Watch a NASA spacecraft collect pebbles from the ancient asteroid Bennu

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made history on Tuesday when its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples from an asteroid, Bennu, that scientists believe may have had water on its surface earlier in its history.

OSIRIS-REx briefly touched the asteroid’s surface in order to gather rocks, pebbles and other geological artifacts from the celestial body so that they could be brought back to Earth by 2023, according to NASA. Despite spending several hours getting to the asteroid’s surface, engineers believe that it only touched it for roughly six seconds before using its thrusters to back away. On Wednesday, the agency released partial footage of OSIRIS-REx’s journey, one that showed the spacecraft’s arm slowly descending toward soil that looked not too different from what one might find in an Earth desert.

“You can see that particles are flying all over the place,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, told reporters in a news briefing on Wednesday. “We really did kind of make a mess on the surface of this asteroid, but it’s a good mess. It’s the kind of mess we were hoping for.”

According to the agency, on Tuesday OSIRIS-REx used its thrusters to push itself out of orbit around Bennu, where it has been since 2018. The spacecraft then commenced a roughly four descent of a half-mile toward its surface, followed by a pair of maneuvers that allowed it to reach “Nightingale,” a predetermined site the size of a small parking lot that had one of the few relatively clear spots on the asteroid, which is covered in boulders. Once it landed there it used its sampling arm, known as the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), to collect the materials from Bennu’s northern hemisphere.

“This was an incredible feat – and today we’ve advanced both science and engineering and our prospects for future missions to study these mysterious ancient storytellers of the solar system,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. “A piece of primordial rock that has witnessed our solar system’s entire history may now be ready to come home for generations of scientific discovery, and we can’t wait to see what comes next.”

Watch the sampling arm of the craft make contact with the surface in the video below:

There are a number of reasons to be optimistic about what these soil samples could teach us about the origins of life in the universe. For one thing, Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, meaning that it is comprised largely of carbon, an element considered to be one of the building blocks of life. The astroid itself is small, about 500 meters in diameter. Two years ago Lauretta announced that, based on the seeming appearance of clay-like materials on the asteroid’s surface, that Bennu “appears to be a very water-rich target, and water is the most interesting and perhaps the most lucrative commodity that you would mine from an asteroid.”

Amy Simon, deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, elaborated on this at the time, explaining that “the presence of hydrated minerals across the asteroid confirms that Bennu, a remnant from early in the formation of the solar system, is an excellent specimen for the OSIRIS-REx mission to study the composition of primitive volatiles and organics. When samples of this material are returned by the mission to Earth in 2023, scientists will receive a treasure trove of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system.”

NASA experts believe Bennu is ancient and, in addition to possibly shedding light on how life came to our planet, may also provide information about the formation of the early solar system.

The next step for NASA is to ascertain exactly how much of the asteroid it was actually able to collect. To do this, they will first need to use a camera to take photographs of the TAGSAM, from material captured inside to that stuck to several pads at the bottom of the spacecraft, according to SpaceNews. Once they have done this, NASA will then slowly rotate OSIRIS-REx, in the process measuring the change in its moment of inertia and thereby allowing them to figure out the mass of their sample within a margin of error of roughly 20 grams.

From “Hillbilly Elegy” to “Fried Green Tomatoes,” Hollywood has a rural perception problem

As soon as Donald Trump was elected to the presidency in 2016, it seemed that all eyes turned to rural America for answers. I was working at a public radio station in Louisville, Kentucky on election night — a typically blue dot in a state that has a complex voting history, voting for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as Reagan, both Bushes and Trump — when the results began to roll in. As it became clear that Trump was pulling ahead, my phone began to light up with texts from friends and other journalists who lived in larger cities, most asking the same question: “How could this happen?”

Almost immediately, media members, policymakers, and academics set about trying to contextualize the beliefs of portions of the country that had seemed to fade below notice or were dismissed as “flyover country.” America at large sought to understand “rural America,” a term that quickly became shorthand for the white, non-college-educated voters that aided in Trump’s victory.

A growing handful of thoughtful, regionally focused media outlets — “The Bitter Southerner,” “Scalawag,” “Southerly” — emerged to tell true, nuanced stories of the communities they represented, but stereotypes and oversimplifications persisted.

The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham, who has resided in a northwest Minnesota farming community since 2016, said that the “near-singular focus on Donald Trump has yielded a body of discourse that views rural Americans primarily through a white, conservative Republican lens.”

“This is somewhat understandable as a matter of raw numbers — its residents do tend to be whiter and more conservative than people living in more densely populated areas,” Ingraham said. “But that focus also has perpetuated a number of myths, blurring out much of the messiness and complexity of rural life.”

The tendency to paint rural communities with a broad brush isn’t just restricted to the political sphere. From “Hee Haw” to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” pop culture has borrowed from, celebrated, and in some ways, immortalized stereotypes and depictions that have come to represent rurality. But now, in an election year where eyes are again locked on the same states that helped determine 2016, there’s a distinct need for cultural representations that don’t oversimplify those same communities, or portray them as a social and cultural monolith.

Will that happen? Well, in the last month there have been two big pieces of news related to this topic: the trailer for the film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, and then it was announced that Reba McEntire was slated to star in a “Fried Green Tomatoes” television series, which will be directed by Norman Lear.

I’ve been disappointed by “Hillbilly Elegy” since I read Vance’s book in 2016. The memoir about his family became a bestseller in large part because it not-so-subtly promised readers, who were perplexed and enraged by Trump’s ascendency, the background needed to understand what the “white, working-class Trump voter” was thinking.

As Salon’s Erin Keane wrote in her 2019 piece “Amy Adams probably will win her Oscar for ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and that’s a damn shame,” Vance’s framing of the story tells people who don’t know much about Eastern Kentucky or Appalachia what they think they already know.

“That the addiction and abuse and poverty that shaped his family are part of a stubbornly ingrained cultural lineage passed down through generations, and that’s what keeps the people of Appalachia (a very large geographical area, mind you) poor and under-educated, even lawless and violent,” Keane wrote. “And what’s more, largely content to stay that way despite their anger, though exceptional individuals can overcome these innate cultural deficits. His overarching themes point to an attitude adjustment as the solution: poor people wouldn’t have to stay poor, with all the social problems that can accompany poverty, if they could decide they didn’t want to act like poor people anymore.”

Forget nuance. “Hillbilly Elegy” frames the hardships faced by many in Appalachia — opioid addiction, lack of access to professional and educational resources, poverty — as the consequences of individual shortcomings and an overwhelming lack of gumption, rather than the result of systemic ills and oppression that have emerged from predatory pharmaceutical companies, a gaping digital divide and a long history of extractive economies that decimate communities’ resources.

“Narratives like this sell not only because a 140-minute redemption arc can be written around them but also because they absolve their creators and viewers of any complicity in systemic issues,” Keane said.

Even with a stellar cast — led by Amy Adams and Glenn Close, directed by Ron Howard — it’s unlikely that “Hillbilly Elegy” will challenge that formula once it hits Netflix on Nov. 24. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

“Fried Green Tomatoes,” however, has an opportunity to insert additional nuance into a story that was flattened for the big screen in 1991.

Based on Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe,” the film adaptation is set in two distinct time periods. Jessica Tandy plays Ninny Threadgoode, a vibrant octogenarian, who entertains Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), a depressed housewife, with her tales of Depression-era Whistlestop, Alabama.

The main characters in her story are Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson), her free-spirited sister-in-law, and Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker), who was Idgie’s closest friend and eventual…well, the film kind of skirts around this part.

In the book, Idgie and Ruth’s relationship is never explicitly sexual, but definitely is more grounded as a straightforward love story; at one point in the novel, Flagg writes, “When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that [Ruth] had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was in that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart.”

This wasn’t just BFF love, but the movie was certainly billed that way, perhaps, as Buzzfeed’s Kate Aurthur suggests, in order to piggy-back off the success of “Thelma and Louise.”

Aurthur also states in her essay, “Why ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ Is A Lesbian Classic — Yes, Lesbian!,” that Masterson once told her that, compared to the book, the movie was “redacted.”

“We were talking at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, when she played the mom of a queer teenage son in an indie movie called ‘As You Are,'” Aurthur wrote. “When I brought up ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ as a mainstream movie with a lesbian love story, she said some things had been cut that would have made the relationship more obvious. ‘It wasn’t a love scene, but there were, like — clearly a love relationship type of a fight, of jealousy,’ she said. ‘There was some more sensual kind of stuff in there. We were clearly playing that.'”

As I wrote in 2019, LGBTQ visibility and celebration in country music has come a long way since Chely Wright had received death threats and an industry-wide cold shoulder after coming out in 2010. Often, country music veers into a “trucks and beer” monolith that feels like it’s solely made for white, straight consumption — an extension of those simplified stories told by and about rural communities.

Over the last decade, artists like Brandi Carlile, Lil Nas X, Kacey Musgraves, and Ty Herndon have stepped forward to complicate that narrative with songs that challenge the idea that rural communities are somehow devoid of queer love stories. The “Fried Green Tomatoes” reboot has the opportunity to do the same.

Will it? McEntire has long been a vocal propoent for LGBTQ rights, but there aren’t many details available yet about the series. According to Variety, the hour-long drama project is “described as a modernization of the novel and movie that explores the lives of descendants from the original work. When present-day Idgie Threadgoode (McEntire) returns to Whistle Stop after a decade away, she must wrestle with a changed town, estranged daughter, faltering cafe and life-changing secret.”

And while one hour-long special isn’t going to undo decades of oversimplifying rural life, pop culture representation is important. It’s a powerful lens through which viewers can both recognize themselves and come to better know people who exist outside their immediate orbit. People with lives and desires that, granted, can’t be wholly encapsulated in a single film — but that doesn’t mean the industry shouldn’t strive for more careful, considered depictions.

SCOTUS lets Alabama ban curbside voting aimed at aiding people with COVID-19 risk and disabilities

A divided Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Alabama to ban curbside voting amid the coronavirus pandemic without explanation.

Some Alabama counties with large numbers of Democratic voters had planned to allow curbside voting to accommodate people with disabilities and increased coronavirus risk, according to NPR. But Republican Secretary of State John Merrill banned counties from doing so without any exceptions.

A federal district court had previously ruled that the ban violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. The ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court before the Supreme Court issued a 5-3 decision granting the state’s request for a stay of the lower court rulings.

The ruling came down from the Supreme Court’s emergency or “shadow” docket, which does not require justices to explain their rulings. The court’s five conservative justices, who all voted to stay the rulings, did not offer an explanation for their decision.

The three liberal justices issued a dissenting opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“If those vulnerable voters wish to vote in person, they must wait inside, for as long as it takes, in a crowd of fellow voters whom Alabama does not require to wear face coverings,” she wrote.

Sotomayor cited the case of Howard Porter Jr., an elderly Black man with asthma and Parkinson’s disease, who said during his testimony that his ancestors had died for his right to vote.

“And while I don’t mind dying to vote,” he said, “I think we’re past that — we’re past that time.”

Sotomayor said Jefferson and Montgomery counties “are ready and willing to help vulnerable voters like Mr. Porter cast their ballots without unnecessarily risking infection from a deadly virus.”

Merrill argued in a Supreme Court brief that “some level of risk is inherent in life and in voting, pandemic or no.”

A brief from the plaintiffs argued that “counties have employed curbside voting as recently as 2016 and 2018, even though state law expressly gives counties broad authority to assist voters with disabilities and to manage elections, and even though denying such access for high-risk voters violates the Constitution and the Americans With Disabilities Act.”

Sotomayor wrote that the high court should have upheld the lower court ruling, which “does not require all counties to adopt curbside voting” and provides a remedy that “respects both the right of voters with disabilities to vote safely and the state’s interest in orderly elections.”

She added that Merrill “does not meaningfully dispute that the plaintiffs have disabilities, that COVID-19 is disproportionately likely to be fatal to these plaintiffs, and that traditional-in-person voting will meaningfully increase their risk of exposure.”

Sotomayor also noted that in-person voting was easier in Alabama than its cumbersome mail-in voting process, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended curbside voting amid the pandemic.

The Supreme Court has heard numerous voting access cases in recent weeks. On Monday, a split 4-4 ruling allowed Pennsylvania to accept mail-in ballots up to three days after Election Day — even if they do not have a clear postmark — after a challenge from state Republicans. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court granted a Republican request to restore a witness signature requirement for absentee ballots in South Carolina.

The court is expected to rule on a Republican challenge to a state-court-approved agreement allowing North Carolina to accept clearly postmarked absentee ballots up to nine days after Election Day. It is also expected to rule on a request from Democrats to restore a federal court order requiring Wisconsin to accept postmarked mail-in ballots up to six days after Election Day.

Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law, said the Supreme Court’s deference to states over federal courts on voting safety concerns “would seem to bode poorly for the attempts by Democrats and voting rights groups” seeking to extend mail-in ballot deadlines.

“Any more federally ordered voting changes that make their way to the Supreme Court before the election face a steep uphill climb,” he wrote.

With Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett expected to be confirmed by the Senate as early as Monday, Democrats may face dimmer odds in election-related cases even if Chief Justice John Roberts joins liberals as he did in the Pennsylvania case.

“This cake is baked as far as a future Coney Barrett justice of the Supreme Court is concerned,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told The Washington Post.

“There is no reason to think she would not be the fifth vote” in a case, he said, “that could end up “throwing out millions and millions of ballots.”

Michael Cohen: Trump family will be in big trouble when the “IRS gets their hands on them”

During a chat with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen revealed what he really thought about the president’s sons – and their financial stakes.

“That’s one of the ironies here, of course, is for all of the corruption and all of the kind of pettiness and the ways in which different people’s fingers have been in different troughs, that it has been bad for the Trump business, right? The Trump family business in 2020, it seems to me, is in bad shape and that itself might create its own dangers and exposure in the person who is the president of the United States,” Hayes told Cohen.

“Well, Chris, no, no, no, don’t forget: he is the greatest negotiator. He can negotiate any deal that you want. He is the greatest. Whatever deal, I’m a great deal maker. No, you’re not, Mr. President. You are not a great deal maker,” Cohen said. “Actually, you are a lousy deal maker. You were fortunate enough to have some good people around you and you were fortunate enough to have daddy’s money coming into the game. Short of that, he would probably be just like Atlantic City – broke.”

“I’m not quite sure how to ask this,” Hayes started. “What do the sons do? Like do they — I don’t understand what they do. The idea was that — I mean, it was obviously preposterous fiction the president was going to have, you know, his sons run the business and have nothing to do with them. That’s clearly not the case. Everything is all tangled together – the business, the presidency, the campaign. But, like, do they have jobs?”

“Yeah, they have jobs,” Cohen responded. “They go into the office. What they do is obviously, nobody knows. You know, Don, Jr. runs around and he makes speeches. Eric is in the office. I don’t know what he is running. You have Allen Weisselberg, the CFO in charge of the trust. They’re not buying anything. They’re not really doing anything. In all fairness, all they’re really trying to do is to retain whatever assets that they have because the market, of course, has taken a tremendous plunge, especially in commercial real estate where their properties have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%, 40% vacancy. So, you know, the company, as you rightly stated, they’re in some serious trouble and they’re going to be in bigger trouble when the IRS gets their hands on them with all of the tax evasion. He’s going to have to pay that back.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Pornification and purity in “Cuties” are two sides of the same patriarchal coin

You may be wondering what all the hoopla is surrounding Netflix’s French film “Cuties.” Those calling to censor “Cuties” and the backlash to #CancelNetflix for sticking by it, condemn the film for sexualizing girls while altogether missing the message of the movie — that it is a critical commentary on pornification. As a gender studies professor who has taught about these issues for many years, I am not surprised by the confusion surrounding “Cuties” because I know that it’s hard to talk about the sexualization of culture (also called raunch culture) without offending somebody.

The film chronicles a few weeks in the life of Amy, an 11-year-old Senegalese immigrant living in Paris. Amy straddles two cultures in the story — a polygamous, conservative branch of Islam that advocates purity and submission in girls and women, and the secular culture of pornification and social media. Amy’s father is traveling, we learn early in “Cuties,” to bring home another wife. While Amy’s mother publicly accepts this development as a “blessing,” we find that in private she feels otherwise. In a tightly shot sequence filmed through Amy’s eyes as she’s hiding under her mother’s bed, we hear her mother shed the public persona and quietly weep. Amy escapes the tension at home, and her misalignment with her religious instruction, by maneuvering to join a gaggle of loud, giggling pre-teen girls practicing for a dance competition.

Here, director Maïmouna Doucouré beautifully captures the mercurial, cruel, and confusing terrain of 11-year-old girl groups. Determined to show her mettle, Amy teaches herself how to dance by mimicking the sexuality adult women display in provocative music videos, and then piques the girls’ interest by teaching them to twerk and pout. One of the more effective ways to raise awareness about a problematic cultural norm like pornification is to baldly show it, and this is the tactic Doucouré takes in many cringe-inducing scenes of Amy and the girls practicing for and performing in a dance competition. They wear booty shorts and crop tops, twerk, finger their lips, and mimic provocative dance moves popularized in videos like the recently released single by Cardi B., “WAP.” This is the material that critics of “Cuties” denounce, many of whom revile the film without actually having watched it. It is, after all, an easy sell: few want to find themselves on the side of arguing for the sexualization of girls.

What no one is talking about is the film’s dual critique of pornification and purity cultures. This may be because we usually see these two cultures situated oppositionally: either raunch is a path of resistance away from conservative religiosity or vice versa. For example, we are familiar with stories of a girl or woman trapped in a fundamentalist religious tradition, like Amy, using the overt sexiness of raunch as a route to self-empowerment, and stories of “fallen” women, perhaps a sex worker, carving a path out of self-objectification through being born again. These two seemingly different narratives tell a similar story – one of the patriarchal control of girls’ and women’s bodies. I see pornification and purity as two sides of the same coin, each dictating that female bodies be either completely seen or completely hidden, determined not by a girl or woman’s personal preference, but in service to men’s desires. Indeed, pornification and conservative religiosity work well in tandem because they both keep girls and women obsessed with their appearances, and controlled by the perceived desires of boys and men.

It’s challenging to discuss this with people across the political spectrum. Conservatives, like Ted Cruz and a Texas Grand Jury indicting Netflix for “lewd depictions” in “Cuties,” sometimes misread illustrations of pornification as an endorsement of it, which is why some are calling to boycott the film. On the other hand, political progressives tend to misconstrue critiques of raunch culture as advocating sexual censorship, and then resist considering the ways in which it narrowly channels female sexual expression into one and only one version – to be sexy like a “porn star.”

As the controversy about “Cuties” highlights, Americans urgently need thoughtful conversations about female bodily autonomy – what is missing under both compulsory pornification and compulsory purity. The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the galloping pace with which the U.S. senate is rushing to confirm conservative Catholic Amy Coney Barrett highlights this. As Americans face the lifetime appointment of a woman whose conservative religiosity may help further restrict women’s reproductive freedom, messengers of raunch culture encourage girls to dress up in stripper shoes and to feel flattered when they get cat-called and receive uninvited d*ck pics because, in the manipulative language of pornification, it’s “empowering.”

I encourage readers to reject the false dichotomy of pornification v. purity, and see them as one and the same. Pornification makes compulsory sexual self-display while purity culture over-values virginity and counsels “modesty” in girls’ and women’s dress to protect men from sexual “sin.” We can instead carve a new path like Amy does in “Cuties.” The story ends with Amy choosing not to attend her father’s wedding (with her mother’s permission) and walking out of the dance competition in the middle of their oversexualized routine. In the final scene, we see Amy dressed in jeans, joining in a game of jump rope. We need more feminist stories like “Cuties” that illuminate the constraints girls and women face and help us chart a path to full gender equality.

“Cuties” is currently streaming on Netflix.

President Trump’s “body tics” and “forward-leaning posture” raise concerns: expert

A professor of Neurology at George Washington University says he believes there may be legitimate concerns over President Donald J. Trump’s “forward-listing posture” that goes beyond the comical memes and gif responses normally shared on social media.

“I know something about political figures and observable signs of illness from afar,” Richard E. Cytowic M.D. wrote in Psychology Today. “. . . The American public deserves an accurate account of our president’s health.”

“While most frequently observed in Parkinson’s Disease, the bent posture so evident in Trump may also be seen in Alzheimer’s Dementia, movement disorders of the basal ganglia, and as the side effect of certain medications,” Cytowic continued. “Also noted are the sudden, jerking movements of Trump’s right arm. Since they occur only on one side, the prefix “hemi” is applied, while “ballistic” means sudden or flinging in the manner of a projectile. Trump’s hemiballistic arm movements are evident in news clips from Memorial Day (also here via C-Span) at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as are his uncontrolled swaying and forward tilt. He is seen to grab his wayward arm with the left one in an effort to keep it under control.”

While Trump “aced” a 10-minute mental status screening in August, Cytowic said “the test is one an average adult should easily pass. To a neurologist, his way of walking, posture, and jerky movements are concerning and in want of explanation.”

Why did Trump have a secretive, midnight run to Walter Reed Medical Center? It’s time we talk about it. #TrumpIsNotWell pic.twitter.com/c8g97n61s5

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 16, 2020

According to Cytowic, “It is true that individuals who have balance and gait issues similar to those observed in Trump can have degenerative brain disease in the frontal lobes, such as fronto-temporal dementia or Pick’s Disease. Other possibilities are normal pressure hydrocephalus, sensory ataxia, peripheral neuropathy, small lacunar strokes in the basal ganglia, supranuclear palsy, the effects of too many medications, and Parkinson’s Disease, which can begin on one side and also show early cognitive impairment.”

Regardless, “The president is a public figure whose judgment we must trust,” Cytowic said. “The American public is entitled to know about his neurological health given the enormous responsibilities placed on our commander in chief.”

Whoops, Trump did it again — the same blackmail scheme that got him impeached

Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican, justified her vote to acquit Donald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson.

“I believe that the president has learned from this case,” Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O’Donnell at the time. “The president has been impeached — that’s a pretty big lesson.”

That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached.

Trump didn’t learn anything. In fact, he’s only escalated the very same botched conspiracy that got him impeached, only this time around he’s abusing his power on the home front, instead of in a distant nation most Americans couldn’t find on a map.

Truth told, Trump demonstrated his failure to learn within days of his acquittal, first by bragging about it and then pivoting to lying about the Democrats. Since then, he’s gone right back to abusing his power to fabricate lies about his opponent. He and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — along with Giuliani’s buddy Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian intelligence — eventually returned to the very scheme that got Trump impeached in the first place: am attempt to counterfeit evidence that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, had somehow dragged his father into a corrupt scheme. It’s a claim with literally no evidence to support it, no matter how much Trump and Giuliani repeat the accusation.

On Wednesday evening, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump has threatened to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray — who, lest we forget, was appointed by Trump after the firing of James Comey — unless Wray announces a phony investigation into Biden that Trump can use as last-minute ammunition in the presidential campaign.

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“Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey,” Barrett and Dawsey write, referring to Comey’s infamous announcement that “he had reopened an investigation into [Hillary] Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered.”

That investigation resulted in no damning information about Clinton, which was entirely predictable. Clinton had been thoroughly investigated for years without a speck of meaningful dirt turned up on her. But that announcement did help turn an election Clinton should have won to Trump’s favor: It caused a surge of undecided voters to break for Trump at the last minute, allowing him to win several important swing states by razor-thin margins.

So there’s one thing Trump was capable of learning: The value of fake scandals to distract from serious issues, such as his own corruption and incompetence. And he’s hoping for a repeat, which is why he’s pressuring Wray to pull a Comey against Biden.

But in doing so — and in “considering” whether to fire Wray if he doesn’t — Trump is doing the exact same thing that got him impeached: Pressuring a government official to announce a phony investigation into his opponent, and threatening to use the powers of his office to punish that person if they don’t comply. This time Trump is targeting a Senate-confirmed official who leads a federal law enforcement agency rather than a foreign leader.

For those who have grown hazy on the details of Trump’s impeachment — which is understandable, since there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump-caused crises since then — a quick recap: In the summer of 2019, Trump called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and told him that the U.S. would withhold military aid (which had been authorized by Congress) unless Zelensky did Trump “a favor.” That favor was to announce an “investigation” into Biden aimed at propping up the convoluted conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, a Ukrainian gas company and a fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Giuliani and Trump were trying to push into the mainstream media.

Zelensky clearly felt uneasy participating in a scheme to smear an innocent man’s reputation, but Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to fight Russian aggression. Luckily for Zelensky, he was spared from this blackmail scheme by a whistleblower and Trump’s eventual impeachment for abusing his office.

Now Trump is doing to Wray what he did to Zelensky. The only difference is that Trump’s leverage in this case is limited: He can dismiss the FBI director at any time, having already done so once, but that’s about it. With Zelensky, Trump’s threats carried a lot more weight.

Either way, the basic story is the same: Trump is demanding that a government official abuse his powers and launch a completely phony investigation based on made-up charges, for Trump’s political benefit. In fact, Trump has reportedly made similar threats about Attorney General Bill Barr, because the Justice Department’s bogus special-counsel investigation of the Russia investigation evidently hasn’t turned up anything Trump can use to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Democrats. (If Barr, the most dogged and ruthless of Trump’s sycophants, is in trouble, things in the White House are getting really bad.)

There’s a word for all this: Blackmail.

Unfortunately, the media coverage about the attacks on Wray (and on Barr) or about the latest ridiculous wrinkles in Rudy Giuliani’s harebrained schemes all too often fails to provide the necessary context. It doesn’t remind readers that none of this is new, and that in fact all these developments are part of the same conspiracy that got Trump impeached. The Washington Post article on the threats against Wray fails to use the word “impeachment” or to mention that Trump is treating Wray exactly as he treated Zelensky. And although mainstream media has emphasized the most important aspects of Giuliani’s efforts to smear Biden — that Giuliani is not credible and is believed by U.S. intelligence to be spreading Russian disinformation — most articles don’t explain that Giuliani is still working the same plot that got his celebrity client (quite likely his only client) impeached.

It’s as if G. Gordon Liddy kept burglarizing various Democratic offices after the Watergate break-in, but the reporting on his later crimes failed to mention the first one. Our national situation is an ongoing catastrophe, no doubt. But is it really too much to expect journalists to explain that Trump keeps on doing the very thing he was impeached for doing?

Either way, the situation shows that Trump, despite all his chaotic crazy-uncle ranting, doesn’t actually have a lot of tricks in his bag. The only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him. Without that, he’s got nothing.

Fox News host admits Trump’s attempt to smear the Bidens may not be based on the truth

Fox News host Chris Wallace on Thursday warned that Democratic nominee Joe Biden could expose President Donald Trump’s “secret” Chinese bank account during the final presidential debate.

While appearing on Fox News, Wallace predicted that Trump will try to attack Biden’s son, Hunter, at Thursday’s presidential debate.

“It’s certainly going to be brought up tonight,” Wallace said. “If [debate moderator] Kristen Welker doesn’t bring it up — and I think she will — the president will bring it up.”

Wallace noted that several conservative pundits have cautioned Trump against making the allegations against Hunter Biden the focus of the debate.

“I think the president has to be a little careful,” the Fox News host continued. “Because you heard Barack Obama yesterday point out that The New York Times had revealed that Donald Trump has — not had, but has — a secret bank in China. And said that, you know, if that had come out when he was president, people would have called him Beijing Barry.”

“It seems to me that Biden is going to have something to come back at,” he remarked.

Wallace went on to note that the attempt to smear Biden’s family may not be based on the truth.

“The question is whether or not he personally benefitted financially,” Wallace explained. “Remember that the hard drive [that the computer repair shop] gave to the FBI in December of 2019 — so about 10-11 months ago — they’ve had and one assumes that had Biden taken money from a foreign entity while he was vice president and had he lied because we’ve seen his tax returns from 2019 that we would have seen the fruits of that investigation by now.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Giuliani calls NSFW Borat hotel room scene a “hit job” in retaliation for recent Biden smear

Former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani is defending his unwitting cameo in the “Borat” sequel as a “hit job” in retaliation for his recent smears on Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

In the controversial appearance, the man once called “America’s Mayor” appears to be touching himself under his pants while on a hotel bed beside an actress posing as a young journalist.

After news of the scene first broke on Wednesday, the former New York mayor called in to radio station WABC to explain that he had merely been tucking in his shirt. Giuliani suggested that the scene might have been “added, doctored, [or] manipulated” — allegations which he denies about his own dubious accusations against Biden.

“I had to take off the electronic equipment,” the former assistant U.S. attorney claimed. “And when the electronic equipment came off, some of it was in the back. And my shirt came a little out, although my clothes were entirely on. I leaned back, and I tucked my shirt in. And at that point — at that point, they have this picture they take which looks doctored. But, in any event, I’m tucking my shirt in. I assure you that’s all I was doing.”

In the sequel to the hit mockumentary, 24-year-old actress Maria Balakova, who poses as Borat’s teenage daughter, Tutar, scores a one-on-one sit-down with Giuliani in a Manhattan hotel suite. According to Giuliani — whose work representing President Donald Trump’s personal interests in Ukraine led directly to his own client’s impeachment — he entered into what “seemed like a legitimate interview” with a “young woman.”

“At one point, she explained to me some problems she had. I actually prayed with her,” he said. “And then, I had to leave. I had my jacket on. I was fully clothed at all times.”

However, that description omitted some relevant details.

Throughout the scene, “Tutar” flirts heavily with Giuliani, and she reaches out to touch his knee several times. At one point, after Giuliani blames China for the coronavirus pandemic, he agrees to eat a bat with her.

After Sacha Baron Cohen, in the role of Borat, interrupts the interview costumed as an audio tech to “save” his daughter, the scene cuts to Tutar inviting Giuliani to “have a drink in the bedroom.” Giuliani, whom U.S. officials reportedly warned the White House had been a target of Russian intelligence, follows her out.

The next scene appears to be captured on hidden cameras. Giuliani, the president’s former informal cybersecurity adviser, removes Tutar’s microphone, sits on the bed and asks for her address and phone number. She removes his microphone, touching his pants, and he pats her backside. Giuliani then lies back on the bed and puts his hands down his pants for longer than he suggested in his later radio interview.

At that point, Borat, dressed in pink neglige which Giuliani later described as a “pink transgender outfit,” bursts into the room. Borat screams, “Put down your chram!” — his word for penis. “She’s 15! She’s too old for you!”

Giuliani, who had been given no information about the woman’s age, attempts to leave as quickly as possible. He is hounded by Borat, who shouts after him, “Rudy, Trump will be disappoint! You are leaving hotel without golden shower!”

After Wednesday’s radio spot, Giuliani posted a series tweets in his defense, attacking Baron Cohen, the film’s star and director, as a “stone-cold liar.”

“The Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment,” Giuliani wrote. “At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.”

“In fact, the NY Post today reports ‘it looks to me like an exaggeration through editing,'” he continued, citing a review from the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid — an echo of his allegation of possible “doctored” footage, which he floated in his radio interview.

“Now let me tell you why I know this is a hit job that happens because, it’s not an accident that it happens that I turn in all this evidence on their prince and darling Joe Biden who’s one of the biggest crooks in the last thirty years, and since I have the courage to say that I’m the target,” Giuliani added, neglecting to mention that the scene was filmed in July.

“Everybody in Hollywood hates me, you know, right?” he asked. “I’m a devil in Hollywood. Nothing about me comes out in that period of time, nothing sensational about me in the movie. Now all of a sudden there’s all this sensational stuff about me in the movie. Don’t know if it was added, doctored, manipulated, whatever.”

In July, Giuliani told The New York Post — the same outlet he recently handed what he claimed were Hunter Biden’s emails — that he had called the police after he left the hotel. When pressed later that month in a WABC radio interview about whether he did anything “regretful,” Giuliani replied, “I don’t think so. I’m trying to remember.”

The movie, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” will be released Friday on Amazon Prime.

Trump camp denies it hired armed men at Florida polling place who claimed they were sent by campaign

Two armed men who set up a tent outside of a Florida polling place told sheriff’s deputies that they were hired by the Trump campaign, an election official said on Wednesday before the campaign denied involvement.

Julie Marcus, the Pinellas County supervisor of elections, told WTSP that two armed men in “security-type uniforms” who said they were licensed through a security company were spotted outside of a polling place in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.

“They indicated — and this has not been confirmed yet — that they were hired by the Trump campaign,” Marcus, a Republican, told WFLA.

The Trump campaign said it had nothing to do with the incident.

“The campaign did not hire these individuals nor did the campaign direct them to go to the voting location,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald told WFLA.

Marcus, who was appointed by Trump ally Gov. Ron DeSantis, said the sheriff’s office was called after a poll worker spotted the men.

“The sheriff and I take this very seriously,” Marcus told the outlet. “Voter intimidation, deterring voters from voting, impeding a voter’s ability to cast a ballot in this election is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in any way, shape or form. So we anticipated many things going into this election — not only cybersecurity, but physical security — and we had a plan in place and executed that plan.”

The men told deputies they would return to the polling location the next day, as well. Marcus said that a deputy would be set up outside the polling place on Thursday.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told WFLA that it was illegal to bring a gun to a polling place in Florida — and “intimidation won’t be allowed, either.”

President Donald Trump urged his supporters to monitor polling places at the first presidential debate last month.

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” Trump said at the time. “Because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it.”

Since then, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison launched an investigation into a Tennessee-based security firm that had been recruiting armed guards to act as poll watchers.

A lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota and League of Women Voters of Minnesota alleged that the company Atlas Aegis posted a Facebook ad recruiting former U.S. Special Operations personnel to protect polling places and businesses from “looting and destruction,” according to ABC News.

Atlas Aegis Chairman Anthony Caudle told The Washington Post that the guards intended to “make sure that the antifas don’t try to destroy the election sites.” Ellison said the effort was illegal.

“Minnesota and federal law are clear: no one may interfere with or intimidate a voter at a polling place, and no one may operate private armed forces in our state,” he said on Tuesday. “The presence of private ‘security’ at polling places would violate these laws. It would make no one safer and is not needed or wanted by anyone who runs elections or enforces the law. For these reasons, my office is formally investigating Atlas Aegis.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson told The Post that it was not aware of the effort — and had nothing to do with it.

But Republicans have worked for months to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers to act as “poll watchers” after a federal court lifted a decades-long ban on Republican poll watching following repeated instances of voter intimidation.

“In recent months, official Trump campaign advertisements have adopted the stark language of wartime recruitment, calling on supporters to ‘enlist today’ so they can join the ‘top ranks’ alongside ‘battle-tested Team Trump operatives,'” Time reported.

“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father,” Donald Trump Jr. warned in a recent ad. “We need every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation . . . We need you to help us watch them.”

Stark language in Don Jr.’s new “defend your ballot” ad: “We need every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation…we need you to help us watch them” pic.twitter.com/qJwaQApptr

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) September 25, 2020

The Giffords Law Center warned in a recent report that “it is likely that significant numbers of people will bring guns to polling places under the guise of preventing election fraud.”

The Trump campaign has denied that the effort is aimed at intimidating voters, but former Department of Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson told Time that the campaign’s rhetoric was dangerous.

“By calling people to polling stations,” he said, “these armed militias could show up and lead to the intimidation of voters under the guise of poll watching.”

Anthony Scaramucci is on a mission to stop Trump: “Something’s wrong with him mentally”

“I’m out there trying to educate as many people as possible at the systemic danger that Mr. Trump represents to our democracy.” Those were part of the opening words of my conversation earlier this week with former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on “Salon Talks.” And it went downhill from there for Trump.

I can’t recall another presidential election where as many former officials from a White House administration and members of the president’s own political party came out so vocally to defeat that very president. But then again, nothing has been normal in the time of Trump.

In our conversation, Scaramucci, a successful Wall Street investor, shared why he turned on Trump, citing events such as Trump’s family separation policy and, finally, when Trump led the “Send her back” bigoted smear of the four Democratic female members of Congress known as “The Squad,” saying they should go back to their own countries. As Scaramucci noted, this vile line of attack by Trump was personal for him; his own Italian grandparents heard the same hateful nativist comments when they first came to America.

The son of blue-collar parents who made it to Harvard Law School and onto the White House staff admitted he had been intoxicated in 2016 by Trump’s celebrity status. Now Scaramucci wants to make amends for those past sins by leading the charge, along with other Republicans, to defeat Trump.

Some may never forgive Scaramucci and other Trump voters who helped elect him in the first place, but experts on authoritarianism will tell you that the key to saving a democracy is not just having an opposition party, but members of the wannabe fascist’s own party standing up to him. Watch my conversation with Scaramucci or read a transcript of our chat below to hear more about his regrets around working for Trump, his continued relationships with General Kelly and Michael Cohen and why he’s supporting Joe Biden.

Many know you as a successful Wall Street executive, entrepreneur, lawyer, author, founder of SkyBridge, and of course, for serving 11 days as Donald Trump’s communications director in the White House in 2017.

That 11 days feels like it was like 500 years ago, Dean. Thank you for inviting me on.

In 2019, you made a famous break from Trump. You wrote an op-ed in of August 2019 for the Washington Post in which you wrote, “While it’s difficult and embarrassing to admit my errors in judgment, I believe I still have the ability to make amends.” You’re talking there about breaking ranks from Donald Trump. Remind people if you could please, why, and how you got to that point?

Well, I don’t want to make this story too long, but here’s what I would say. I was a lifelong Republican, but a moderate Republican. I was in the Jeb Bush, Nelson Rockefeller quadrant of the Republican party, sort of agnostic on issues like gay marriage and women’s right to choose. Certainly think that they should be able to live their lives the way they see fit, but was more free-market based, but recognize that you need an energetic government. I’m not a hardcore conservative, but I was more center-right, if you will. Mr. Trump slayed all of those people.

I was with Jeb Bush [then Trump] recruited me into the campaign, and this is a shortcoming of mine which I’m open to admit: I got intoxicated by the idea of working on a winning campaign. Mr. Trump was a celebrity. I started normalizing him like many people did and said, “OK, well, he can’t be that abnormal. He’s running for president. He’s going to sit in Abraham Lincoln’s seat, he’s the successor of Dwight Eisenhower.” You start to normalize somebody that is actually very abnormal, and that is a mistake I made, but I did make it alongside of 63 million other people. And then what happens is he wins, which I didn’t think was going to happen. And we should talk about that because the election’s coming up in a few weeks. But he wins, and then he asked me to go work for him. And then I make the fatal mistake there. And that’s due to the intoxication related to working in the office of the presidency and the notion I’d be working in the White House.

I grew up in this blue-collar family and I’ve lived a pretty good element of the American dream. And so I started this narrative in my head, and I think I’ve said this to you, that is very ego-based. You got to be very careful when you’re making egocentric decisions based on your ego and pride. Your emotions go up and your intelligence goes down, and you got to be very, very careful. And my wife, who probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him, was dead set against it. We started fighting, almost got ourselves divorced. It was a really rough period of time. But I went to go work for him. Then when I got fired abruptly, I always tell people that was my fault. I said something to a reporter I shouldn’t have said that caused me to get fired.

Now I’m outside of the White House, lifelong Republican, let me do my best to try to be supportive of the President and his agenda. And then it just became impossible, so I had to separate myself related to the child separation issue. I had to break from him on denigrating our intelligence agencies, and he’s praising Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He’s then saying that the press is the enemy to people. I wrote an op-ed saying that it wasn’t. That’s actually the last time I talked to Mr. Trump — that was Easter Sunday, April 2019, he called to yell at me and tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that the press is the enemy of the people, sort of demagogic nonsense.

But then by July, he wants to throw the Congresswomen [four members of Congress known as The Squad], he says he wants them to go back to the countries that they originally came from. And so that is a racist nativist trope. They said it to my Italian-American grandparents. I said, “I am done. There’s no way I can support this guy.” I disavowed my support, I wrote that article. I wrote many articles subsequent to that. And I’m out there trying to educate as many people as possible at the systemic danger that Mr. Trump represents to our democracy.

So it’s a sad thing for me. It’s not like I’m all happy about it. I mean, it’s sad to listen to the President of the United States ask for the Governor of Michigan, who 10 days ago her life was threatened, they were trying to kidnap her, a white militia group, and possibly execute her. They had to have that broken up by the FBI. And then 10 short days later, the leader of the free world is in her state saying “lock her up.” I mean, it’s sort of bizarre.

And then, Anthony Fauci, who’s been in the American government for 36 years, has dedicated his life to science and healing, he has to now go on his power walks at age 79 with armed federal agents because of death threats related to him because he’s just really just trying to tell people the facts about the pandemic and his observation of 6,000 years of scientific discovery on Planet Earth, and what we need to do to protect ourselves. But now he’s being threatened as well.

And so there’s an evil in our world, you and I both know that. It’s important for good men and women to reject evil. We know from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that evil people can get ahead mostly based on the silence of good people and the inaction of good people. I feel compelled to speak out about it and I’m going to continue to do that. And by the way, if Mr. Trump is defeated, which I predict he will be in two weeks, you still have a problem in the country because there is a systemic issue related to a very large group of people that are angry and they feel left out of the system. Mr. Trump has preyed on their anger, trying to divide the country. We have to work with those people to see if we can calm things down and bring them back. So it’s a sad situation, Dean.

You’re still friends with John Kelly, who was chief of staff for President Trump and is a retired U.S. Marine Corps general. CNN reported last week that Kelly told his close friends the following about Trump.”The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” You’re friends with John Kelly, can you share anything more about this comment?

I think he’s made a decision — alongside of HR McMaster, who I interviewed on Friday for SALT Talks, and for General Mattis — I think they’ve all made the decision that they are going to stay consistent with what George Washington wanted for the military, and Eisenhower, and Marshall, was the separation of military men from the political system because they want to adhere to the civilian nature of the democracy. And they don’t want to use their uniforms and their brass, if you will, to make any undue influence.

Having said that, they’ve all spoken out. They’ve all said that the President is unfit to serve. They’ve disagreed with the President’s use of force in Lafayette Square. They have said that the President is a threat to the constitution. They have said that he is trying to divide the nation, he’s not trying to unite the nation. Because of their roles in the military, as former military general officers, they don’t feel that they should be out on a platform or a podium. But having said that, I’m friends with all three of them, including Admiral [William H.] McRaven who has spoken out a little bit more voraciously than them. They’ve all said to me, “Hey, this is your civilian duty to get out there and speak truth to power related to this.” So Olivia Troy, Miles Taylor, myself. I guess what should upset the American people is that there’s a very large group of people inside the administration that know how dangerous President Trump is. There’s also senators that know how dangerous he is. John Cornyn is now saying, “Well, I broke from him privately.” So what’s going to happen is this ship is sinking, all the rats are going to climb over to one side and say, well, yeah, we didn’t really like him that much.

It speaks to the cowardice and the political expediency and the selfishness of people, because when Mr. Trump was flying high they wanted to be around him. And it was speaking to their power of personal preservation and so forth. I broke from President Trump, it turned out, at the height of his poll numbers. If you look back July of 2019 into August of 2019, he was at the height of his poll numbers, he was at the height of his popularity and approval rating. And many people said to me, “Well, that’s a kamikaze mission, and you’re going to be rejected soundly by your fellow Republicans.” But it’s not a kamikaze mission today. It’s a mission loaded with aircraft carriers and squadrons.

General Kelly knows this man is unfit. He knows this man is dishonest. General Kelly knows that he called his son who died for our country a sucker and a loser. General Kelly would tell you if he would come on your show that that’s the tip of the iceberg of the way Mr. Trump talks about our servicemen and women. He’s just, unfortunately, an unfit guy. He’s an unwell guy. Something’s wrong with him mentally. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that there’s something wrong with him. The guy is very sick. He’s an unwell person.

I’m going to work over the next 16 days to get rid of him. But then over the next several years, we have another project, we have to heal the country. We have to figure out why the country got to where it is right now. And God forbid, look, there’s a chance he could win. If he wins, we’re going to be heading into an American winter, Dean. And it’s going to be a sad four years for America. This guy’s going to try to really disrupt and destroy the institutions of our democracy.

Healing is so appealing to me down the road, but winning right now is everything because it has to be. Right now we’ve got 11 million Americans who have still lost their jobs. You’re a finance guy. Last week, we get our weekly unemployment claims. We had almost 900,000, the highest since mid-August. We’re going the wrong way on unemployment claims. Trump is not talking about any job creation program whatsoever. From your point of view, forget politics for a second. You look at our economy right now, is it getting sicker, and do we need some federal leadership to make things better for people?

We need two things, actually. We need a coordinated public health and safety policy where the federal government in coordination with the 50 states really follows a process. If you look at what’s going on in China right now, they were successful in doing that. Their economy is growing and there are people sitting in Wuhan where the virus originated from without masks on, they’re in restaurants. The virus has almost been completely eradicated from the area that it originated from. The virus can be contained, the virus can ultimately be destroyed, and we can move on from the pandemic like we did the Spanish flu and other pandemics throughout history.

You’re not going to contain it by lying about the science. You have a science denier in the White House that’s saying, “Don’t vote for Joe Biden. He may listen to the scientists.” Now, what the president is trying to say to his supporters is, “Well, if he listens to his scientists, he’s going to shut down the economy and we’re going to tip further into a recession.” I don’t believe that’s the case. I think we can explain to people what they need to do to protect themselves. We can get the economy moving. We can offer up, hopefully, more stimulus. We certainly need it.

If you go back to my writings in early March, I was saying we have to go very, very big on this stimulus. We are at war and you have to look at it that way. And so therefore deficit spending needs to increase when you’re at war. We can afford it. We have some flexibility in the economy. We’re about to enter an amazing growth phase, technologically, for America and the rest of the world. This will unleash another great wave of prosperity.

Now, we have to figure out a way to even it out. That’s been one of the dilemmas. We have too big of a wealth divide now. So you need public policy people that are less focused on left and right issues and more focused on what’s right and wrong for America. And if we do that, we’re going to enter into a golden age for America. Having said that, we got to get the virus behind us. You can’t have somebody like Mr. Trump telling you, “Let’s just let herd immunity go.” We’ll have four and a half, 5 million people dead. Why would we do that as a society? What is the case for “economic growth”? You won’t have it, by the way, because what will happen is you will scare the living daylights out of every person in the country.

If you offered a coordinated, responsible plan that was national, you could fix this thing. And so, yeah, I’m worried about the economy, but I’m not overly worried about it. I think we’ve got tremendous resources in the country. We were at peak economic performance in the fourth quarter of 2019. We can get back there. It’s not the end of the world. We have to rebuild these cities. All of these things are possible, but they’re not going to be possible under a President Trump, they’re not. And I’m not saying that Joe Biden is the panacea for our civilization, but at least he’s a step towards re-fortifying the institutions of our democracy and the semblance of our government that has made all of us have this great peace and prosperity and this great opportunity in this country.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump said that if he loses he might leave the country. When you hear him say, “Maybe I’ll have to leave the country,” what does that indicate to you about Trump’s thought process now?

Well, he said, “You may never hear from me again if I lose, and maybe I have to leave the country.” I think those are both statements by him that should not be taken lightly. I mean, he’s got serious problems. His business is under threat, he’s got tremendous amounts of debt. There are people that think, though, that he’s been paid by some foreign leaders and autocrats to move our foreign policy around, and that that stuff is hidden which will offer him some financial protection. I don’t know if that’s true or not any more than I… I shouldn’t even be saying that because who the hell knows what’s going on.

But I will say this. He is a guy that is unstable, and he’s a guy that is unfit for the presidency of the United States. To just imagine that he’s saying to people, “Well, I may not accept a peaceful transfer of power.” After 244 years of the American experiment. And then he’s saying he may have to leave the country. And it’s never a joke with him. Michael Cohen has said that; I have said that. People that know him know he doesn’t know how to joke. He doesn’t laugh. He has almost like an Asperger’s way about him where he can’t pick up the emotional cues and know when to laugh and when not to laugh. He’s very rarely joking, if ever.

Your friend Michael Cohen was on MSNBC recently talking about this whole idea of Hunter Biden and the laptop that Rudy has and Cohen said that Rudy is “drunk all the time,” making him more easily swayed by Russian disinformation. Is Rudy being used by Russian disinformation forces?

Obviously, you may have read the New York Times article about the New York Post article about Hunter Biden, how the journalists didn’t even want to be involved with it because they didn’t have enough evidence and they felt the stuff was specious and illusory. Additionally, I choose to think about the mayor the way he was at 9/11 and the way he was from 1993 to 2001. The mayor today is not frankly the same guy that I recognize from 30 years ago and it breaks my heart. It also obviously has an impact on his children. And if you think about what his daughter is saying, “We’ve got to get rid of Mr. Trump.” I mean, it’s scary. What Michael is saying about Rudy is true, unfortunately.

At a recent rally, Donald Trump had the crowd cheering, “Lock him up” about Joe Biden. Crowds also cheered “Lock her up” about Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan. He’s gone back to [talking about] imprisoning his political opponents. Not just defeating them, but actually putting them in jail. In this case, there’s not even evidence Joe Biden’s done any wrongdoing whatsoever. How alarming is that to you? Is that just Trump being desperate?

There’s a great book out, the title is “Active Measures” [by Thomas Rid] about what the Russians do in terms of disinformation. One of the things is lock up your political opponents. That’s a clear message from them. Now, another one is this disinformation, and then it’s always pedophilia, by the way. You always want to go with pedophilia. You’re going to go with pedophilia because pedophilia is by and large repulsive to 99.5 percent of the population, or hopefully more than that. And so if you accuse somebody of pedophilia and you get people to believe that, it’ll engender a lot of hate and create some negative activism. And so they’ve even tried that now.

I think the good news is that both Facebook and Twitter, which were easily manipulated by Russian intelligence, the GRU, and these troll farms last time, a lot of that stuff has been contained. But I just want you to imagine that the American president, instead of denouncing this sort of activity and denouncing foreign interference, is welcoming the foreign interference. And my liberal friends have a point when they say to me, “Well, you supported that last time.” And I have to own that, unfortunately, because I did support it last time, unfortunately. I have to own that.

I admire your honestly there. The stakes are too high. When this is over, if Trump is defeated, do you think that you, Rick Wilson and other Republicans like yourselves might return to the Republican Party and try to reshape it? Or has the party become that of QAnon and Trumpism and wild conspiracy theories and white supremacy?

Yes, I think it’ll cause the end of the Republican Party as we know it. And the party already is this aging white demographic. It’s going to be a party that buys catheters and CPAP machines and MyPillows in between a Fox News commercial. I mean, it is a weird thing going on right now and the party needs a reset and the party needs a tent expansion and it needs to look like the wonderful, colorful mosaic of America. And it’s not going to look like that in its current configuration. Could he pull it off again? Could he have this one last gasp of win, of an aging white America that wants this aging white demagogue to run America? That’s possible.

I hope that’s not the case, but all I can do right now is fight against it. I can get out there and speak about it. I can offer my opinions on social media. On Friday, I was 10 hours on the radio. I did radio in Michigan, Florida. I did radio in Pennsylvania, radio in Wisconsin. And some of it was tough on me. It was talk radio, conservative talk radio, where these guys have got their callers coming in and lighting me up, and I’m a traitor and I’m a two-faced guy and can’t be trusted. I said, “No. I’m not a traitor. I’m just abiding and I’m loyal to the country and I’m loyal to democracy and loyal to the constitution. I’m not loyal to a person.”

I would also caution people. You have to have symmetry in loyalty. I tell that to my children. You don’t have unconditional asymmetrical loyalty. That’s what got Michael Cohen in trouble. Once Trump realized that Mr. Cohen was out to please him any way, anyhow, he kept moving the goalposts on Michael. And so Michael said, “Okay, well, I’m not loyal if I don’t pay this porn star. Or I’m not loyal if I don’t pay this Playboy model. I’m not loyal if I don’t do this. I’m not loyal if I don’t do that.” Which is why I think Michael named his book “Disloyal” because he’s trying to point out that the person that’s actually the most disloyal is Mr. Trump. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.

I agree.

When he’s doing a news search, Dean, he’s not searching USA. And he’s definitely not searching you. He could care less about you. But he’s searching Trump, that’s it. And so hopefully we can defeat him. And by the way, I will point out when I’m on conservative radio, they want me off in a hurry. I did Steve Hilton’s show last time I was on Fox News, Trump was going crazy lighting me up on Twitter because he doesn’t want people like me breaking through the vessel of his reality distortion. So what are they going to say to me? How are they going to argue? “Oh, no, Trump is a conservative.” “No, he’s not. You got a $3 trillion deficit.” “Oh, Trump is patriotic.” “Tell me how so? He’s destroyed the country. He’s pitting the country against each other. The first name of the country is United. He’s trying to dis-unify the country. So tell me what he’s doing that is so patriotic?” By the way, when is bullying been a pro-American value? When has that been a pro-American value?

Let’s assume for a second that Trump loses. Michael Cohen testified that he feared if Trump loses in 2020 “there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” We don’t have to speculate because Trump said maybe there won’t be. You know the guy, you know what he’s about. He loses, he loses soundly. Do you think he resigns? Do you think he leaves quietly, he does the right thing and shakes Joe Biden’s hand on January 20th and escorts him out like Obama did and transfers power? How do you think it truly ends, knowing Trump?

I’m a little bit of a contrarian on this. It has to be a big enough margin. I think if it’s a tight margin, I think Michael’s going to be right, we’re going to be in for a fight. But if it’s a big enough margin, if it looks consistent to what the polls look like and what Nate Silver is suggesting, I’m a contrarian because I think Trump is a baby. I think he’s a keyboard warrior coward. He’s not a confrontational guy. He couldn’t handle a confrontation if his life depended on it.

Anderson Cooper said to me, “Wow, you guys are like in a bar fight” last August. I’m like, “We’re not at a bar fight.” I mean, first of all, this guy’s never been in a bar fight. And by the way, with somebody like Trump, I would have dragged him into the street. I would have never left him in the bar. I mean, in the bar, you got the risk of a bouncer intervening in what you need to do to the guy. So no, this guy has never been able to handle conflict like that. He’s an over blustering, overcompensating, arguably one of the most insecure people I’ve ever met in my life. I think the humiliation will cause him to retreat. And I think he’ll slink away. And I think he’ll want to surprise people by offering some level of conciliation end of power.

Now, if I’m him, I’m trying to negotiate with Biden right now my pardon. I’m trying to figure out a way: “Hey, you’re going to be the president. I need a pardon and it’ll be better for the American people if I’m pardoned. And I need you to pardon my family as well.” And I know people will hate me for saying this, but if you really study political history, you don’t want that yoke on the American people. I just want to make this point. Edward Kennedy, he wrote it in his book in 2009, before he passed. He said that he was very upset with Gerry Ford when he pardoned Nixon. And then he reflected upon it. He was pardoned in September 1974. He was writing the book 35 years later. And he said that ultimately Gerry Ford was right. That it actually helped heal the country and allowed the country to move forward and it was a statesman’s thing to do and he regrets his criticism of Gerry Ford. And so, I’m just telling my liberal friends to have that historical perspective, let’s move on from Mr. Trump and move on from his criminality. We’re bigger than him as a country and we need to figure out a way to unify now.

Lincoln Project’s anti-Trump ads show the power of biting satire

The narrator in a recent Lincoln Project ad tells listeners, “In six months, COVID-19 has killed more Americans than any disease in a hundred years. Donald Trump lied about it, rejected science, and still has no plan to save Americans.”

The narrator tells listeners that, unlike Trump, Democratic challenger Joe Biden has a plan for the virus, while a second voice, in the background, reads the names of some of those who have died of the coronavirus.

The ad ends with the narrator saying, “On November 3, vote like your life depends on it.”

The Lincoln Project’s ‘Names’ ad uses elements of satire to increase its effect on viewers.

The ads, which air on television and online, were created by the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded by longtime Republican strategists and staffers, including Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; Rick Wilson, ad maker for politicians Rudy Giuliani and John Kasich; and George Conway, attorney and husband of Trump loyalist Kellyanne Conway.

The PAC has spent $28 million — most of that money on ads — to defeat Trump, who, it says, has destroyed GOP principles and, in the process, is destroying America. The ads portray Trump as unfit for the presidency — a draft dodger who calls soldiers who died in wars “losers.”

I’ve written a book on editorial cartooning and served as a Pulitzer Prize judge in the category of editorial cartooning. As a scholar of satire, I’m not interested in whether the Lincoln Project videos are good politics or bad politics; I’m interested in whether they’re good satire.

They are.

This Lincoln Project ad uses sarcasm and ridicule.

Satire is a destructive art

Satire is the use of ridicule, sarcasm and irony to attack or expose the vices and follies of society. Satirists see themselves on the outside of society, looking in at an unjust or immoral world with mean-spirited, corrupt or inept leaders.

Effective satire must resonate with readers in a way that’s intimate, personal and often uncomfortable. A satirist wants the reader to grimace or howl at his or her description of a politician’s fatal flaws, and not chuckle comfortably as when watching a “Saturday Night Live” character parodying a politician.

An example of good satire that is an exception to the regular “Saturday Night Live” pattern of ridicule would be Tina Fey’s spoof of Sarah Palin, which was meant to mock John McCain’s 2008 running mate as wholly inadequate for the job of being vice president.

The satiric tradition includes ancient writers like Aristophanes and Horace; prominent writers of past centuries like Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau; as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s televised depictions of right-wing excesses.

Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin on ‘Saturday Night Live’ was excellent satire.

A satirist takes his or her sense of indignation and tries to shake the audience out of its sense of futility or indifference to confront the injustice.

Hitting the mark

For satire to be effective, it must attack someone or something that is readily identifiable. This often includes using someone’s own words to make a fool out of them — as the Lincoln Project ads often do with Trump. One way to measure satire’s effectiveness is in the response of the person being satirized.

The ads certainly struck a nerve with Trump, who called the Lincoln Project “the Losers Project.”

If Trump intended to damage the project, it backfired. The group received $2 million in donations in the two days after his comment, which also inspired the creation of more ads that were designed to poke fun specifically at him.

Playing off his bragging of having the “most loyal people” working for him, one ad quotes John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, calling Trump “an idiot”; Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, calling Trump “a f—ing moron”; and John Bolton, the former national security adviser, saying, “I don’t think he’s fit for office.”

https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1280552633955233792

Another ad targeted military families and veterans, showing American soldiers carrying the flag-draped coffin of one of their fallen comrades while the narrator reads out the words Trump has used to describe soldiers: “losers,” “suckers,” “dopes” and “babies.”

The Lincoln Project ads have occupied the attention of the news media. The New Yorker and “60 Minutes” have published recent stories on the PAC, promoting its objective to defeat Trump.

Advertising Age reported that the ads have become a sensation during the 2020 campaign. One ad, called “Hospital,” opens with an image of a patient in a hospital bed that then quickly fades to black as we hear the beep of a heart monitor. There is no narrator. The words on the screen say, “A death from COVID is the loneliest death imaginable.”

The ad finishes by linking the responsibility for those deaths to Trump with the following words: “Over 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID. We could have stopped it. His lying is killing us. We have to stop it. Vote him out.”

The Lincoln Project uses many of the same techniques of satire, but gives them a thoroughly modern bite by using slick videography. The ads go viral on social media to audiences that may not watch television ads.

The Lincoln Project attacked Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

One Lincoln Project ad was posted after Trump was diagnosed with the coronavirus. The ad criticizes Trump for reportedly infecting staffers because he refused to wear a surgical mask and he mocked those who did. The ad, called “Covita,” shows a montage of a maskless Trump at White House functions as a singer delivers a parody of the words from “Evita”:

“Don’t cry for me, White House staffers. The truth is, I will infect you. All through my tweeting, my mad existence. I broke my promise. Won’t keep my distance.”

The Lincoln Project may or not accomplish its objective to defeat Trump on Nov. 3. But it already has made a contribution to the tradition of political satire.

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, IUPUI

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

If Joe Biden wins this election, mainstream media has plenty of catch-up work ahead

There’s a lot we don’t know about what kind of leader Joe Biden will be if he wins the presidential election.

None of it matters very much before Nov. 3, because this is not a normal election. There is nothing we could possibly learn about Biden that would make him a worse candidate than Donald Trump. We know Biden is a fundamentally decent man, with flaws. Trump is a disaster and an existential threat to core American values.

But the political press corps has never pressed Biden hard on, well, anything — not even when he was running for the Democratic nomination against several strong competitors. Reporters failed to aggressively question him during the primaries, a professional lapse I still don’t understand.

(And no, I don’t mean bogus questions about planted conspiracy theories. I mean tough questions about his history, his policies and his campaign.)

Once it was clear Biden would become the nominee, everything suddenly became relative — relative to Donald Trump, that is. So the press corps’ docile stance was largely appropriate. I was initially more worried that reporters might repeat the journalistic failures of 2016: blowing Democratic mini-scandals out of proportion, while underplaying Trump’s unbounded corruption and tragic incapacity, to create the appearance of balance.

But Trump’s clueless and disastrous response to a deadly pandemic — on top of his unhinged lies and some excellent investigative reporting on his finances — made that kind of false equivalence impossible even for the most jaded political journalists. The few attempted Biden gotchas have fallen terribly flat.

It wasn’t Biden that the Washington press corps needed to hold accountable. He simply was not the story.

But all that changes if and when he becomes the president-elect.

The second he is declared the victor — or, given how long that could take, perhaps even once all the votes are cast — political journalists should hold Biden to the highest possible standards of transparency, logic and clarity.

They should demanding detailed statements about policy and personnel so we can hold him accountable going forward.

And yes, with Trump no longer a distraction, it may well be worth re-litigating the past to get a better sense of where Biden’s weaknesses are — and to determine where he needs to be held to account most aggressively.

Barring a Trump victory, the biggest danger ahead is that, once the election is finally over, political reporters will all just breath a huge sigh of relief, kick back and see how things turn out. That eerily parallels what happened when Barack Obama was elected — and wildly underperformed as president, compared to expectations. American presidencies require the utmost scrutiny, no matter the circumstances.

Trump’s legacy also needs to be emphatically addressed. He has so profoundly demolished reasonable expectations for the presidency that they need to be aggressively and intentionally revisited and rebuilt, stronger than before. The political press could help the nation move forward by engaging in reporting that helps establish model public codes of conduct for each agency and leadership position; lists of norms Biden should publicly commit to restoring; common-sense limits to executive power; expectations about submitting to oversight, and so on. There is a huge legislative post-Trump reform agenda to be covered, as well.

The first order of business, of course, is beginning to turn around the national response to the pandemic. The government’s gears may take a while to shift, but to the degree that a huge part of Trump’s failure has been in messaging, journalists must stop listening to him (so overdue!) and instead turn to the Biden team and require clear, detailed guidance and plans.

The political press corps must demand unprecedented transparency. That’s the ultimate antidote to Trumpist authoritarianism. It starts with clarity over how policy is set, and by whom. Biden, Kamala Harris and their team members need to become a lot more available and more forthcoming about what they think and why they think it.

The switch to transition coverage needs to be quick and aggressive:

Who is advising Biden, and who is he tapping for key posts in the transition and the administration?
How much of a commitment to diversity is he prepared to make?
What will his ethics rules be?
Will he ban corporate executives and corporate lobbyists from top positions, as a group of progressive House members have demanded?
Will he reward his big donors and his bundlers? (He has thus far refused to even identify his bundlers.)
What role will the progressive wing of the party — specifically, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their allies — have in a Biden presidency?

There are also questions that should have been asked during the primaries that are highly relevant again. Here are a few of them:

Is Biden really, firmly, turning his back on his long history as a deficit hawk?
Without buying into the conspiracy theories about his son Hunter, how will Biden protect against conflicts of interest, including those involving his own family members?
How far is he prepared to bend to win Republican support? What policies is he willing to sacrifice in order to put a Republican in his cabinet? At what point does he simply say, Forget it?

There are new questions, rising from recent comments. During Biden’s first debate with Trump, and again during his ABC town hall on Oct. 15, for instance, he distanced himself from his own website’s embrace of the Green New Deal as a “crucial framework” for addressing climate change.

How will conflicts between the things Biden blurts out and his stated positions — including the Biden-Sanders unity task force report — be resolved?

How will journalists report on Biden’s rambling, sometimes incoherent statements? The fact is that sometimes it’s not clear what he’s thinking. News organizations have too often covered up Trump’s vastly greater incoherence; they should be bolder about calling it out whenever a leader isn’t making sense.

Remember: The barrage of critical, questioning coverage of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election was not the result of a journalistic conspiracy against her — far from it. It was the result of an almost universally-shared presumption that she would win.

That coverage was not in the context of whether she was a better candidate than Trump, since that was barely even perceived as a question. It was in the context of how she would govern. Although some stories were terribly overplayed, they were written with the intention of holding the future president accountable.

The danger now is that Biden has been insufficiently held accountable. I suspect that many reporters already feel too comfortable with him because he seems to share their own centrist, non-threatening Washington cocktail-party ideology. They could also let him off the hook by comparing him to Trump, rather than by holding him to reasonable, vastly tougher standards.

It would be really bad for democracy — and, I would hazard, for the Biden administration itself — if he and his top people get used to not facing tough questions and not being held accountable.

That’s ultimately Biden’s promise: A return to an accountable government. When and if he wins, the press needs to step up and play its essential role.

Robert Reich: How to stop Trump from stealing the election

Trump is likely to claim that mail-in ballots, made necessary by the pandemic, are rife with “fraud like you’ve never seen,” as he alleged during his debate with Joe Biden — although it’s been shown that Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

So we should expect him to dispute election results in any Republican-led state he loses by a small margin — such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

The 12th Amendment to the Constitution provides that if state electors deadlock or neither candidate gets a majority of the votes in the Electoral College needed to win the presidency (now 270) — because, for example, Trump contests votes in several key states — the decision about who’ll be president goes to the House, where each of the nation’s 50 states gets one vote.

That means less-populous Republican-dominated states like Alaska (with one House member, who’s a Republican) would have the same clout as large Democratic states like California (with 53 House members, 45 of whom are Democrats).

So if the decision goes to the House, Trump has the advantage right now: 26 of state congressional delegations in the House are now controlled by Republicans, and 22 by Democrats (two — Pennsylvania and Michigan — are essentially tied).

But he won’t necessarily keep that advantage after the election. If the decision goes to the House, it would be made by lawmakers elected in November, who will be sworn in on January 3 — three days before they’ll convene to decide the winner of the election.

Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is focusing on races that could tip the balance of state delegations — not just in Pennsylvania and Michigan but any others within reach. “It’s sad we have to plan this way,” she wrote recently, “but it’s what we must do to ensure the election is not stolen.”

The targets are Alaska (where replacing the one House member, now a Republican, with a Democrat, would result in a vote for Biden), Montana (ditto), Pennsylvania (now tied, so flipping one would be enough), Florida (now 14 Republicans and 13 Democrats, but 3 Republicans are retiring) and Michigan (where Republicans now have 6 members and Democrats 7).

Congress has decided contested elections only three times in U.S. history, in 1801, 1825, and 1877. But we might face another because Donald Trump will stop at nothing to retain his power.

That’s why it’s even more critical for you to vote. Make this a blowout victory for Joe Biden and Democrats down the ballot, and stop Trump from stealing this election.

Why nurses say “Trump must go”

From her position as a nurse at Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Medical Center, Eunice Balencio sees the damage. The abject lack of political leadership on COVID-19 has led to untold misery. She and her colleagues have at times struggled to obtain basic gear such as personal protective equipment (PPE). And active misinformation, much of it from the president himself, has led people into wrongheaded decisions that affect their lives, often drastically for the worse.

“We take care of these patients 24/7,” Balencio said. “The saddest part is when you watch a patient die alone because of COVID. My message is to take this seriously and not downplay it – which has been in contrast to the very words and actions of the president.”

Donald Trump’s inability to reckon with the truth of the coronavirus is readily apparent by the numbers. With 8.2 million current COVID cases and more than 221,000 deaths, the U.S. is a global leader in the sorts of statistics no one wants to be associated with, and Trump’s insistence on minimizing the true risk while promoting quack medicine has only exacerbated the problem.

In any year, such a failure to lead would be catastrophic. In 2020 America, it has also mobilized the nation’s nurses to push back with their voices and their votes.

In July, the National Nurses United, which represents more than 155,000 members nationwide, emphatically endorsed Trump’s rival for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden. The NNU’s statement read, in part, “For nurses, who have been struggling every day for months on the front lines of the worst pandemic of our lifetime, hampered by President Trump’s abandonment of public health and safety, the stakes in November could not be sharper.”

An opinion piece in Newsweek signed by more than 700 nurses made similar points, saying Trump has “grossly mismanaged the nation’s response” to the COVID-19 outbreak and calling the loss of life and proliferation of long-term care issues “stunning and unacceptable.” The nurses said they were writing as individuals and not part of a campaign, but their message was unified and unambiguous: Trump “lied and continues to lie about the seriousness of the pandemic.” The nurses said they would be voting for Biden.

* * *

As part of Capital & Main’s ongoing coverage of this health crisis, we’ve been interviewing nurses steadily since February. The unanimity of their frustration and concern, both for patients and the health professionals trying to care for them, has been the constant through these months, but a rising tide of animus toward Trump has also been clearly visible.

“He should lead by example, and that means following the proper precautions,” said Balencio, a member of the California Nurses Association. (Disclosure: The union, part of NNU, is a financial supporter of this website.) “Wear a mask. Follow the social distancing. But we don’t see him doing this. It is really undermining the sacrifices of the health care workers, of the essential workers, and the many lives lost to COVID.”

For Balencio and other nurses, simply lining up adequate PPE was – and remains – a significant challenge, the kind of thing they never thought they’d have to deal with and the product of Trump’s refusal to coalesce a national strategy for procuring equipment. And at hospitals and clinics across the country, nurses and physicians alike have seen patients who are unwilling to acknowledge the disease in their midst.

In Springfield, Mo., a nurse wrote an open letter imploring citizens to take the virus seriously, adding that she and her colleagues had been cursed by patients who did not practice social distancing “because they didn’t believe the virus was real,” and taken calls from angry family members who were sure a relative’s positive test result was somehow false. A doctor in Green Bay, Wisconsin, told the Associated Press that a few patients with COVID symptoms refused to be tested “because they don’t want to become a statistic, or some rhetoric like that.”

Trump embraced the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus; the drug’s emergency authorization later was revoked by the FDA after “serious adverse cardiac events” and other side effects rendered it far too risky. Trump denied – and continues to deny – the efficacy of masks in preventing spread of the disease, despite broad agreement among experts that masks are a critical element of the fight against COVID. After refusing for months to mask up or socially distance from others, Trump was diagnosed with the virus, only to receive an experimental drug cocktail not even approved for public consumption and proclaim it a “cure” for the disease.

In short, Trump’s approach to the science of COVID-19 is a train wreck – but with a nation on board. Doctors, nurses and their organizations know it. The 23,000-member Massachusetts Nurses Association endorsed Biden. In traditionally red-state Texas, anti-Trump sentiment fostered the creation of the grassroots organization Texas Nurses For Biden. And in Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, doctors and nurses in Boca Raton rallied last weekend to raise awareness of early voting. The group’s name: Doctors for Biden.

Nurses in the U.S. are a disparate group, and any attempt to broadly label them – either politically or socially – is doomed to fail. But in 2020, it appears they’ve arrived at one point they can agree on: Donald Trump has made a horrific situation even worse, a running litany of failure that now includes his pointless trashing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the single most trusted source of information about the disease in this country.

Eunice Balencio, who aside from normal days off has not taken a break from her nursing duties in San Francisco since the pandemic hit the U.S., feels that much all the way down. “I believe in science,” said Balencio, “and it’s really alarming and heartbreaking for me to think that the highest levels of political leadership are not listening to the experts.”

Lara Trump: No, that’s not funny at all

On a CNN Sunday politics show, Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of Donald Trump and a campaign official, defended the president’s attacks on Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Lara Trump said the president was just “having fun.”

Fun?

Trump’s rally chanted, “Lock her up” with Whitmer now the target, despite the fact that she was the subject of a plot broken up by the FBI to kidnap and possibly kill her.

Host Jake Tapper asked whether Trump should be watching his tone, but mine was why is this “fun”? It seems to be a reflection of a leader who is cruel and so self-concerned that he can’t notice that he is inflicting harm on others.

That, of course, is the only logical explanation for why Trump can so easily turn his back on mask-wearing and physical distancing to forestall coronavirus contagion, and why he can’t see the impact of his own policies on immigration, environment, climate and economic inequality on actual Americans.

Once again, it is Trump First, not America First.

How is it “fun” to have armed domestic terrorists plotting clandestinely to kill governors?

How is it “fun” to mock women’s looks or a reporter’s physical disability or ethnicity?

How is it “fun” to call for unexplained and unspecified criminal charges against Joe and Hunter Biden over whether the son took advantage of dad’s position — as if that exact situation did not also describe the Trumps?

I’m less concerned with Lara Trump’s remarks than the sentiment clear at the rallies themselves — that someone else must pay for my discomfort — and that anything other than adoration for a regal Trump is criminal behavior.

Test Ahead

Americans are going to be tested sorely in coming weeks over election counts and the distinct move to the Right by our Supreme Court as the result of a hurried and unfair judicial nomination. Democratic principles are at stake, but so will be practical details of health care amid pandemic, jobs and whether we have any trust in government.

Trump says he is promoting hope, but he depends on the darkest tools at hand — outward racism and division and spread of disease rather than containment — in his zeal. Actual individuals don’t seem to count, unless their stories advance his real or made-up views about what he thinks Americans want.

Joe Biden’s lead in the polls clearly has been shown to be more a reflection of the possibility of removing Trump than it is in enthusiasm for him personally or perhaps even for the programs he supports. Though his insistence on realism reflects a harder path ahead, his campaign is much more hopeful than Trump’s.

Plus, Trump is no one to be talking about locking people up, since, if he loses, he looks to be facing a number of actual criminal charges.

An American Myth?

If personal attack is “fun,” maybe we just see different Americas.

Writer Robin Wright, in The New Yorker, asked last month whether America is a Myth, that our unraveling present actually reflects a history of division and tribes almost from the beginning. She argues that there never was a reason to believe that the different strains of what America is about ever really has come together.

“The foundation of our nation has deepening cracks — possibly too many to repair anytime soon, or perhaps, at all. The ideas and imagery of America face existential challenges — some with reason, some without — that no longer come only from the fringes. Rage consumes many in America. And it may only get worse after the election, and for the next four years, no matter who wins,” she says.

“Three hundred and thirty million people may identify as Americans, but they define what that means — and what rights and responsibilities are involved — in vastly different ways.”

It’s a sad commentary, but even division is no excuse for cruelty.

McConnell admits he’s been working to sabotage COVID relief talks to speed up Barrett confirmation

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his Republican colleagues Tuesday that he has privately been urging the Trump White House not to strike a coronavirus relief deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the November 3 election, warning that an agreement could interfere with his chamber’s plan to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court early next week.

McConnell’s remarks, first reported by the Washington Post, came during a closed-door Senate GOP lunch just ahead of a Tuesday evening deadline for a relief deal set by Pelosi and agreed to by the Trump administration. While the deadline came and went without a deal, the House Speaker told Democratic lawmakers late Tuesday that the two sides “have been making some progress” and continued to voice optimism that “we can reach an agreement before the election.”

But with the election less than two weeks away, the window to hash out the details of the legislative package — which currently includes a desperately needed boost in unemployment benefits, another round of stimulus checks, and aid to state and local governments — and push it through both chambers of Congress is shrinking rapidly. Pelosi acknowledged that reality on Tuesday, telling reporters that legislation would have to be written by the end of this week for it to have any chance of reaching President Donald Trump’s desk before Election Day.

Even if the White House and Pelosi come to an agreement, it remains unclear whether enough GOP senators would be willing to vote for a big spending package, despite the catastrophic economic consequences of blocking additional relief. Assuming a united Democratic caucus, any legislation would need at least 13 Republican votes to clear the Senate.

While McConnell’s stated excuse for standing in the way of relief is his commitment to confirming Barrett as quickly as possible, that justification may be intended to obscure the fact that many Senate Republicans are simply opposed to additional coronavirus aid, whether or not the package would disrupt the right-wing judge’s path to the Supreme Court. Others have warned in recent days that in preparation for a potential Trump loss next month, McConnell is laying the groundwork to force crippling austerity under a Biden administration.

“Let’s be very clear about this: Mitch McConnell and Republicans are continuing to block essential relief to Americans across our country,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If Trump wants to ‘go big or go home,’ he better see if he can control his own party.”

Mitch McConnell is rushing to steal a Supreme Court seat before the election. Senate Republicans would rather help him do it than help millions of Americans.

We will #votethemallout this year. Go to https://t.co/pDaqN0is7w to volunteer. https://t.co/9jAVKQqLvP

— Swing Left (@swingleft) October 20, 2020

The wrangling on Capitol Hill comes amid a backdrop of deepening misery for tens of millions of Americans as the coronavirus continues to spread and the economic collapse brought on by the pandemic—as well as lawmakers’ refusal to take sufficient action in response—shows no sign of letting up, with layoffs at their highest level since August and hunger still on the rise.

According to data from the Census Bureau, 22 million U.S. adults reported that their household struggled to afford enough food last month.

“Whatever savings low-income people managed to build up with CARES Act relief will be gone well before any other help arrives, and another pandemic surge deeply complicates matters,” David Dayen of The American Prospect warned Tuesday. “Many of the few still-extant relief supports expire at the end of the year… It’s disgusting to now have a man-made depression on top of the pandemic-made one.”

With a comprehensive relief package in doubt in large part due to his own obstruction, McConnell on Tuesday held a procedural vote on a plan to extend an additional $260 billion to the Paycheck Protection Program.

Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says his COVID relief bill does not include another round of stimulus checks for Americans. pic.twitter.com/Bt4YHdCuOn

— The Recount (@therecount) October 20, 2020

Dismissing the vote as a political stunt, most Senate Democrats voted to block the legislation.

“The bill that Mitch McConnell put on the floor today leaves behind our struggling families, small businesses, minority-owned businesses, restaurants, doctors and nurses, and public health experts,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted late Tuesday. “That’s why Senate Democrats voted no.”

Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement that “the American people need help and need it now.”

“Only voting to extend a program that failed the very people it was intended to help without fixing any of the flaws that allowed it to fail is completely nonsensical,” Herrig added.

How Europe and America blew it on the pandemic: A tale of blindness and arrogance

It is said that times of crisis reveal who we really are. If this adage works for civilizations as it does for individuals, Europe and America have reasons to worry.

The illusion of getting the new coronavirus under control was short-lived, barely surviving summer. Europe is seeing infections rising to spring levels; mortality remains lower but health care systems in parts of Spain and France are on red alert again. Meanwhile, the United States has successfully curbed several major outbreaks, most notably in New York, but remains the worst affected country in the world. The light at the end of the tunnel is rather faint.

There have been attempts to identify ritual scapegoats, most often the World Health Organization. Indeed, WHO made its share of missteps, from an initially hesitant stance toward face masks to cheerleading for the Chinese dictatorship. Still, it was WHO that declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30 and urged countries to set up strong measures ensuring early detection of the virus.

The West listened — and did next to nothing. That was the time to prepare tests, stockpile protective equipment, review the capacities of public health care. Donald Trump’s lackadaisical stance towards the infection is well known and hardly surprising, but few Western leaders did much better in the beginning. Despite WHO’s clear warning, governments across Europe were caught completely unprepared a month later. Why this time was wasted remains a mystery and it’s difficult to understand how politicians who are usually scrutinized for every detail were able to get away with such a level of negligence.

Even more surprisingly, experts didn’t fare much better. Their voices were muted and, if not careless, then certainly inclined to marginalize the risk. Germany’s revered Robert Koch Institute labeled COVID-19’s risk to the country “small to medium” as late as Feb. 28, when community transmissions were already soaring in nearby Italy. In my native Czech Republic, doctors and scientists raced to dismiss the virus as “media-fueled hysteria.” Britain’s top medical advisers came up with an outlandish plan for herd immunity, which was abandoned only after researchers at Imperial College London calculated that it could cost the lives of a quarter million people in the U.K. alone. We could continue this list ad nauseam.

But the worst was still to come. After draconian restrictions brought the infection under control in many countries by the end of spring, governments had the chance to look around, see what was working and determine a reasonable way forward. Inspiration was easy to come by — if only we had cared to look.

While Western countries reported thousands of victims each day, East Asia handled the pandemic remarkably well. Despite their proximity and business ties to the original epicenter of COVID-19 in China, and despite several strong but localized outbreaks, impact across the region was nowhere near the level of Europe and the U.S.

South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have 80 million inhabitants combined, roughly one-fourth of U.S. population and larger than the populations of Britain or France. As of Oct. 1, the total number of fatalities in those three nations together stands at 449. That’s less than Florida’s Polk County or the English city of Leeds, with populations of less than 800,000 each.

To make things even more interesting, the Asian trio achieved that result without total lockdowns. OECD expects the South Korean economy to contract by 1% in 2020, while Taiwan’s GDP is predicted to grow slightly. Even Singapore’s 6% decline, which would be catastrophic in normal circumstances, is better than the European Union’s forecast 8% downturn — and that was before the second wave of the pandemic hit Europe.

So what was the East Asian recipe for success?

Face masks are a must indoors, with huge fines for offenders.
Sophisticated contact tracing systems were in place.
Testing was intensive and easily accessible.
Social distancing measures limited the numbers of participants at public events.
Temperature checks were in place at entry points to most indoor spaces.
Strict quarantines were enforced on travelers from risk countries, subject to geo tracking and daily checks from officials.
Production of protective equipment was ramped up, and citizens were informed where to get it.

First and foremost, safety measures were deployed before the pandemic hit hard — and ordinary people respected them.

Fact vs. fiction

East Asia’s experience refutes two myths at once. COVID-19 is not an inevitable biblical plague, destined to kill millions no matter what. There also is no necessary trade-off between public health and economy, as far too many politicians and economists have claimed. Governments can save lives and jobs at the same time.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Taiwan, et al., became the blueprint for Western governments to follow. You couldn’t be more wrong. As the first wave of infections in Europe waned, so did precautions. Borders opened wide in a desperate attempt to save the summer season. Media treated us to images of crowded beaches and people sharing hugs over a drink. Both Europe and United States — where the first wave never really ended — wasted a golden opportunity to take a lesson from the Asian approach. Mask rules were introduced too late, if at all. Temperature checks are rare and haphazard, testing capacities remain insufficient in many regions, and quarantines are poorly controlled.

It would be tempting to place the blame solely on politicians, and without question the way they failed in their duty should get more scrutiny. As time goes by, however, it becomes more and more apparent that elected representatives are but a reflection of the electorate.

While Asians wear masks as a protective standard, big chunks of American and European societies struggle mightily with this idea. Refusal to wear face coverings became a badge of honor among libertarians and the right: What’s life without the “freedom” to infect thy neighbor? Esoteric hipsters find masks insufficiently natural, while social media users share hoaxes about children in masks choking on CO2. People without a trace of medical education spread copy-pasted wisdom about the supposed ineffectiveness of protective equipment. British students complain to the media that restrictions on bars and pubs are damaging for their university experience. Celebrities refuse to respect public health laws … and on and on.

We may think of ourselves as the children of Enlightenment and the scientific method, yet our reactions to the first big crisis in 75 years made us look like mere children, full stop.

The virus-busting success of East Asian countries is no secret. Anyone can learn about their situation through open information sources. What remains a mystery is why, instead of taking a page from Asia’s book, even sensible people in Western societies are periodically reviving dangerous nonsense about the “Swedish way” and “herd immunity,” a pair of myths that finally need to be put to sleep and wiped from the face of the Earth.

Sweden — unlike neighboring Norway, Finland and Denmark — rejected a tough lockdown in the spring, in favor of softer and mostly voluntary measures. This approach resulted in nearly 6,000 deaths so far, the fifth wrst per capita in Europe. Denmark’s death toll, adjusted for population size, is five times lower, and death rates in Norway and Finland are more like 10 times lower. Translated into the real world, more than 5,000 Swedes would still be alive, in all probability, had they lived across the border in a nearby nation.

Do I hear you saying, Well, at least the Swedish approach saved their economy? Not at all. Sweden’s GDP fell by 8.6% in Q2, a notably worse result than Denmark’s at 7.4%, Norway’s at 7.1% and Finland’s at 3.2%. Current infection rates are also worse in Sweden than elsewhere in the region. All in all, there isn’t a single reason why Sweden, a nation that let an astonishing number of its citizens die needlessly without achieving anything in exchange, should serve as an example.

Still, even respected media in the English-speaking world, such as the Guardian and the Washington Post, keep comparing Sweden with the worst-affected countries, such as Britain, and triumphantly exclaiming that “in Sweden there has not been the same sharp increase in cases” (Guardian) or alleging that the “success or failure of [Swedish] policy is still being debated” (Post). Five thousand Swedes would beg to differ, if they could. They cannot, because they’re dead.

This indifference towards human life, which has been spreading through public space during the pandemic, is most apparent in the “herd immunity” theory. According to its prophets — which appear to include Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who serves as President Trump’s virus-whisperer, COVID is unavoidable, so the best option we have is to get enough people infected and create antibodies, until the evil germ runs out of victims.

Herd immunity requires no less than 60% of population to contract the virus. Looking at stats from countries with the most diligent testing programs (Iceland, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Malta), COVID-19’s real fatality rate is likely around 0.5%, with higher values in some countries being the result of many undetected infections, especially during the first wave. Even that relatively low rate would mean 200,000 deaths in Britain, a quarter of a million in Germany, and close to 1 million in the United States, should these countries opt for herd immunity without a vaccine.

Funny how times change. It seems like yesterday when every single life lost to Islamist terrorism in the West was a sufficient excuse for denying help to millions of refugees and labelling an entire religion with roughly a billion adherents as an existential threat to our civilization. It’s often the same people who consider hundreds of thousands of extra deaths to be an acceptable price for “getting our lives back.”

An exorbitant human toll isn’t the only reason why the concept of herd immunity is irrelevant. First and foremost, we have no idea whether herd immunity can be achieved at all. Just look at the common flu virus, which mutates all the time and requires re-vaccination every year. Herd immunity usually lasts only a few months, if it develops at all — and that’s with widely available vaccines. Research suggests that the new coronavirus is no stranger to change either, which could easily mean that the only lasting effect of any pre-vaccine attempt at herd immunity would be a gargantuan pile of dead bodies.

Another big problem is that we have extremely limited insight into the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 infection. We almost certainly have to stop thinking about this disease in binary form. It’s not only about deaths versus recoveries. Several recent studies warn that lasting effects of the disease are far from rare. Survivors with permanent health damage are no small issues for a plethora of reasons, from quality of life to economic impact.

Until we know more about antibodies and long-term effects, any attempt to allow the spread of this virus for the sake of herd immunity should be considered a crime against humanity, a totally irresponsible gamble using people instead of chips — a Nazi-doctor-style experiment that could destroy millions of lives and achieve nothing.

Better late than early

More than anything, COVID-19 is a game of time. Vaccines may not be the silver bullet we’re hoping for. We may well have to learn to live with this disease. Perhaps most of us will eventually catch it. If that’s the case, every month counts.

Viruses tend to get weaker over time, which helps them spread better. More experience gives medical staff the knowledge to identify the most efficient care. Each month can bring improved treatment and more prepared hospitals. Proper preventive measures limit the quantity of virus spreading around, which can lead to milder infection. Judging by the lower mortality rates of the second wave, several if not all of these factors are already having an impact. You are more likely to survive COVID-19 today than you were in April; odds are that your chances next year will be even better. Therefore, playing for time isn’t delaying the inevitable — it represents an essential part of damage mitigation.

The Asian approach fits this goal like a glove. It’s not perfect: Singapore mishandled COVID spread among foreign workers, and South Korea struggled to contain outbreaks associated with a religious group. But imperfect is nonetheless the best we currently have.

The only reason for our refusal to accept this is cultural arrogance. It’s not just Donald Trump who sees America as the greatest country in the world. And it’s not only nationalists who feel that Europe, as the supposed cradle of democracy, is superior to every other part of the world. It’s a dangerous — and in current circumstances, even lethal — delusion.

The supposed dilemma between economy and health is a false construct. The East has shown how to protect both; the West looked for its own way, which has largely failed on both counts. There is still time to do things right, but it’s running out. While Western governments are now moving closer to East Asia’s policies, the public, increasingly distrustful of their elected representatives, is largely drifting in the opposite direction. Changing this mindset is the greatest challenge that American and European leaders are facing today.

Psychologist Kevin Washington: Trump is waging “psychic terrorism” against Black Americans

A prominent Black psychologist is accusing President Trump of waging “psychic terrorism” against Black Americans, and warns that the “psychological trauma” experienced by people of African descent won’t simply go away if Trump loses the election.

Dr. Kevin Washington, the former president of the Association of Black Psychologists and the head of the sociology and psychology department at Grambling State University, studies the cultural and historical trauma of people impacted by the legacy of slavery in America. In a recent interviw, he told Salon that the president’s rhetoric has effectively given “permission” to act out on “white supremacist” ideology, but was not the primary cause of rising racial tensions across the country.

Washington led a statement from the Association of Black Psychologists accusing Trump of a “psychological assault” on people of color and was among the dozens of mental health professionals who spoke out about Trump’s mental health in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” edited by Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee. Washington said he sought to emphasize in his writing that “it is not Trump but it is a rhetoric of a country that’s tied to ideology that is predicated on the oppression and denigration of people of African descent and all those that are deemed not to be European.”

Washington spoke to Salon about Trump’s racist rhetoric and how it fits into America’s tragic racial history.

You expressed numerous concerns about Trump before he took office. How have you seen that play out over these four years?

I would emphasize that it was not a concern before he took office. The issue is that the ideology that he represents is the ideology of the country.

I think that too often we reduce the conversation to a personality that recognizes that this ideology tends to perpetuate. It’s the ideology that treated the condition under which we have the enslavement of African people in this country, the idea of superiority of one group over another, the perpetual mistreatment of that population through Jim Crow laws following the abolition of slavery in this country, to Black Codes, to redlining and to the current, modern-day lynchings that we see of African men and women in the streets. It’s the same ideology, so I’m not then suggesting that it was a concern before Trump took office. I’m saying that it was an issue and a major source of my discourse about the psychology of people and that his voice simply resonated with the ideology and thus created a condition that people began to act out on their ideology. He didn’t create it. It was already there.

Do you believe that has evolved under Trump? You mentioned that people are acting out because he emboldened them with his rhetoric.

I believe that the ideology that he articulates and the permission that he gives them to act out that ideology has been exacerbated. However, it must be recognized that it is the case because it comes on the heels of an African American man in the seat of the president of the United States of America. It was all because of that particular position that “Make America great again” has power and agency ,because it suggests that the presence of a Black man in the position of presidency was a plummeting of the greatness of America and that there must be a return to the greatness. Greatness is something that is articulated within the ideology of this country. He simply spoke to the ideology that individuals are already having. Your word was “emboldened.” Did he embolden? He simply gave agency or freedom to act out on that ideology.

The statement put out by the Association of Black Psychologists listed several examples of his rhetoric about people of color and described it as “psychic terrorism.” Can you tell me what you mean by that?

His discourse was clear and has never changed. Unrelenting. The idea of suggesting that a population are animals, are beasts, are less than human. To call Black women “bitches” in the form of telling “those sons of bitches to go out and play football” is by default calling the Black woman a bitch, a woman of low intelligence. This has been a constant rhetoric. He did this while in office, but it was the same rhetoric that was happening before he took office, which is another form of psychic trauma because it begins to resonate with the population that sees the essential nature of people of African descent. It sees people of African descent as being animals.

We talk about the Willie Horton conversations that were propagated about being rapists. If you allow them to go free, they will rape. What happens when you allow Black men to go free? They will rape and ravage white women.

My point is that the same ideology has unleashed the freedom to act out on that particular rhetoric, so that is a level of psychic trauma. “Make America great again” is psychic trauma because when we look at the past of America for people of African descent, the question begs to be asked and answered: Where is the greatness, then, for people that were beaten, sodomized, dehumanized, brutalized and never seen as human?

How do you see Trump’s presidency in the context of hundreds of years of psychic trauma?

The presidency, again, gave the agency to act out the ideology. When you hear people saying they can’t find a qualified Black person to fill a position, that’s psychic trauma, because Black individuals have been trained in Eurocentric institutions and then go through the various permutations that one would go through to attain status — education, training, other things — and are still told they are not qualified. That language is traumatizing because it simply says “I’m not good enough,” right? When you have this conversation coming from the presidency, it gives people, again, the license to not be covert but to be overt in their actions.

To have a symbolic image of a Black man in the highest position in the land, when the rhetoric has articulated that a population is inferior and can never hold that position, becomes problematic psychologically. Thus, he’s a welcome change or relief for those who had to question their whiteness when Barack Obama was in office. Now they can go back and clearly go into this space of white supremacy and then act out on that space, that ideology.

If you look clearly at the foundation of this, the treatment that Barack Obama had in office, his wife being called the welfare queen, that they were draining money for them to take trips. He was called a liar. He was even disallowed from appointing a Supreme Court justice because he was coming to the end of his term, and that was nine months out, whereas Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing so with him having less than three months left in office.

These things are elements of psychic trauma that people of African descent have to contend with and are recalling again, so it’s giving them license to act out that ideology. The same thing that disallowed Obama from appointing a Supreme Court justice was white supremacy ideology, and that thinking allows Donald Trump to appoint someone less than three months out from the end of his term.

Aside from his rhetoric, he’s obviously denigrated the Black Lives Matter protest movement, but he’s also deployed federal forces to tear gas peaceful protesters and crack down on protests in several cities. What was your reaction to that?

I spent some time among the protesters in Washington, D.C., and the vast majority of the protesters were non-Black people. There were pockets of Black people, but the issue was about, again, challenging rhetoric and ideology. You had a large number of non-Blacks engage in the process of protesting because they had to deal with the reality that they see. These people were not Black and brown, but they were attacked.

Sure, but it definitely seems that when Trump announces he is deploying federal officers it is aimed at Black Lives Matter.

You’re correct. I want to capture this bit, too. This is only because I was in the fray. If I wasn’t down there, I couldn’t have this conversation. I know what I experienced in the moment. I think I went down after it happened in front of the White House. It is an attack on the idea of Black lives mattering.

It’s not an issue of power or quality. It’s the saying “matter,” right? You can’t get any lower than that. Just “matter.” Not even to go to your school, not even to spend economic wealth, just simply to “matter.” Those three words, Black Lives Matter, are enough for you to see it as a term of war, right? It’s the truth. When you’re fighting for something, it is a war, and you declare war on ideology that’s apathetic to your ideology because your ideology says that Black lives do not matter, except for economic gain.

Yes, Trump’s rhetoric unleashed the troops on individuals, had the highest-ranking Pentagon officers walking with them across the street. They’ll stand in front of the church and hold the Bible upside down. Again, same rhetoric, same battle, same process.

What is your response, then, to conservatives who respond to the words “Black Lives Matter” by saying, “All lives matter”?

The statement “All lives matter” or the statements “We can breathe” or “Blue lives matter,” all of those are concepts or ideas to discredit the experiences of people of African descent. It is to demoralize the population; it is, as you asked already, another form of psychic trauma because it begins to suggest that somehow there is a lack of relevance of a population. It’s akin to me as a man telling a woman that menstrual cramps don’t really hurt them much. I can’t have that conversation because I’ve never had menstrual cramps. The idea is that to say “all lives matter” is to suggest to a population to stop whining, stop crying and know that everybody matters.

There’s no discussion that only Black lives matter. The discussion was that there needs to be an indication of the relevance of a population, that it matters and we would have equal representation under the law. If we mattered, we would not be killed in the streets. If we had some value and worth, we would not suffer the health concerns that we encounter.

If there was a mattering, then these things would not occur. Again, it’s a cumulative impact or aspect that is being felt here, and, again, the Trumpian rhetoric has simply given the freedom to act out on that ideology.

On a related note, a lot of people have been horrified by Trump’s coronavirus response, the number of people dying. The people disproportionately affected by it have been Black people and people of color. Now the Trump administration is pushing a “herd immunity” strategy that experts say will result in rampant needless death. How do you see that as a Black American?

You got on a really good point when you mentioned “All lives matter.” The same thing about the racism in the language of a “China disease,” right? We have a history where those things that ravage a community don’t come from the States typically.

Your statement was about the disproportionate impact on a population that has already been impacted by the dynamics of racism, oppression and human denigration. That which makes the immune system weaker is tied to poverty and discrimination, tied to not receiving adequate health care. There are studies that indicate where cardiologists, for example – this is a study that I highlight quite often – who share the symptoms from a Black actor and a white actor, assign heart attack symptoms to the white actor and heartburn to the Black actor. They used the same identical script. We have this lack of proper treatment, not having the financial resources to receive certain medical treatments and so on. As a result, the immune system is already taxed. To suggest that coronavirus is impacting the population without understanding the condition of the population is tied to racism and oppression.

Then, I want to add in, what does it take to cope with, to live under the umbrella of, basically, oppression? Racism is a major killer because it’s a psychological destroyer. It can contribute to hypertension, when you talk about living under high-stress racism or conditions. Hypertension can cause heart disease, which can cause a heart attack. It can lead to obesity. That then goes into the coronavirus simply being a virus that’s opportunistic.

When it was a question about how it was spreading, there was a shutdown all over the country. However, when it was discerned that it disproportionately impacted the Black and brown population, the moniker became “Get back to work.” Which begs again, was this a deliberate or an indirect act of genocide against the population? If you know that it has impacted a population disproportionately, now it’s time to say, “Get back to work.” There’s an agenda: We talk about the rhetoric of a population being disposed. We don’t need them.

That psychic trauma is not going to go away when Trump leaves office. How do you think we can address that psychological trauma?

It is a tough reality. It’s not like it’s a very easy, broad-brush, one-wave-of-the-magic-wand answer that’s going to resolve this, and I don’t have all the answers. What I do have is a 79-year-old mother who is looking at all this, saying that she put her children in certain positions and places to have a better life, to be beyond something. That something has never taken place, so she was looking at this in despair and going, “What did I do it all for? I thought I was doing the right thing by putting y’all in these educational settings, by doing these things.” We have not gotten any further than we were back when there were riots in the streets. This is my 79-year-old mother grappling with the existential phenomenon of over 50 years of seeing the same thing, and her only response now is, “We have to get him out of office.”

For her, it would be, “Get him out of office so that the rhetoric can stop and the relief can start.” Listening to children, listening to young adults, think about what they encounter. They saw something that I never saw. They saw a Black man in the position of president. As a matter of fact, my youngest daughter was in the second or third grade when he became president. One day, I picked her up after school, and she came to the car upset because she had just gotten into a heated discussion with a white female and a Hispanic female about Barack Obama-not really being an American and some other things about him. These were elementary age children, second- and third-graders, having this discussion that came to them from their parents because they could not have had this information on their own. There is some knowledge that is passed on that continuously exists. They have the same indoctrination of white supremacy.

So, do I believe that Donald Trump contributed to the psychological duress of Black people in this country through his rhetoric? I do. How so? It articulates through statements like “Make America great again,” and this is psychic trauma because Black people understand that this country has a history of misleading and mistreating people of African descent, among others.

Will the situation be relieved once he’s removed from office? My response is, it’s doubtful that it will be relieved because the dynamics of racism and oppression are woven into the fabric of this country, and it will take time to undo the tapestry that has been created by such ideologies. Am I hopeful? I’m optimistic that things can be better. I would trust that as we see individuals out in the street, a variety of races, ethnicities and colors, in this process of understanding that Black Lives Matter, among other things, that there will be a shift.

My question is that, if you were standing as a person that is not Black for Black Lives Matter, what is it about Black life that matters to you? That’s a critical question, because my mattering means that the curriculum needs to shift. My matter means that the health care system needs to change. My matter means the legal system has to be adjusted so that I can have the inalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My mattering means that my voting practice is not frustrated by gerrymandering and long lines. Not just simply, “Don’t kill me,” but my mattering means that when I exist in this country, I’m not existing through surviving, through not being attacked and killed one more day. That’s not living in this country. When I counsel Black women who are concerned about their son coming home safely every single day, that’s not living. That’s surviving like a cockroach, that’s surviving like a mouse in a house, trying not to be caught. That’s not thriving.

These things are critical to the conversation. I would have been done with the conversation, but my passion dictates that there’s more that has to be said. My desire, my hope and my prayer is that as you do this work that is challenging, that is difficult, that is painful, that you’re able to capture the dimensions of the truth of a population, and that through that truth, we will have some level of freedom, and in that freedom, soon, we’ll have peace. We’ll have power. We’ll have prosperity.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

HBO’s “537 Votes” uses the Florida recount to explain American politics’ descent into bloodsport

It’s basically impossible to watch HBO’s “537 Votes” without thinking about Nov. 3. The thrust of the documentary, which traces the complexities of the 2000 Florida recount, is found in the chaos and the uncertainty surrounding the election results. This year feels ripe for a repeat as questions about early and mail-in voting abound amid postal service lags, and as President Trump has yet to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.

As such, it makes sense to view the Billy Corben-directed documentary as both a prelude to this year’s election and as a greater warning about political strategy in unprecedented times. As Rick Sanchez, a Cuban-American Miami TV anchor puts it in the film, “While Democrats are sitting around trying to figure out how to do the right thing, Republicans are figuring out how to win.”

“537 Votes” opens nearly a year prior to the fateful election, when 5-year-old Elian González was found clinging to an inner tube about three miles off the Florida coast. His mother, Elizabeth Brotons Rodríguez, had drowned while attempting to leave Cuba with Elian and her boyfriend. Rodríguez had family in Miami’s Little Havana, while Elian’s biological father was still in Cuba.

As the families began to tussle over the boy’s custody and future, the nation — but especially Florida — was swept up in the dispute as well. As the documentary lays out, the popularity of Alex Penelas, the Cuban-American executive mayor of Miami-Dade County, surged in the meantime.

He was young, handsome, charismatic and unwavering (at least initially) about his stance on keeping Elian in the States. “We will not lend resources, [including] police officers, to assist the federal government in any way, shape or form,” Penelas said at the time.

While eventual Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore broke ranks with the Clinton administration, saying that he felt the case could have been handled in family court, the Clinton Administration’s Justice Department ultimately approved a raid to take custody of Elian.

It was a decision that ultimately alienated Cuban-American voters from the Democratic party, while also ensuring that Gore was isolated from much of Bill Clinton’s presidential administration.

Most voters who remember the 2000 election will likely remember this event as background noise that was eventually overshadowed by the talk of uncounted votes and hanging chads, but what Corben manages to do in this documentary is neatly explain how the Elian case ultimately served as a catalyst for the recount (and essentially the end of Penelas’ career), while also laying the groundwork for the Republican near-bloodsport political play that is so well-known today.

While Democrats focused on decency and democracy, Corben asserts, Republicans focused on conquest. “Politics is about winning,” Roger Stone, who is one of the main voices for the Republican side in the documentary, says matter-of-factly to the camera.

The controversy over the handling of Elian’s future takes up just over the first half of the documentary, and it’s telling is pretty stylish. Much like HBO’s “McMillions,” “537 Votes” elevates what could have been a bone-dry political retelling with that era’s cultural markers: “Everybody Dance Now” by C+C Music Factory, clips of “Saturday Night Live,” excerpts of “South Park,” montages of local newscasters detailing the events of the day and the immediate communities’ responses.

In contrast, the second half of the documentary can feel a little anemic at times. It’s the part of the story with which everyone is more familiar, but lacks sit-downs with the key figures who propelled the recount or were involved in the election. It makes sense that Gore and George W. Bush wouldn’t speak for a documentary of this scope, but the local experts who were integral to shaping Elian’s narrative for new audiences just don’t have quite the heft needed to further illuminate the recount and the surrounding drama which has already been well-trodden through the 2008 HBO film “Recount.”

But Corben ultimately sticks the landing by encapsulating how politics has descended from a place where political rivals were viewed as opponents, rather than enemies — a message that intensely resonates in preparation for the upcoming election as the country feels almost irreparably divided. While imperfect, “537 Votes” succeeds in making the tumult and social upheaval of 2000 feel fresh again, while also delivering additional nuance to the story that may have been lost over the last two decades.

“537 Votes” premieres on Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 9 p.m. on HBO.

AOC just delivered a live-stream of her playing a video game. Here’s why this is a big deal

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., live-streamed herself on Twitch playing the video game “Among Us” Tuesday night, she did more than simply blow off some steam while encouraging people to vote. She also demonstrated that video games and politics intersect in important ways — and that those intersections are likely to only grow stronger in the future.

Twitch, for those unfamiliar with the Amazon subsidiary, is a video social media site that allows ordinary users to post content of themselves live-streaming games. The popular platform is widely associated with gamer culture, as video gamers all over the world use the site to not only play games together but to engage in conversations about a diverse range of subjects. According to Statista, Twitch had more than 7.4 million active streamers last month, and an enormous number of viewers tuned in to watch Ocasio-Cortez’s gaming. At its peak, her stream had roughly 435,000 viewers, making her broadcast one of the 20 biggest Twitch streams of all time. She was joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as well as famous Twitch users like Disguised Toast, DrLupo, Hasan Abi and Pokimane. By most accounts, she played the game pretty well — nowhere near at a professional level, to be sure, but competently enough to demonstrate that she is familiar with gaming.

Ocasio-Cortez is not the first political figure to recognize the potential in Twitch. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., joined the platform last year, and President Donald Trump’s account was temporarily suspended in June after the company accused him of using it to spread hate. (Trump’s account posted a video of a speech in which he claimed people of Mexican descent are more likely to be rapists and criminals, and a Twitch spokesperson told Salon at the time that “hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch.”)

Part of Twitch’s appeal is, of course, the fact that it is a popular internet platform, and as such can be used to spread political messages much as users do so at sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. Yet Twitch is distinct among internet platforms precisely because of its close association with gaming culture, which has also been politicized in recent years. This is hardly surprising, given that a substantial percentage of the world’s population plays video games. According to Statista, there were almost two billion video gamers on the planet as of 2015, and that number is expected to reach more than three billion by 2023.

Ocasio-Cortez herself is no stranger to gaming, as she made a surprise appearance last year during a live stream of a 50-hour marathon game of “Donkey Kong 64” to raise money for a transgender youth advocacy organization. Last month former Vice President Joe Biden, who is running against Trump in the upcoming election, launched online merchandise on the Nintendo Switch video game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” Christian Tom, director of digital partnerships for the Biden-Harris campaign, explained the campaign’s decision by telling USA Today that “Animal Crossing is a dynamic, diverse, and powerful platform that brings communities together from across the world. It is an exciting new opportunity for our campaign to engage and connect Biden-Harris supporters as they build and decorate their islands.”

Still, despite the ubiquity of video gaming, major politicians seem to have sclerotic attitudes about gaming and those who engage in it. Earlier this year, Biden told The New York Times about how, during a meeting with Silicon Valley business leaders, “one of the little creeps sitting around that table,” whom the former vice president described as “close to a billionaire,” characterized himself as “an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people.” Biden later made it clear that the “little creep” in question was specifically referring to video games.

Trump has expressed a similar prejudice toward video games, commenting to reporters after mass shootings in Ohio and Texas that “we must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.” (In fact, research has repeatedly found that there is no scientific link between video game violence and its real-world counterpart.)

Yet Trump, and the right generally, has also politically benefited from trends in gamer culture. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote in 2016, the 2014 controversy known as Gamergate — one in which feminists were widely harassed by video gamers — helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign.

“It’s not just that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his acolytes are playing to the same grievance about ‘social justice warriors’ who dare to think that white men should share power with women and people of color,” Marcotte wrote. “It’s that Trump and his men are using the same tools as the Gamergaters: gaslighting, projection, working the refs and leaning heavily on often subconscious double standards that allow white men to have more benefit of the doubt than others.”

With Biden and Trump, it is likely that their comments on gaming culture are calculated, efforts made by septuagenarian men to interact with a nascent element of American culture that they may not fully understand. For younger generations who are more likely to have grown up playing video games, gaming has long been fertile breeding ground for political discourse. Now, with platforms like Twitch, it is a tool for reaching millions. Ocasio-Cortez, as a Millennial, clearly understands this. As more Millennials and Zoomers become politicians, Twitch streams may become a standard piece of any campaign trail or get-out-the-vote operation.

How binge-watching affects your health

The streaming era has changed the way we watch television, as many TV consumers no longer have the self-control that was forced upon us by the old model of television — whereby a new episode of a show was released once a week, or less. Now, many entertainment companies release entire series at once, thus reifying a new term, “binge-watching,” to describe the behavior of watching multiple episodes, back-to-back, of an entire series.

Binge-watching is a remarkably common behavior. Indeed, a 2018 MorningConsult poll found that 60 percent of American adults who watch shows on on-demand TV services binge-watch. The percentage increased with younger demographics, and 73 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds binge-watched TV at least once a week.

Of course, every new cultural behavior has its accompanying health consequences. So it should be no surprise that researchers have started asking: what is all this binge-watching doing to our health?

Researchers at Arizona State University sought to figure this out. They sent an 18-question survey to 926 adults who owned a television and at least one other device with a screen. Specifically, the survey measured the amount of time spent on devices, their diets, quantity and quality of sleep, sense of stress and health, physical activity, one’s body mass index (BMI), and binge-watching habits. Their results were published in the journal BMC Public Health.

“Binge watching has been increasing, but there’s barely any research on it; we were one of the first ones to investigate this phenomenon,” Maricarmen Vizcaino, a co-author of the study told Salon.

Researchers identified binge-watchers by asking them how many hours they watch television, and how many episodes in a single sitting they consume—from zero to four daily.

Researchers found that heavy screen time users averaged 17.5 hours of screen-use per day; they also reported that this group had the least healthy dietary patterns compared to moderate and light users. More specifically, those who were heavy users of television consumption and smartphones were the least healthy compared to heavy users of TV-connected devices, laptops, and tablets.

“Binge-watching was also significantly associated with less healthy dietary patterns, including frequency of fast-food consumption as well as eating family meals in front of a television, and perceived stress,” the authors stated in the study.

Interestingly, Vizcaino said she and her colleagues discovered an association between binge-watching and “greater perceived stress.”

“That’s surprising, because you would assume that people will feel happier because they’re watching their show, or they’re [watching] some entertainment, but that’s not the case — people are more stressed out, if they’re binge-watching,” Vizcaino said.

This might suggest that people are turning to binge-watching to cope with anxiety and stress. Conversely, it could be the case that people who have unhealthy diets and greater stress watching more television.

“It could be a number of patterns,” Vizcaino said.

Another surprising finding from the study, Vizcaino said, is that the health outcomes might depend on the device.

“For instance, we did not find any differences with laptop users — those that reported higher use of laptops versus those with lower use didn’t report differences in dietary patterns, fast-food consumptions, or perceived stress,” Vizcaino said. “However, we saw those differences in people for instance using smartphones or television-connected devices, so I think one of the messages of our study was that we need to be looking at the screens individually.”

Researchers hope their study can serve as a jumping off point for two areas of research.

“Future research is needed to better understand what factors among different screen-based devices might affect health behaviors and in turn health-related outcomes,” the authors of the study wrote. “Research is also required to better understand how binge-watching behavior contributes to health-related behaviors and characteristics.”

Oxycontin maker pleads guilty to criminal charge over opioid sales

Purdue Pharma LP, the pharmaceutical giant responsible for manufacturing OxyContin, pleaded guilty to criminal charges and faces roughly $8.3 billion in penalties, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

“Today’s resolution is the result of years of hard work by the FBI and its partners to combat the opioid crisis in the U.S.,” Steven M. D’Antuono, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office, explained in the Justice Department’s official announcement. “Purdue, through greed and violation of the law, prioritized money over the health and well-being of patients. The FBI remains committed to holding companies accountable for their illegal and inexcusable activity and to seeking justice, on behalf of the victims, for those who contributed to the opioid crisis.”

Because Purdue is currently in bankruptcy court, it is unlikely that the company will ultimately pay the $8.3 billion. Even so, the Justice Department’s decision is a major step forward in holding the company accountable for pushing OxyContin and thereby playing a major role in causing America’s current opioid epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 450,000 Americans have died of the opioid epidemic since 1999. The Justice Department’s recent actions could make it easier for thousands of other lawsuits against the company to be settled, as well as help state and local governments pursue compensation for the money they have had to spend addressing the opioid epidemic.

In addition to the penalties being imposed on Purdue, the company’s owners — members of the wealthy Sackler family — agreed to pay $225 million in damages as a way of resolving its civil False Claims Act liability. These members of the Sackler family have previously denied that they and Purdue exaggerated the benefits of OxyContin and falsely played down its risks in order to more effectively market it as a safe pain management medication, and in a recent statement denied any criminal wrongdoing. The company itself pled guilty to violating anti-kickback laws and defrauding federal health agencies, with its penalties including $3.54 billion in criminal fines, $2.8 billion in civil penalties and $2 billion in criminal forfeiture.

Federal prosecutors accused Purdue of paying two doctors through the company’s doctor speaker program, and an electronic health records company, to increase prescriptions for its opioid drugs like OxyContin, according to The Washington Post. As District of Vermont U.S. Attorney Christina E. Nolan said at the Justice Department briefing, “The kickback effectively put Purdue marketing department in the exam room with their thumb on the scale at precisely the moment doctors were making critical decisions about patient health.”

“The resolutions do not include the criminal release of any individuals, including members of the Sackler family, nor are any of the company’s executives or employees receiving civil releases,” the Justice Department wrote.

Writing for Salon last year, Dr. Gayle Woodson described how a 1979 study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) claimed that only four patients out of 1,200 who were given narcotics to manage pain wound up developing addiction. The false premise, Woodson pointed out, was that the pain negated the euphoric effects of drugs like opioids and therefore meant they were much less likely to become addictive.

“The drug companies sold us doctors a bill of goods,” Woodson wrote. “To be honest, we bought it, hook, line, and sinker. Careful review the original NEJM article would have shown us that the data did not support the claim of non-addiction. We should have required clinical studies to prove that pain negates euphoria. Instead, we swallowed their propaganda and accepted the biased research findings that they funded.”

She added, “The marketers and distributors of opioid pain medication are now being held accountable in the courts for untold death and misery. The fines they pay will in no way compensate for the deaths and destroyed lives.”

Opioid addicts themselves were often aware of the pharmaceutical companies’ actions. Salon spoke with several opioid addicts in Pennsylvania last year, with one of them commenting that “Purdue Pharmaceuticals still runs Connecticut” and that “the Chinese are still making billions of dollars making phenol in labs. Sending it over here. And flat-out, everybody is addicted to something that takes away the pain. And it’s just become so readily available in the form of Percocet, to kids who get their wisdom teeth pulled, or Darvocet, to people with skin issues. Dilaudid for people with more breakthrough-type pain with cancer and whatnot.”

He added, “The pharmaceutical industry is never going to let it go away. There’s just too much damn money in it is the problem.”

Correction: At one point in this article the term “Sackler family” was used, which erroneously implied that the entire Sackler family is behind this controversy. The controversy only involves specific members of the Sackler family and this story has been edited to reflect that fact. Salon apologizes for the error.

Authorities probe emails demanding that Democratic voters in three states “vote for Trump or else”

Authorities are investigating threatening emails, which demanded that Democratic voters in three states “vote for Trump or else.”

The emails were sent earlier this week to voters in Florida, Arizona and Alaska, according to The Washington Post. They appear to have been targeted at Democrats using data from voter files.

Two of the emails reviewed by CBS News included the home addresses of the recipients, one of which was outdated.

“We are in possession of all your information (email, address, telephone… everything),” the message read, according to CBS News. “You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you.”

Threatening emails like this — purporting to be from the Proud Boys — are being sent to voters in Florida and Alaska.

We do not know who is behind them, but whoever it is is taking a lot of steps to mask their identity. https://t.co/cB3RpocA5i pic.twitter.com/NjYti0ufbe

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) October 21, 2020

The emails were sent from a domain linked to the Proud Boys, but experts say it appears that someone took advantage of the group’s unsecured domain after Google Cloud Services canceled its registration. Source code embedded in emails reviewed by CBS News showed that the messages originated from IP addresses linked to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Estonia. The varying IP addresses suggest that the emails “could have been routed through the servers from nearly anywhere.”

Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told the outlet that the messages were sent using a “cloud infrastructure provider in Saudi Arabia called ‘Saudi Executive Cloud.'” Despite the source code, “there is no indication to suggest that it is a nation-state or otherwise foreign campaign.”

“It could be that they are simply relaying through this infrastructure,” he said. “In fact, given how this email was sent using their web interface, that’s most likely the case — that the people behind this found a vulnerable server in Saudi through which they can route lots of emails.”

Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys and the Florida state director of Latinos for Trump, said that not only was the group was not involved but also he did not know where the emails came from. Tarrio told CBS he believed they were sent by someone “that’s not very fond of us.”

“If somebody’s trying to intimidate voters, they’re probably successful,” he told the outlet. “The damage is done to some people that aren’t very media savvy, you know, like a 70-year-old that gets an email like this and is not going to go out to vote.”

Debi Martinez, a resident of Alachua County, Fla., who received one of the emails, told CBS News that she was “not intimidated by this scam looking email.” However, “elderly mother very much was.”

The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office said it was working with federal and local law enforcement to investigate the origin of the emails. Alachua County was previously the target of a cyberattack by Russia’s military intelligence operation in 2016.

A spokesperson for the Alaska Democratic Party told The Post that the FBI was “now involved in the investigation.” Tarrio also told the outlet he had spoken with the FBI.

Christopher Krebs, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said on Twitter that the agency was “aware of threatening emails with misleading info about the secrecy of your vote.”

“Ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states,” he said. “These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections.”

It remains unclear how many emails were sent in the operation. A spokesperson for the University of Florida, which is based in Alachua County, told CNN that 183 people at the school had received the emails. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said it had received three dozen reports of voters receiving similar messages.

“Regardless of who is behind this effort it seems the goal is to discourage people from freely casting their ballots,” Kristen Clarke, the group’s executive director, told the outlet.

“This is absolutely something to be concerned about,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, told The Post. “This is what election interference looks like.”