his murder, but has now backed away from those calls to action. And remember the grand gesture of unveiling Black Lives Matter Plaza in the racist president’s backyard? The street may have a new name, but many people experiencing homelessness still occupy that area thanks to systemic racism, injustice and lack of opportunities in the nation’s capital. And we’ve all seen the many magazine covers of Breonna Taylor and the jewelry that lets you parade the names of Black lives lost on your neck, egregiously commodifying access to our lives.

It is easy to rename a street, to hold a ceremony, to claim solidarity, to perform for press and social media. It is harder — much harder — to actually implement and rethink policies that help and not harm Black people by pushing for institutional changes that bring about real justice. Perhaps among the greatest historic performative actions was the naming of streets after Martin Luther King. Over 900 streets in the U.S. are named after MLK, and the majority of them are home to liquor stores, boarded up buildings, and represent lines of segregation where white people dare not visit and refuse to invest in out of fear and racism — a slap in the face to Dr. King’s legacy and the urgency of preserving, restoring and progressing Black communities.

America is built on a lot of ceremonial nonsense — including reenactments of the Civil War, plantation tours where we pretend enslaved people were happily living with their owners and ignorant weddings that accompany them, and the Pledge of Allegiance — and white supremacists love their statues and monuments to slavery (e.g. the Confederate flag). But the change we seek isn’t to turn the Black life you took into monuments for Black Lives Matter. And the excuse for not doing more than ceremonial performances can’t be “we don’t know what to do” or “we’re still learning.” Racism didn’t just arrive in 2020.

The change we seek is that you actually do the hard work to make Black lives matter. I mean the hard, often uncomfortable and sometimes confrontational but necessary intersectional change that forces people in power to dismantle their own biases to make Black people matter, including Black women’s lives and Black LGBTQ+ lives.

That means that officials and politicians who shout “Black Lives Matter” must also invest in our communities by supporting and embracing Black-owned businesses, providing access to capital, and allowing entrepreneurs to flourish. It means that cops don’t need to bother with “serve and protect,” but rather respect us and maybe actually live on MLK Boulevard with us. It means limiting the power of police unions and not sending cops to our homes, schools and neighborhoods, when professionals who deal with mental illness and other social services might be better suited. It means that you employ us before you incarcerate us — and restore voting rights post-incarceration. It means restorative justice isn’t solely about the victim. It means that suicide and homelessness among Black LGBTQ+ youth should matter, and that you can’t just shout you care, but legislate your way to caring by creating inclusive policies and laws. It means that Black women are no longer the exception, but the rule when it comes to our leadership, talents, skills and wisdom — and that it shouldn’t take an absurd amount of years to even get laws on the books that prevent discrimination based on our hair. It means you stop preaching at us to vote without expecting accountability and making room for our protests. But mostly, it means that officials and politicians must know when to step aside, let us lead, and stop treating us like pawns on a chessboard that can be moved around to win praise and allow for more performances.

My father was George L. Winfield, the first Black Director of Public Works (DPW) in Baltimore City. He was the best dad. I am undeniably my father’s daughter, and I was fortunate to have him in my life until he passed away suddenly from a stroke when I was 23 years old — taken far too soon from the disproportionate effects of high blood pressure on Black people. He was a man of integrity, dignity and respect who literally gave and sacrificed his life for the city he loved — dying in office in 2007, having never been able to realize and enjoy the retirement he and my mom deserved and earned. He was a Vietnam veteran, a civil engineer who later won Black Engineer of the Year in 1989, and a Black man from the South who worked his way up to success despite the odds against him, having once been a janitor to take care of his family.

When I was in grad school, I bought my first car. I will never forget driving home to show it to my dad. I was so proud that he didn’t have to sacrifice for it, because he had done so much for me and my brothers. I had figured out how to hardwire my radio and plug my iPod into it so I could jam out in the car. We drove around the neighborhood so I could show off my skills, and I vividly remember him saying, “You did that?!” He was impressed, and I knew it. College students run into tough times, and there was one month when I couldn’t pay my car note. I begrudgingly gathered up the courage to ask Dad to help, with the promise that I’d pay him back. A few weeks later, I remember driving back home and feeling so good that I had saved up the money to pay Dad back. I got to the house and gave him the check proudly, thrilled I made good on my word.

He never cashed that check. I remember clearing out the house so my mom could move in the years after he passed away, finding the check, and having an entire breakdown — not only because I missed my dad, but I knew what our city had lost, too. He was that great.

After my father passed, Baltimore City officials chose to name a building after him, which was a lovely gesture. But my dad would’ve wanted equality and justice — more support, better benefits and pay for the mostly Black, Brown, justice-impacted, financially uncertain workers he managed who picked up trash and recycling, dealt with numerous complaints from residents, fixed potholes, managed weather emergencies, along with the other jobs they toiled away at daily.

That building won’t bring him back to us, nor will it bring about justice for the workers and the city he loved. But today, some Baltimore City Council members are asking for better pay and support for those DPW workers. Achieving that would honor Dad more than any building ever could. A street named in his memory won’t bring Trayvon back or end police murders of Black people, but there are lots of people fighting to change the police state in this country, including in Miami. Those in power should listen and act. Wearing an absurd and offensive “The Breonna” necklace might make you think you’re stylish and on trend, but it absolutely will not bring Breonna Taylor and her family justice.

I now want to know what we do past this “moment of national reckoning,” because we are seeing white folks already going back to living their privileged lives, never having to think about or act on racism because they don’t value our lives enough or experience it. Additionally, recent polling shows that when protestors are identified as Black, support drops. And when white women start to have real talk with the 55%, let me know. Your marches are full of empty promises and until you take action that dignifies and respects Black women, I have no choice but to ignore you.

I don’t want your statues, ceremonies, building and street names, martyr magazine covers, billboards, your Black Lives Matter signs in your yards and windows, or whatever other ceremonial relic you try to placate us with right now.

I just want you to stop killing us — and killing us again with ceremonial bullshit — and make our lives better while we’re living.

Nadiya Hussain isn’t trying to blend into the food world anymore: “Why not just create space?”

From her first appearance on the sixth season of “The Great British Bake Off,” Nadiya Hussain emerged as a fan favorite. With her cheeky asides to the camera (“I’d sooner have another baby. I really would,” she famously quipped during a soufflé round) and undeniable prowess in the kitchen, she emerged from the season as both a winner and a GIF-able star.

In the five years since, Hussain’s career has exploded to include her own cooking shows, a memoir, several documentaries and cookbooks, including her newest, “Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives,” a companion to her hit Netflix series, now available in the United States.

Through it all, she has continued to break barriers in a food media landscape that still remains incredibly white and male — and hopes to help others do the same.

“The reality is that I’m never going to blend into this industry,” she told Salon. “I’m a five-foot, brown, Muslim woman in an industry where there is no way I’m going to blend in, so why even try? Why even try? Why not just create space?”

Watch Hussain’s interview with “Salon Talks” or read the transcript below to learn more about her rules for the kitchen, what ingredients she thinks are overlooked most in baking, and her pantry staples.

Before we jump into some of your projects, let’s talk a little bit about how cooking has changed for everybody over the past several months. And I actually wanted to start by talking about physical kitchen space. You’ve mentioned in interviews in the past that the kitchen that you first shared with your husband was on the smaller side. And I think now that people are cooking at home more, they may be coming up against space restrictions they didn’t even know they had. So I was curious if you had any tips for people who are wanting to make the most of the kitchen space that they do have?

One of the things that I learned once I had children is that it’s not about the space. It’s about how you use it. I’ve gone from having a much smaller kitchen, tiny kitchen, to a much bigger kitchen. And even then, I always look at it and think, “Oh, I could do with some more space.” And the truth is, it’s not about the space. It’s about using it properly and actually organizing yourself so that you know where everything is. And for me, it’s all about organization. I think that’s the key.

Now I have a bigger [kitchen] than what I had 15 years ago, but my kitchen still feels really small sometimes because my kids are getting bigger. So it feels like the space is really small, but actually it’s all about organization. It’s about labeling, putting baskets in places, on shelves where you know you can kind of access things really quickly.

And I find when I label things and I can see things running out — especially whether it’s spices or where my lentils and pasta and things sit — when I can see things running out, I can just quickly put it on a list and I can go off and buy it.

I think if you have space that can be utilized by anything, what we tend to do is we buy and we fill the space, and we don’t really know what we’re buying and things get pushed to the back. And so what I like to do is have clear, defined spaces for certain things — be it my pots, my pans, my lids, pasta, lentils, cans. Everything has a space and it’s labeled. I think if you use that space properly and you know where everything goes, you can really utilize that space without worrying about it being too small.

That’s a great point. So, just speaking of spending more time at home, you’ve spoken openly about struggling with anxiety. There’s that great BBC documentary that you did, “Anxiety and Me.” And I know for a lot of people, myself included, this is a really rough time for mental health. I think that feeding yourself can sometimes drop to the bottom of the to-do list, or feeding yourself well, potentially, can drop. What would you say to those people? What advice do you have?

I’m just like everybody else. For me as a mom — I’ll feed the cat before I feed the kids, and then I’ll feed the kids and then my husband. So, everybody gets fed and I’m not on my list of priorities. I’m definitely not high up there on the list. So, one of the things I like to do is wake up very early and have some time to myself. By allowing myself allocated times in the day, that’s where I find I eat properly and eat well and look after myself. Whether it’s having a quick lunch and going for a half an hour walk, that’s really important time.

I tend to wake up much earlier than the children because as soon as they’re up, they’re on my list of things to sort out and make sure that they’re all fixed and ready for school and lunches are done and all of that, so I drop straight down to the bottom of the list. But when I wake up first thing in the morning, I don’t have to worry about anybody. I can wake up, tippy-toe downstairs, make a cup of coffee, and just sit there and just kind of enjoy that moment, maybe even make myself some breakfast, some porridge, wait for them to come down. By then, I’ll have fed myself, feel nourished, feel well, and I’m ready to go. So, I think give yourself pockets of time.

I love that. So, I was curious what your current refrigerator and pantry staples are like. Because I think people are doing sort of big shops now, and then they’re not going to the store as often. So what are some things that you keep in the house to ensure that you can put together quick, healthy meals?

I always have dried lentils. I always have rice and pasta because they’re really good basics, but I always like to have tinned fish because you can quickly add that to a tomato sauce and then add something, just to bulk up a pasta. I always have tinned beans because, again, they’re very quick and easy, and always have dried herbs. We go [to the supermarket] every other week now, so we try and eliminate how many times we go to the supermarket. And often we can’t get herbs, so what I like to do is always have dried herbs in the cupboard so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

That makes sense. Well, this ties really nicely into your book, “Time to Eat.” I kind of feel like the backbone of that book, which is being released in the U.S. this November, are smart culinary shortcuts. How did you get to a point in your own cooking where you embraced shortcuts? What was that process like for you?

I think growing up in an immigrant household, where we were going between eating English food at school and eating Bangladeshi food at home, we were always — well, I grew up in a working class family. We didn’t have lots of money, so we would often go to the butchers and they would be throwing away the offal and we’d bring that back home, free, so we would eat the offal. And I think growing up in a house where we had to save money and we had to watch our pockets and make sure we weren’t spending too much money, I grew up with that need to always save money and not waste. I think it’s always about not wasting.

We can all be a little bit fancy sometimes, and occasionally I might buy some lobster tails if I feel like we deserve it or we should have it. But otherwise, I’m always kind of budgeting and making sure that we’re not spending too much money. But I think for us growing up it was all about not wasting, and I think that’s something that’s really important these days. That’s really important for us to do these days, and that’s something that I do. And I always try and impart that knowledge to my children, especially now, in the last seven or eight months.

Your book opens with several rules that you abide by in your kitchen, and one of them was “don’t throw anything away.” I was curious how that plays out in your kitchen currently. What are some things that you feel like people might be throwing away that you would urge them to kind of hold back?

If you’re peeling parsnips or carrots, people will often throw away the peelings, or potato peelings. But there’s a recipe in the book for scrap soup, which is basically all the peelings that you would normally throw away — so your potato, your carrot, your parsnips, all of that, celery ends, all of it, it goes into a big pot with lots of herbs and spices and you cook it up. And that is essentially something that you would have thrown in the bin that you have now made an entire hearty, autumn soup out of. And that, to me, that’s how I cook. I think it’s really important. I think once you get the taste for not throwing things away, you realize that everything’s an ingredient, and as long as it doesn’t poison you, why not, right?

For instance, herbs. Often we buy loads of herbs. I buy too many herbs, pop them in the fridge, and then they sit there and get wilty and really sad, and you’re like, “Oh, what do I do with them?” Well, all you do is you put them in the microwave for 10 seconds and they dry instantly and then you just kind of rub them and they break up and then you pop them into a jar. I don’t even buy dried herbs anymore because I wait for my herbs to get sad and wilted, and then I just dry them.

This ties to one of your other rules, which is about kind of giving yourself permission to use the microwave in the kitchen. I feel like, at least in U.S. culture, people have kind of moved away from the microwave, and I like that you’re advocating for bringing it back because it makes things so much more simple. What inspired you to include that rule in your book?

Well, I’ve always had a microwave, and with young children, sometimes it’s the fast solution to get something done quickly. And also, I grew up in a working class home. Any way where we could save money, whether that was on the gas bill or the electricity bill, that made all the difference. Especially as a young mum — I had three kids under the age of four, so I was always trying to find ways of saving money on the gas and the bills and things like that.

So, the microwave saves time and it saves money. Where to bake a potato in the oven can take up to 40 minutes, you can bake it in the microwave for five. Not only do you save money, but you also save time. I think it’s all about balance. And I’m not saying that you should microwave a potato all-day, every day. I’m just saying that you can do it occasionally and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think there’s a lot of snobbery and pretentiousness where food is concerned, and that doesn’t sit well with me because, for me, food is to be enjoyed and sometimes we want to eat, but we want to eat fast and that’s OK.

Right. Well, and to that end, one of the other things that I really appreciate about this book are the little icons next to certain recipes so you can tell, oh, this is going to freeze well, or this is good for batching up and making double portions. How often do you rely on batch cooking in your real life kitchen, in your home?

I literally batch cook every day.

When I do a big pot of something — whether it’s a curry or a stew or a bolognese — what I like to do is I always like to feed the kids with one lot and then put one in the freezer. The rule is, at the moment, I’ll put one meal into the freezer a week, so by the end of the month, I have four meals. If I go away for four days, the kids will have four meals, and that’s without even trying. It’s not like I had to take off a Sunday afternoon to cook four meals. It’s just without trying.

I think when you get into the mindset of just cooking a little bit more and putting it aside and freezing it, it becomes natural and it doesn’t become a chore anymore. It doesn’t become a task for a Sunday morning or a Sunday afternoon. That’s where I wholeheartedly believe that if you batch cooking without really thinking about it, what you do is, effectively, you save time for yourself.

In the book, there’s this really helpful guide for freezing individual ingredients. What are some things that you have, like individual ingredients, freezing in your own freezer right now that people may not think that they can freeze?

I like to freeze onions because onions are one of those things that I always have at home, but sometimes I just cannot be bothered. If I’m honest, I’m lazy. I cannot be bothered to chop them. It’s like, “Oh, do I have to put onions in?” And sometimes you do.

So, what I like to do is freeze onions in a bag. I chop them up and then I freeze them, and also spinach. Lots of people think that you have to blanch spinach and then put it in a bag and then freeze it. You don’t!

You literally buy the spinach that you buy in a bag, stick that in the freezer. Just as you buy it, stick it in the freezer. Literally, then take it out once it’s frozen, and smash it all up like that. You just smash the whole lot up and then you get crumbly bits of spinach and that’s it. So, it’s little things like that that really save on going out [and] shopping, and then having just quick ingredients.

I always have ginger, I always have garlic, and I always have fresh whole frozen chiles so that at when I’ve made a really yummy spaghetti dish and I want a chile here, I just grate it on top.

One of the recipes from the book and the television show that I really loved was the peanut butter and jelly sheet pan pancake. For people that haven’t seen it, it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s this massive pancake baked in a sheet pan with these amazing swirls of peanut butter and jelly. And I love it because pancakes can feel like kind of a production, especially when it’s just myself or just two people. What inspired you to create this dish?

A lot of my recipes are inspired by my children and the fact that I love cooking, but I also really like spending time with them, so I’m always looking for ways of giving them what they love, but a little bit faster.

So my kids, we have pancakes every Saturday morning. Whether they’re making them, I’m making them — someone’s making pancakes. Sometimes our Saturday mornings can get really, really busy because they’ve got all sorts of different classes and things to go to on a Saturday morning. It just kind of came to me. It’s like, “Let’s just bake it in the oven.” And so I did this recipe.

What I love about this recipe is that you make a double-batch of batter, and then you freeze one batch in the freezer so that next Saturday you don’t have to think about making the batter. You just defrost it and it’s done. And then the other batch, you just literally put in a sheet pan and then you dollop over peanut butter, jam, swirl it over, bake it in the oven. Easy-peasy, none of this standing there. Because what happens is whoever’s making pancakes, that’s the person that eats last and they eat the last pancakes, the cold ones that nobody wants.

It’s absolutely true. So currently in my pantry, I have the ingredients for your masala porridge, which I’m really excited to try. I think people tend to veer sweet with their oats. What inspired you to go towards the spice direction?

Eating spicy food in a Bangladeshi home is completely normal. And where I know there are lots of people with a Western palate would say, “Oh, gosh, I couldn’t have garlic first thing in the morning, no way, absolutely not.” I just think, come on. It’s about making it different. We don’t have to always have cereals and pancakes and toast. We can have something savory. And I think it’s just being proud of where I’m from and the way we eat. And actually masala porridge isn’t something that is common in Bangladesh, but eating spicy food for breakfast is, so I kind of wanted to marry the two together.

I also really love the dessert section of this book, which has great recipes. There are the apple palm pies, and then there’s the strawberry milkshake funnel cakes, which are very exciting to me because it all feels really doable. And I think that baking can sometimes feel intimidating for people. What considerations did you make when putting this book together to ensure that it was accessible for just your average home baker?

Whenever I write a cookbook, I always make sure that if there’s an ingredient that I think is slightly obscure, maybe, somebody might struggle to get it, what I tend to do is have a list of these ingredients after I’ve written one chapter and, if I’m slightly unsure about the ingredient, I will take the list of ingredients to four big, local supermarkets, maybe six local supermarkets, and I will go to each one and make sure I can find them in each supermarket.

And if I can’t find it in the supermarket, I just take it out of the recipe entirely and change it with something that I can. Because I think often people open up a book and they look at the ingredients and they think, “Oh, there’s too many ingredients in there, or there are ingredients in there that I don’t recognize or that I’m unsure about.” So what I like to do is use ingredients that lots of people recognize and that are popular, but also ones that are accessible. And I hope that’s one of the things that people have noticed when they cook from the book.

So many people have taken up baking, I feel like, over the past several months, now that we’ve been home-bound. Banana bread had its moment, sourdough had its moment. What are you baking in your own home right now?

Usually, apart from when I’m testing recipes, I’m baking when I’ve got too much of something in the house. We had a bit of blueberry jam leftover and I thought, “Oh, well, it’s kind of not enough for everybody,” so I thought, “right, I’m going to put that aside.” And I had something like eight or 10 limes in the house . . . they’ve just gathered over time. So I made an enormous lime and vanilla pound cake with some blueberry jam rippled through it, and then I made a lime curd. So that’s what I’ve been baking.

Usually my baking is all about using stuff up. It’s very rare that I go out and get particular ingredients to bake something. It’s usually a case of, “What have I got? Let’s quickly make something.”

You also recently released your book, “Nadiya Bakes,” which I love because it includes a lot of flavors in baked goods that I think tend to fall outside the realm of what people typically reach for when it comes to picking up stuff for baked goods. So, obviously there’s chocolate and sugar and that sort of thing, but there are also some flavors that were interesting to me. I was curious what flavors you feel like are under-utilized in baked goods or things that you wish people would maybe reach for a little more often.

I think spices. I think lots of people are afraid of spices. So, for me, when I’m baking I love to use [them]. White chocolate and black pepper work really well together. It just really does balance the sweetness of the white chocolate. So things like black pepper or Sichuan peppers, or even turmeric. I’ve got a recipe in there for turmeric and ginger diamonds, in the book. Turmeric is often associated as a savory flavor, but so often when my kids are sick, I tend to give them a glass of hot milk with half a teaspoon of turmeric and some honey. So, my kids almost associate it more with sweet than they do savory. I think it’s turmeric. We should be using more turmeric. Absolutely.

As we’ve covered in this conversation, your career spans a lot of different things. You’ve been involved in documentaries. You won a reality TV show. You’re involved in cookbooks and television programs. But in a recent Guardian interview, you spoke about how, rather than blending into the industry — which by and large can still feel very white and sometimes very male-centered — you’d like to “create space.” I was curious if you could expand upon that a little bit.

It’s exactly that. I work in an industry where it is very white and it’s very middle-aged man. It’s not the kind of industry that, I suppose, for me, going into it, felt like a space that I felt comfortable in because there was nobody like me. So, I think if you’d asked me five years ago, “Actually, how do you feel about this?” I would’ve said, “You know what, actually? Can we just talk about the cooking and the baking?” Because talking about something like that feels way too difficult. And you almost don’t want to highlight it because it’s scary to highlight something that is clearly a problem within the television and publishing industry.

The hope was that over the years that I would just blend in and I could be a part of that world. And the truth is, in some ways, [I’ll] never be a part of that world because I am so often quizzed about my race, my religion, my political stance, when people who work in the industry — men who work in the industry — can go about their business and they can cook and bake and work in television and publishing, and nobody will question, “Who’s looking after your children at home?”

I get asked so often, “So, who’s looking after your children?” Well, they’re not in the street. I have got somebody to look after them and they have a dad. We’re so lucky that as a family we work it out, but if that was my husband in my position, nobody would ever, ever ask him, “Who’s looking after your children?”

It’s that constant justification of, “What gives you the right to be here?” And so from now on, I’ve just kind of said to myself, “I’m not going to attempt to blend in,” because the reality is that I’m never going to blend into this industry. I’m a five-foot, brown, Muslim woman in an industry where there is no way I’m going to blend in, so why even try? Why even try? Why not just create space? That’s what it’s all about.

It’s about saying that actually I’m here and I love the job that I do and I’m good at the job that I do, which is something that, as women, we’re not very good at just saying. There’s nothing wrong with that. We have to always be very humble, and actually you can be humble and be really proud of what you do and believe in yourself at the same time.

It’s taken a long time for me to actually believe the words that come out of my mouth. And so rather than blending in, it’s about creating space because I know I have a responsibility to my children to create that space for them, no matter what industry they work in. And granted, I’m not going to knock down every single hurdle for them, but I’d like to think that as their mother working in an industry that wasn’t really made for her, I’m knocking a few down at least.

Absolutely. So I think most people came to you through “The Great British Bake Off.” And we’re in the middle of the new season on Netflix here in the U.S. I was curious if you watch the program now.

Well, I have to say I do watch it, but I haven’t this year just because I’ve been so busy with the children, and just generally in life, it’s just been really, really busy. So I haven’t really watched it, but we have recorded it and we are going to binge watch it, perhaps on the weekend. Perhaps. We’ll see.

And then a final, big, big question: Why do you cook?

I cook because it’s slightly selfish. I cook because it makes me happy.. I love the feeling of cooking and sharing with other people, which is lovely, which for me is the byproduct. The cooking is the byproduct. The sharing is the byproduct. I genuinely cook for me because I love the joy I feel for cooking and to be creative and to be able to make something that makes me really happy and then to be able to share it. I cook because I love my family. I cook because I get to share it. I cook because it’s my happy place.

Twitter puts new disclaimer on Trump’s tweets after he lies about winning Pennsylvania and Georgia

Twitter has received harsh criticism for undermining democracy by letting President Donald Trump lie about the 2020 presidential election on their social media platform.

“This claim about election fraud is disputed,” was the disclaimer slapped on multiple tweets.

However, he got a disclaimer reading “official sources called this election differently” after he falsely claimed he won Pennsylvania and Georgia.

700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020

Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is @BrianKempGA?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020

These states in question should immediately be put in the Trump Win column. Biden did not win, he lost by a lot! pic.twitter.com/ywiw6sPicI https://t.co/C1g9LZpMah

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2020