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Noam Chomsky: “If you don’t push the lever for the Democrats, you are assisting Trump”

Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals, has provided the international left with wisdom, guidance and inspiration for nearly 60 years. Proving that he operates at the locus where argumentation and activism meet, he demonstrates indispensable intellectual leadership on issues of foreign policy, democratic socialism and rejection of corporate media bromides.

One of the founders of linguistics, he is also an American dissident who has wrestled with systems of power on matters no less important than genocide, war and poverty, creating a corpus of classics, ranging from his manifesto against the Vietnam War, “American Power and the New Mandarins,” to his amplification of reason against a jingoistic cacophony following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, “9-11.” “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” which he co-authored with Edward S. Herman, is essential reading for anyone interested in the real biases against democracy in the commercial press. His more recent book “What Kind of Creatures Are We?” provides a deft and provocative exploration of human purpose and the common good.

At 91, he is still committed to seeking and sharing the truth, and showing little patience for the foolishness and selfishness of the powerful. 

With dozens of books, and countless lectures and articles, Chomsky has addressed nearly every major topic of politics and economics with an orientation toward democracy, peace, and justice, but his new book is possibly his most urgent. “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal,” co-authored with progressive economist Robert Pollin, measures the stakes of climate change as threatening the survival of the human species, and offers a bold and ambitious solution that can not only stave off disaster, but create a more beautiful, hospitable and just world.

I recently interviewed Chomsky over the phone about climate change, the Green New Deal, and the 2020 presidential election. 

We can, perhaps, begin by spotlighting Amy Coney Barrett’s remarks at her nomination hearings calling climate change a “controversial and contentious issue.” One of the realities you and your co-author, Robert Pollin, identify in this book, which seems to elude most other analysts, is that while our mainstream discourse often presents a “debate” surrounding climate change, there is no debate at all – not just among scientists, but among the institutions that are actively making the problem worse. They know they are courting catastrophe.

Not just “courting,” but causing catastrophe. She not only said that it is “contentious.” She said, “I’m not a scientist. I don’t really know about it.” Unless she is a hermit living in Montana without any contact with the outside world, it is inconceivable that anyone could even be considered for a Supreme Court position who doesn’t know about the most significant environmental issue.

In the case of the major institutions, let’s start with the Pentagon. They are open about it. They acknowledge that climate change is a serious threat. They’ve argued we should prepare for it. They’ve published documents about it. Certainly, they know about it.

In the case of ExxonMobil, their scientists were among the first to discover the nature of the problem back in the 1970s. We have the full record, and it’s quite extensive. Their scientists provided detailed reports on the threat of global warming – on the threat it will have on the business of fossil fuels. They knew and know about everything. What actually happened with ExxonMobil is – when James Hansen made a speech about global warming in 1988, which received a lot of publicity, at that point management moved to a new position. It wasn’t outright detail, because that would have been too easy to expose. They said, “Well, it’s uncertain.” This was a strategy to shed doubt. In other words, “we really don’t know yet. So, we better not do anything precipitous.” That was an effective strategy, and that’s the Barret strategy: “It’s contentious.” Meanwhile, the scientific evidence is accumulating beyond any question. ExxonMobil knows all of this, and they’ve said straight out that, unlike other companies, they won’t put aside funds to develop sustainable energy. They’ve committed to keeping to their business model of doing what is most profitable, and that is developing as many fossil fuels as possible. 

Then, there is JPMorgan Chase. They know, and they’ve conceded. They were one of the world’s leading financiers of fossil fuels. Recently, their CEO, Jamie Dimon, announced [they] have to do something about fossil fuels, because of the reputational risks. “Reputational risks” translates into “it is harming our business, because consumers are upset.” In fact, an interesting memo leaked from JPMorgan Chase that said [the company is] pursuing policies that place the survival of humanity at risk, and [the company has] to be careful about [its] reputational risks. The “survival of humanity.”

There is an interesting question about people like Jamie Dimon. They know exactly what is happening, but they are willing to proceed knowing that it is going to cause a cataclysm — a total disaster that will be irreversible. What is in the mind of somebody like that? Maybe we can say that Mike Pence listens to his preacher, and actually believes there is no need to worry, because God will take care of it. But not the executives of ExxonMobil or JPMorgan Chase. 

JPMorgan Chase used the phrase, “survival of humanity,” and you are quoting it. All of your books deal with serious issues, to put it mildly. It seems, though, that the new book is the most urgent. Is that a fair characterization?

Let’s take seriously the publication of the Department of Transportation — their document on climate change and emission standards. It was an astonishing document, and it is shocking that it didn’t get more coverage.

It is a careful environmental assessment from the Trump administration. It concluded that on our present course we will reach four degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. What is that? Total cataclysm. No one can even estimate the effects. Organized human life as we know it will be over. Of course, it will build up over the years, getting worse and worse with sea levels rising, extreme weather events, and so on. So, after describing this, they offer a prescription, and here it is: Let’s reduce emission regulations on cars and trucks.

This is the most extraordinary document in human history. I can’t think of anything like this. The thing that comes closest is the Nazi Wannsee declaration in 1942, which was the formal decision of the Nazi party to wipe out all the Jews of Europe. Not even that said, “Let’s race ahead to make some money while destroying the prospects of all human life on Earth.” Why isn’t this the headline everywhere?

You’ve asked two questions, I assume rhetorically, but I’m curious if you can offer an answer to either. First, what kind of people have an awareness that they are threatening all livable ecology and proceed along the same course? Second, why isn’t this the headline everywhere?

I have no independent evidence about what is inside people’s minds. In the case of the Trump administration, I simply think that they don’t care. They are sociopaths. We see this constantly with the president, from the pandemic to hurting the World Health Organization, because it improves his election prospects. If that means kill people in Africa and Yemen who depend upon the WHO for survival, that’s fine. The Palestinians didn’t treat him nicely? Good. Cut off money for their hospitals. I think it is the mentality that all of us have when we walk down the street and realize that we might crush a lot of ants. We don’t think, “I’ll take all kinds of precautions to avoid crushing ants.” That is the Trump administration’s attitude toward the human species. I’m sure it isn’t everybody, but it is the mentality that comes from the top down.

There is also the idea, “We have force. Therefore, we can compel anyone else to surrender to it.” We see that constantly in the most remarkable ways. A couple of weeks ago the administration approached the United Nations Security Council, requesting that they reinstitute the sanctions against Iran, which were torturing and killing Iranians. The Security Council flatly rejected it. Well, they didn’t say no. They abstained, because you don’t want to irritate the master too much. So what did the U.S. do? Mike Pompeo returned to the Security Council, and said, sorry children, we’re reinstituting the sanctions, because we say so. Has that ever happened in the history of the Security Council? I don’t know everything, but I don’t think so. What country acts that way? This one does.

There’s a major biodiversity conference going on right now at the UN. It is of crucial significance not only for the many species that are being crushed, but for human survival. For example, one of the issues they are addressing is how to prepare for the next pandemic. There is one major country that is not attending. The usual one. The United States. Take a look for coverage. I did, and all I could find was approximately two minutes on NPR.

The New York Times: Great newspaper, right? A couple of days ago, they ran an article on Chevron buying Noble, which gives them entry into the Eastern Mediterranean – huge natural gas fields. Good article on how it will expand production. It will be very good for Israel and Egypt. It didn’t say one word about how this is another stab in the heart of the possibility of human survival. It isn’t something they really think about. They don’t see it as their task to think about it. They write about gas markets, very little about climate change, because it is good for Israel-Egypt relations. There is a biodiversity conference happening, but the U.S. isn’t attending. So, who cares?

Now, what about the banks? They know what is happening, and this is my best guess. Let’s see if it is plausible. I put myself in the position of Jamie Dimon. I’m sure he knows all about global warming. He cares about it. He probably contributes to the Sierra Club is his spare time. He has two choices. He can say, “What we are doing is horrible. I refuse to participate.” He does that, and the board of directors throws him out. They bring someone else in who will do it. So, then he says to himself, “I’m as humane as that next guy they would bring in to destroy the planet. So, I might as well be the one to do it.”

ExxonMobil has shareholders. They do what is best for them. The only other way to explain it is sociopathy, but I don’t think they are all sociopaths. I think they are the same as people like us. 

If the profit at the center of the system incentives sociopathy, is it possible to proceed with something like the Global Green New Deal, on the level that is necessary, without addressing the profit motive? 

That’s a question that Robert Pollin and I discuss. First of all, there is the simple question of timescale. The timescale needed to deal with this urgent problem is a decade or two. Major institutional changes, which I think are very much in order, have a totally different timescale. It is a much longer process. The fact of the matter is that in order to survive we have to deal with the problem within the framework of the existing institutions. Then, comes the question, can it be done?

We think so. Without radical modification of the existing institutions, which on the side, we can continue to pursue – it is a parallel project – but without that happening, there are adjustments possible. This is mainly Pollin’s work – looking at how we can proceed within the timescale and within the existing institutions.

Take fossil fuels. One thing that could be done is simply to take them over – socialize them. It isn’t even that expensive. With the oil prices, they aren’t worth that much right now. Then, we can put the institutions in the hands of the workforce and the community, and have them do what has to be done. What has to be done? Cut back annually – say 5 percent – on the use of fossil fuels. That would be enough to bring us to net zero emissions by the midcentury. Set the workforce to do things that they know how to do. Let’s have them work on developing sustainable energy. They know how to do it. Outside of ExxonMobil, every major company has a division on this.

We might recall that one of the leading early environmentalists was Tony Mazzocchi, the head of the Oil, Chemical, Atomic International Workers Union. Those are the guys on the front line. They’re the ones being poisoned. Mazzocchi and his union pushed for safety regulations, and the reduction of fossil fuels. That can be picked up. That’s within the framework of institutions.

Take the carbon tax. In itself, it is destructive. It leads to what happened in France. You’re telling poor, working people, “You will have to pay more to get to work, because I care about the environment.” The way that a carbon tax ought to work is redistribution of the income. Tax the fossil fuels, but then redistribute the profits to the people who need it. The rich guys aren’t going to like that, but there’s a lot of things that they don’t like. They don’t like Social Security, but we ram it down their throats through popular pressure. 

All of this is within a range of expenses that is not very high. We have Robert Pollin’s model. We have a different model from Jeffery Sachs, which reaches pretty much the same conclusion. It can probably all be done within 2-3% of GDP. It is important to note that this doesn’t only end fossil fuel production. It creates a better world. 

The small number of workers in the fossil fuel industry can get a much better job doing something else. If they need help during the transition period, we can do it for peanuts. Pollin points out that the amount that is needed annually is a fraction of what the Treasury recently poured out to save Wall Street. These things are not out of sight.

Now, there are plenty of barriers. Plenty of fighting back. Amy Coney Barrett saying, “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m too remote from all of this.” The people behind her, getting her to say it, they are going to try to block it.

But there are popular forces who pressing for this, because they know it has to happen quickly. Most of them are young. Greta Thunberg, for example, saying eloquently, “You betrayed us.” We should listen to her. Yes, we’ve betrayed them. Now, we have to change course.

Too often the issue is presented as dichotomous, meaning working class economics versus environmentalism. Why is that wrong?

There will be better jobs and more jobs for working people with a Green New Deal. Jobs ranging from construction to retrofitting houses to mass transportation to installing solar panels and wind turbines to research and development. That whole range presents many more opportunities than there are in fossil fuels, and it makes for a better world.

I don’t know where you live. I live in Arizona right now, but I lived outside Boston most of my life. It isn’t much fun sitting in a traffic jam for over an hour to get to work.

I live near Chicago. I can relate.

Same thing. It would be much nicer to have a highly efficient mass transit system. You step inside, read a newspaper, enjoy a cup of coffee, and get to where you need to go in no time. It is a better world. In Arizona, I know people who pay $1,000 over the summer for air conditioning. I pay $10 a month, because we’ve installed solar panels on the roof. It is a better life. Furthermore, I don’t have to feel guilty about using so much electricity. The sun is up there, and it is just giving it to me. Insulate your home. You are more comfortable, you are saving money, and you are saving the environment.

It isn’t 100 percent. The coal miners, for example. It is a rotten job, but it does pay well. They are on their way out anyway, though. So, we better begin to think about how we can ease the transition. They can do constructive things. In Germany, they are phasing out coal mines, and turning them into ways to produce sustainable energy. These are good jobs, cleaner jobs, and less dangerous. Where there are people who are going to be harmed, we can help them ease the transition.

And again, let’s remember that the fossil fuel workers are the ones suffering directly. They experience the worst health consequences – the workers and the people who live near the plants. So, it is in their interest more than anyone. It isn’t a hard sell if you break through the propaganda. 

You are using the simple, but profound phrase, “It’s a better life.” It seems that the Global Green New Deal presents the left with a great opportunity to offer to people a large-scale, ambitious project for reimagining human life and society that leads to dramatic improvements.

Absolutely. These two questions that you presented earlier — environmentalism or changing the institutions. This is where they coincide. 

Let’s take the auto industry. It is a huge industry; the core of American production. In 2009, after the financial collapse, the auto industry was nationalized. There were choices at the time, and if the left had been up to it, we could have made a better choice. The first choice, which is what the Obama administration did, was to pay off the executives and the shareholders, and then return the industry to its original owners, and have them go back to what they were doing — make traffic jams in Chicago and Boston.

Another possibility was to take the industry that we owned, and hand it over to the workforce and the community, and ask them to alter it in ways that were more beneficial. They might have developed an efficient mass transit system. If we start doing that, we undercut the institutions that work for profit, and transform them into democratic institutions that work for public needs. This isn’t nationalization, putting it into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats. It is giving it to workers and community members who can use it for their own needs. That is radically undermining capitalist institutions.

I’m sure you know the Next System Project. One of their proposals that makes great sense is to expand the postal service into general services for people, like banking. It is a perfect way to do banking — not commercial banking, JPMorgan Chase giving someone $2 billion — but the kind of banking we all do. It would be easy to do it through the post office. There are post offices everywhere, the staff is already there, the infrastructure is there. Much of what we do can happen through socialized institutions, which people are surprisingly favorable to. And it would improve our lives. It is a good part of life to have a postal carrier who you get to know. You trust him. You can ask him to feed your dog when you are away. It makes life better.

This is one of the reasons why the rich and powerful want to destroy public institutions, like the Post Office. Public institutions show people that there is an alternative to individualism and consumerism that is possible. 

There is so much that it is possible if we only escape the rigid doctrinal assumptions that say, to quote Ronald Reagan, “government is the problem.” It is a problem for the rich. It isn’t a problem for the rest of us. 

Forgive me for closing with what is by now an obligatory and predictable question, but I think I am forever banished from journalism if I don’t ask. How do you respond to the irresponsible leftist purity that discourages voting for Biden because of his limitations as a candidate, and the troubling aspects of his record? 

My position is to vote against Trump. In our two-party system, there is a technical fact that if you want to vote against Trump, you have to push the lever for the Democrats. If you don’t push the lever for the Democrats, you are assisting Trump. We can argue about a lot of things, but not arithmetic. You have a choice on Nov. 3. Do I vote against Trump or help Trump?

It is a simple choice. He’s the worst malignancy ever to appear in our political system. He is extremely dangerous.

All of this for the left shouldn’t even be discussed. It takes a few minutes. Politics means constant activism. An election comes along every once in awhile, and you have to decide if it is worth participating. Sometimes not — there were cases when I didn’t even bother voting. There were cases when I voted Republican, because the Republican congressional candidate in my district was slightly better. It should take roughly a few minutes to decide, then you go back to activism, which is real politics.

There is a new phenomenon on the left. I had never even heard of it before 2016, which is to focus, laser-like, on elections. That’s where you get these crazy ideas like condemnation of “lesser-evil voting.” Of course, you vote against someone dangerous if it is necessary, but that is not serious political activity. Serious political activity comes out of commitment to educational and organizational work. 

Somehow parts of the left within the past few years have unconsciously accepted establishment propaganda. The establishment view of politics is that the public are spectators, not participants in action. Your function is to show up every few years, push a lever, go back home, leave the rest to us. You shouldn’t have “democratic dogmatisms about people judging what’s in their best interest” — I’m quoting Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of political science. The establishment view is that we have to provide people with, to quote Reinhold Niebuhr, “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent simplifications.” We’ll handle the real work.   

To see the left buy into this is astonishing. If you don’t buy into the establishment picture, you don’t talk about “lesser-evil voting.” You talk about activism and strategy. Every once in awhile, you decide whether or not it is worth the effort to push a lever. Sometimes it is so obvious, as it is now, that it shouldn’t take two minutes to decide.  

These 4 toss-up Senate races might determine the fate of the plane

As one of the most taxing and truly bizarre election years in memory enters its final weeks, most Americans are laser-focused on a single question: Which septuagenarian will occupy the White House for the next four years?

But the most important races for the future of the planet might just be in Maine, North Carolina, Iowa, and Montana, where Democrats and Republicans are tussling over seats that will decide the balance of power in the U.S. Senate — and the likelihood of passing any significant climate legislation.

Across the country, 35 Senate seats are up for grabs, and just four of those seats could decide whether a new administration could pass real, comprehensive legislation to mute the drumbeat of climate disasters.

Biden has promised that, if elected, he will spend $2 trillion on boosting clean energy and work to rid the country’s electricity grid of fossil fuels by 2035. To do either, though, he’d need Democrats to pick up enough seats to hold a majority of the Senate, or many more to overcome a deal-killing filibuster.

Here are the four races that could decide whether the next Congress will pass climate legislation — or drag its feet for another four years.

Iowa: Can Ernst still make ’em squeal?

Joni Ernst (R) vs. Theresa Greenfield (D)

When Joni Ernst launched her first Senate campaign in 2014, the Republican former state senator knew how to grab the public’s attention. “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm,” Ernst said, smiling sweetly at the camera during a viral TV ad. “So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork.” The spot closed with a tagline that became Ernst’s calling card: “Let’s make ’em squeal.”

Both Ernst, the incumbent U.S. senator from Iowa, and her opponent, Theresa Greenfield, grew up on Iowa farms — but that’s where any resemblance ends. Ernst was propelled to the national stage by funding from Charles and the late David Koch, two billionaires known for their liberatarian views and fossil fuel empire. According to Politico, the Koch brothers saw Ernst as an ally who would help defeat Mark Jacobs, another Republican candidate for the Senate who had previously expressed support of a national cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions.

Since entering Congress in 2015, Ernst has railed against the Green New Deal, calling it the “creep of socialism into America” and arguing that it would “essentially ban animal agriculture and eliminate gas-powered cars.”

Greenfield, Ernst’s Democratic opponent, has largely focused her campaign on Social Security and health care. But Greenfield hasn’t neglected climate change: In an Iowa Senate debate last month, Greenfield argued that the country needs to take “urgent climate action” and said that she would help Iowa become the “first net-zero farm industry in the world.” The Democratic candidate has also vowed to help strengthen Iowa’s defenses against flooding expected to get worse in a warming climate.

At the moment, the race is neck-in-neck: The most recent polls show Greenfield leading Ernst, 47 percent to 43 percent, and two prominent election analyzers, Fivethirtyeight and the Cook Political Report, still rate it as a “toss-up.”

Montana: Two Steves and a carbon price

Steve Daines (R) vs. Steve Bullock (D)

There are no viral pig ads in Big Sky country unfortunately, but the two candidates running for one of Montana’s coveted Senate seats have managed to create plenty of drama. State climate reports usually don’t make the news, but in August — thanks to a leak from the conservative website the Daily Caller — Montana’s Climate Solutions Plan became the latest flash point in a heavily contested election.

Governor Steve Bullock, the Democratic contender for the Senate, commissioned the report back in July 2019. Most of the 71-page plan focused on expanding energy efficiency and boosting renewables across the state. It did, however, include three paragraphs on the use of carbon pricing to stem emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide — enough for Senator Steve Daines, the one-term Republican incumbent to use as ammunition against his opponent.

“You still support a job-killing carbon tax,” Daines tweeted at the governor, just a day after sending a letter accusing Bullock of delivering a “gut punch” to the 35,000 Montanans employed in the oil, gas, and coal industry. (Bullock later told the press that he doesn’t support “any carbon pricing proposal put forward.”)

The race between Bullock and Daines could carry far-reaching implications for the future of climate action. For months, Bullock vowed that he would not run for the Senate, even after he dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. “I think that my skill set, and what I’ve done, I just wouldn’t enjoy it,” he told the Montana Lowdown podcast in March.

But as the 2020 races heated up, Bullock changed his tune. (It didn’t hurt that a New York Times columnist, in encouraging Bullock to run, called him “the most important person on the planet.”) Bullock has adopted a fairly middle-ground approach on tackling climate change, supporting both fracking and aggressively expanding renewable energy. Daines, however, recently referred to the 2016 Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions as the “Paris-China climate accords.”

A recent poll from Public Policy Polling shows Bullock tied with Daines at 48 percent of the vote.

Maine: A moderate under attack

Susan Collins (R) vs. Sara Gideon (D)

Senator Susan Collins is known to be a moderate Republican, but in moments of high conflict in Congress — when a single vote against the majority could change the result — Collins has typically hemmed and hawed for days before ultimately siding with her Republican colleagues. (Case in point: Collins voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of sexual assault allegations.) This has led to a number of amusing parody headlines, including “Susan Collins to self-quarantine to avoid possible contact with decisions” and “Susan Collins takes hours to decide on lunch before ordering exactly what Mitch McConnell is having.”

Now, in a race against the Democratic speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives, Sara Gideon, some of the senator’s longtime allies are turning away from her. Last year, the League of Conservation Voters — which had supported Collins in her past races — gave her a paltry 21 percent on its environmental scorecard and switched allegiance to Gideon.

Although Collins is one of few Republican senators who supports taking action on climate change, her voting record hasn’t always reflected that. Although Collins voted against confirming President Trump’s picks to lead the EPA, she supported Trump’s $1.7 trillion tax cuts in 2017, a bill that included authorization for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Gideon, meanwhile, has shepherded several landmark climate bills through the state legislature, including one that requires the state to get all of its electricity from renewable energy by 2050. She also co-sponsored a bill for a statewide carbon tax, which Collins has called “Gideon’s gas tax” in attack ads.

Recent polling by the Bangor Daily News gives Gideon a one point lead over Collins. Ousting the sitting senator — who has been in Congress for 16 years — may still be a long shot.

North Carolina: Scandals, scandals, everywhere

Thom Tillis (R) vs. Cal Cunningham (D)

Even against the backdrop of this historically tumultuous election season, the Senate race in North Carolina has started to look like a soap opera. Earlier this month, Senator Thom Tillis, the Republican incumbent, announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19, after attending Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination ceremony for the Supreme Court in the Rose Garden. Hours later, Tillis’ Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, faced a scandal of his own: The former state senator, a married father of two, publicly apologized for steamy text messageshe sent to a married PR strategist.

Cunningham has made responding to climate change and record-breaking flooding a centerpiece of his campaign. He opposes the Green New Deal but has vowed to boost investment in renewable energy and thinks the U.S. should rejoin the Paris climate agreement.

Tillis, meanwhile, has made an about-face since his 2014 run for the Senate, in which he told a debate moderator “no” when asked if climate change was a fact. Since then, Hurricanes Florence and Matthew have devastated the Tar Heel State, and Tillis says he now believes that humans do contribute to the overheating planet— but still refuses to support the Paris agreement and cites the importance of mainly “market-based solutions” to combat the crisis.

The Republican senator’s environmental record could still be a liability for North Carolina voters. Tillis currently trails Cunningham, 37 percent to 41 percent.

“David Byrne’s American Utopia” is a rousing, vibrant spectacular that rivals “Stop Making Sense”

David Byrne is perspicacious — a canny mix of smarts and wonder. His body moves gracefully too, especially when he is gyrating to a relentlessly percussive beat. Spike Lee nicely captures Byrne’s mind and body as well as his musical talents in “American Utopia,” the lively documentary version of the hit Broadway show that makes its way to HBO for safe viewing, after it was selected as the Opening Night feature at this year’s Toronto Film Festival and had a Spotlight presentation at the recent New York Film Festival.

Having seen the 2018 concert version of the show, Lee’s documentary does the music and energy of the stage performance justice. The powerhouse sound of the drumming and joyful force of the songs — as well as the few political messages — come through loud and clear. Despite being a film that will mostly be viewed in one’s living room, it is impossible to just sit and watch. Lee and Byrne practically encourage folks to dance and sing along. (The audience at the performance recorded for the film is periodically shown to be on their feet, singing and dancing.)

“American Utopia” opens with an overhead shot of Byrne sitting at a table with a model of a brain between his hands. He gets up and holds the brain up and looks quizzically at it, singing “Here,” about the sections of the brain, and about confusion and precision. He is, surely, suggesting that folks think critically. After the song, he addresses the audience, talking about baby’s brains, and how they potentially have more knowledge than adults who lose connections and reach “a plateau of stupidity.” These comments form the show’s thread, about developing and defining who we are as people, our connections with others, and even discussions about democracy, immigration, and Black Lives Matter, among other topics.

Byrne’s thesis provides the framework for the nearly two dozen songs — several from the Talking Heads‘ catalog — that make the show as vibrant and stimulating as “Stop Making Sense.” When Byrne talks about nonsense poetry, he explains how Dadaists in the 1930s used nonsense to make sense of a world — there was an economic crash, Nazis, and fascism on the rise — that didn’t make sense. He performs snippets from Kurt Schwitters’ “Sonate in Urlauten” to illustrate how these nonsense poets reminded the world of different, independent minds with ideals that were beyond war and nationality, before launching into a rousing rendition of “I Zimbra,” which features lyrics from Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poetry and African beats.

As Lee films this performance, he provides close-ups, which can be frustrating for viewers who want to see the full bodies of the dancers and musicians as they move. The music is catchy, but the editing (on this and several other numbers) can be distracting. Lee shoots through the chain curtain that surrounds the stage on three sides a few times, which provides a unique perspective, but these moments also feel necessary only when the curtain is part of the performance. Similarly, a handful of overhead shots work best during the songs that have Busby Berkeley-style choreography (“Every Day Is A Miracle,” and “Burning Down the House”). Otherwise they can pull viewers out of the experience.

“American Utopia” emphasizes the benefits of and necessity for diversity and inclusivity. Byrne considers this specifically when he presents “Everybody’s Coming to My House.” He explains how his version of the song suggests social anxiety, but a version sung by the Detroit School of Arts Vocal Jazz Ensemble celebrates inclusion. (The chorus’ track is played during the film’s closing credits, to cement this valid point). It is also an opportunity for Byrne, a naturalized citizen, to mention that many of the 11 members of the band on stage with him are immigrants, adding, “And we couldn’t do it without them.” 

A later sequence illustrates that all the music heard on stage is live, with no playback; Byrne shows how the song, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” is constructed. The drumming is rhythmic and pulsating and proves why a later shot of Brazilian percussionist Gustavo Di Dalva performing a solo during the song “Blind,” is so enthralling. Lee also shrewdly provides a close-up of Byrne playing the opening signature chords of “Burning Down the House.”   

Lee and Byrne do get political a few times in “American Utopia.” (How can they not?) The performers take a knee during “I Should Watch TV,” as an image of Colin Kaepernick flashes briefly on screen. Byrne indicates that only 20% of people voted in a recent local election, and 55% voted for president in 2016. “We’ve got to do better than 20%,” he implores. And in the pièce de résistance, a performance of Janelle Monáe‘s galvanizing protest song, “Hell You Talmbout,” Lee cuts away to people holding posters of slain Black men and women, including Treyvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Emmett Till, and too many other victims of racist violence, along with their names on screen.

Thankfully, Lee resists shooting the members of audience in close-up save a quick cut during “Burning Down the House,” but he does go off stage for the infectious “Road to Nowhere,” when Byrne and his band march along the theater’s perimeter for the upbeat finale.

Lee takes viewers backstage briefly after the show, and then out onto the street during the closing credits. This is an inspired decision, but the real power of “American Utopia” is all on the stage.

“David Byrne’s American Utopia” premieres Saturday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.

Billionaire wealth rises to more than $10 trillion for first time ever amid pandemic: analysis

Billionaire wealth increased to $10.2 trillion through the end of July, setting a new record amid the coronavirus pandemic even as millions of unemployed people fall into poverty.

Wealth held by billionaires around the world rose to $10.2 trillion in July, up from the previous record of $8.9 trillion in 2017, according to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS and consulting firm PwC.

The number of billionaires also rose from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 this summer, according to the report.

Not all billionaires saw their wealth increase, though some saw their wealth rise by close to 50%. Health care billionaires, for example, saw their wealth increase by 50%. Technology billionaires saw their wealth rise by 42.5%. Billionaires in the entertainment, financial services, materials, and real estate sectors saw increases of 10% or less.

While the UBS analysis looked at billionaires around the world, a separate analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that billionaire wealth in the United States has grown by $792 billion, or 27%, since the beginning of coronavirus lockdowns in March. The combined wealth of American billionaires now tops $3.7 trillion.

Some prominent billionaires have done particularly well. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth rise more than 60% during the pandemic to $195 billion through late August, according to the analysis. Tesla CEO Elon Musk saw his wealth more than triple to $85 billion over that time frame.

The study pointed to President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which helped billionaires keep more of their earnings. The UBS study noted that Trump’s desired capital gains tax cut, billed as a pandemic-related stimulus, would overwhelmingly favor the richest Americans.

“For billionaires, this is a heads-we win, tails-you-lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top,” Chuck Collins, the head of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality, said in a news release.

“The pandemic profiteering of America’s billionaires shows taxes on the wealthy must go up substantially to narrow the wealth gap and raise revenue vital for our big climb back from disaster,” added Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. “By demanding even more tax cuts for the rich at this crucial moment President Trump shows he is as out of touch with our nation’s needs as America’s billionaires are disconnected from our nation’s misery.”

Some executives, like Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Bezos, have profited from a boom in business caused by the lockdowns. Others have profited directly from government aid distributed to their companies. But most billionaires saw their wealth increase due to rising investments, buoyed by a stock market surge propped up by government assistance.

The rising wealth amid an economically devastating pandemic threatens to deepen longstanding inequalities.

“Extreme wealth concentration is an ugly phenomenon from a moral perspective, but it’s also economically and socially destructive,” Luke Hilyard, the executive director of the High Pay Center, a think tank that focuses on excessive executive pay, told The Guardian. “Anyone accumulating riches on this scale could easily afford to raise the pay of the employees who generate their wealth, or contribute a great deal more in taxes to support vital public services, while remaining very well rewarded for whatever successes they’ve achieved. The findings from the UBS report showing that the super-rich are getting even richer are a sign that capitalism isn’t working as it should.”

UBS executive Josef Stadler also acknowledged that billionaires could face societal backlash over their growing wealth as many people face months if not years of struggles.

“We’re at an inflection point,” he told the outlet. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

But it’s far from the first time that billionaires profited while millions suffered. The Institute for Policy Studies found that the wealthiest 400 billionaires in the US not only recovered from the 2008 recession within three years but increased their wealth by 80% over the following decade. By comparison, the bottom 80% of earners have still not recovered.

While government intervention has helped billionaires accumulate even more wealth, the lack of government action since the spring has resulted in an estimated 8 million Americans falling into poverty since May, according to a study from researchers at Columbia University. The lack of additional stimulus payments and the expiration of enhanced federal unemployment benefits has resulted in 6 million Americans falling into poverty over just the last three months, according to a study from researchers at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame.

The problem has been even worse globally. Between 88 million and 114 million people around the world have fallen into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 per day, since the pandemic hit, according to the World Bank. There are now more than 700 million people living in extreme poverty and researchers expected that number to keep rising.

“This is the worst setback that we’ve witnessed in a generation,” Carolina Sánchez-Páramo, the global director of the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice, told The Wall Street Journal.

World Bank Group President David Malpass argued in a speech this month that the problem is worse in developing economies because “rich countries” have the resources to expand sweeping “government spending programs” while poorer economies have few tools to mitigate the economic damage.

The US, by contrast, should be doing better if not for Republican reluctance to increased government relief. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned Congress last month that inaction in the face of growing inequality would be highly damaging to the economic recovery.

“Those are things that hold back our economy,” he said at a news conference. “If we want to have the highest potential output and the best output for our economy, we need that prosperity to be very broadly spread.”

Many analysts have also faulted Powell and the Fed for contributing to the growing inequality with policies “disproportionately benefiting stockholders,” according to the Associated Press.

Just as the coronavirus has exposed longstanding health disparities between the richest and poorest Americans, the growing inequality is largely the result of a “catastrophic failure to tackle inequality” well before the pandemic struck, according to a report from Oxfam International.

“Governments’ catastrophic failure to tackle inequality meant the majority of the world’s countries were critically ill-equipped to weather the pandemic,” said Oxfam interim executive director Chema Vera. “No country on earth was trying hard enough to reduce inequality and ordinary people are bearing the brunt of this crisis as a result. Millions of people have been pushed into poverty and hunger and there have been countless unnecessary deaths.”

Short on cash, Trump campaign can’t keep up with Biden

Donald Trump’s campaign is so desperate to raise cash that it’s begun offering deep discounts on the merch it sells. The campaign’s Columbus Day “flash sale” comes amid signs that the campaign could go broke before balloting ends Nov. 3.

“For a limited time, YOU can use code COLUMBUS to get 30% OFF your ENTIRE ORDER,” screamed an email I received over the weekend, the latest in an endless stream of pitches offering Trump goods.

There was a chance to win a signed Trump-Pence football or gain membership in an exclusive “100 club” and other offerings that are unlike anything that any other campaign I know of has ever made.

The 30% discount on routine goods stamped Trump-Pence just three weeks before balloting ends suggests that his campaign ordered a lot more merch than wanted by his eroding fan base.

Those items pitched specifically by email did sell. On Oct. 1 the Trump-Pence campaign sent me and many others this pitch, a curious one given that Trump says he is a teetotaler:

 

Trump pint glasses

 

The accompanying email said Trump “wants to do something special for you to show you how much your steadfast support means to him. He’s asked us to give you EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to get our BRAND-NEW Official 2020 Make America Great Again Pint Glasses. These beautiful, American-made pint glasses are already FLYING off the shelves, but if you place an order in the NEXT HOUR, we’ll make sure you get a set before they’re gone. These will sell out FAST, so don’t wait.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone gullible enough to believe that malarkey, but those quite ordinary beer glasses sold out in a few days. So did a prissy Trump “freedom hat” pitched in a similar fashion.

But you can still buy Trump-Pence “peaceful protester” women’s t-shirts in sizes up to 3XL for $30 in any color so long as it’s white. Plenty more is still available for 30% off including hoodies ($55), MAGA dog collars and a Trump coloring book for kids. At least the coloring book doesn’t show Trump in a Superman shirt, which a Trump aide told The New York Times he proposed to wear under his suit when he left the hospital so he could rip off the business attire mimicking Clark Kent. You can’t make up stuff like this.

Like the stream of daily emails I get saying I am the “only” person who didn’t respond to a text or how personally disappointed Trump is in me or how he wants me to have an autographed Trump-Pence football, it’s all to scam the people he claims to love. Trump calls them the “poorly educated.” I call them the con man’s marks.

Big loser

When it comes to campaign raising funds, Trump is turning out to be a big loser compared with Joe Biden. The Trump campaign, the Republican National Committeen and their affiliated fundraising combined raised $210 million in August. That’s a lot of money, though still well below the record set in July 2008 by Barack Obama. Adjusted for inflation the Obama campaign raised $236 million that month.

But Trump’s haul paled next to Biden’s. For each dollar Trump raised in August the Biden campaign brought in $1.74. Biden’s record-breaking August total was $364.5 million.

Neither campaign has said yet how well they did in September. But the Biden campaign, playing smug and coy with The Associated Press, said when it files its report the September number will be bigger than August. That would be two record-breaking months in a row. It also would mean Biden can spend at least $729 million on top of the more than $100 million already on hand. This means that in just the last month of the campaign, Biden can spend on television and a ground game what Trump’s campaign wasted in the first half of this year.

For Trump, the awful truth is that his campaign lacks money for television ads. From the Tuesday after Labor Day through the end of September, the Biden campaign spent $109 million on TV ads. Trump spent just $45 million, NBC News calculated.

Dwindling cash

The incumbent’s cash has dwindled to the point where campaign staffers no longer fly with their hero on Air Force One. Our government recoups the cost of those seats for other than official business at top drawer charter rates. Instead, Trump campaign staffers now fly commercial in the cheap seats.

Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission contain an astonishing fact that shows just how bad Trump is at handling money. From January through July his campaign and its affiliates spent $350 million to find and develop more donors. That’s nearly half of the $800 million his campaign blew through.

Among the dubious expenses in trying to find new donors was $156,000 for small aircraft to tow Trump-Pence banners above crowds of beachgoers and others.

All that massive spending was a big loser. The revenue raised since July didn’t come close to paying back the investment. And that’s despite steadily rising promises of match money. They started out at a dollar for dollar match. Now the email pitches claim if I donate to Trump my campaign contribution will be matched 800%. On Monday afternoon I got an even larger match offer — 825%.

That spending was, however, consistent with Trump’s lifelong pattern. Money burns big holes in his pockets. Acquiring a valuable asset that could throw off cash for decades is never interesting to Trump. He prefers to sell out early and pocket instant cash.

Had he hung onto the thousands of apartments he and his siblings inherited from their father two decades ago they would be awash in a forest of greenbacks because that was when our era of rising real estate values and rising rents began.

Alas, Donald persuaded his siblings to sell out before the market rose. Rich as they are, the Trumps would be vastly richer if they had not listened to their profligate brother’s artless deal.

Spending the most doesn’t always result in victory at the ballot box. But the flood of money flowing to Biden and the dwindling sums flowing to Trump tells us one thing. Those Americans voting with their wallets in the last few months overwhelmingly favor Biden.

Political bias in media doesn’t threaten democracy — other, less visible biases do

Charges of media bias – that “the media” are trying to brainwash Americans by feeding the public only one side of every issue – have become as common as the hope that the presidential race will end safely … and soon.

As a political scientist who has examined media coverage of the Trump presidency and campaigns, I can say that this is what social science research tells us about media bias.

First, media bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Communications scholars have found that if you ask people in any community, using scientific polling methods, whether their local media are biased, you’ll find that about half say yes. But of that half, typically a little more than a quarter say that their local media are biased against Republicans, and a little less than a quarter say the same local media are biased against Democrats.

Research shows that Republicans and Democrats spot bias only in articles that clearly favor the other party. If an article tilts in favor of their own party, they tend to see it as unbiased.

Many people, then, define “bias” as “anything that doesn’t agree with me.” It’s not hard to see why.

Sometimes Fox News, the media outlet for conservative viewers, does its own media criticism. Here, anchor Sean Hannity tells viewers “What the mob and the media will never tell you…”

“Media” is a plural word

American party politics has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Republicans have become more consistently conservative, and Democrats have become more consistently liberal to moderate.

As the lines have been drawn more clearly, many people have developed hostile feelings toward the opposition party.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 45% of Republicans said the Democratic Party’s policies are “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,” and 41% of Democrats said the same about Republicans.

Not surprisingly, media outlets have arisen to appeal primarily to people who share a conservative view, or people who share a liberal view.

That doesn’t mean that “the media” are biased. There are hundreds of thousands of media outlets in the U.S. – newspapers, radio, network TV, cable TV, blogs, websites and social media. These news outlets don’t all take the same perspective on any given issue. If you want a very conservative news site, it is not hard to find one, and the same with a very liberal news site.

First Amendment rules

“The media,” then, present a variety of different perspectives. That’s the way a free press works.

The Constitution’s First Amendment says Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of the press. It doesn’t say that Congress shall require all media sources to be “unbiased.” Rather, it implies that as long as Congress does not systematically suppress any particular point of view, then the free press can do its job as one of the primary checks on a powerful government.

When the Constitution was written and for most of U.S. history, the major news sources – newspapers, for most of that time – were explicitly biased. Most were sponsored by a political party or a partisan individual.

The notion of objective journalism – that media must report both sides of every issue in every story – barely existed until the late 1800s. It reached full flower only in the few decades when broadcast television, limited to three major networks, was the primary source of political information.

Since that time, the media universe has expanded to include huge numbers of internet news sites, cable channels and social media posts. So if you feel that the media sources you’re reading or watching are biased, you can read a wider variety of media sources.

If it bleeds, it leads

There is one form of actual media bias. Almost all media outlets need audiences in order to exist. Some can’t survive financially without an audience; others want the prestige that comes from attracting a big audience.

Thus, the media define as “news” the kinds of stories that will attract an audience: those that feature drama, conflict, engaging pictures and immediacy. That’s what most people find interesting. They don’t want to read a story headlined “Dog bites man.” They want “Man bites dog.”

The problem is that a focus on such stories crowds out what we need to know to protect our democracy, such as: How do the workings of American institutions benefit some groups and disadvantage others? In what ways do our major systems – education, health care, national defense and others – function effectively or less effectively?

These analyses are vital to us as citizens – if we fail to protect our democracy, our lives will be changed forever – but they aren’t always fun to read. So they get covered much less than celebrity scandals or murder cases – which, while compelling, don’t really affect our ability to sustain a democratic system.

Writer Dave Barry demonstrated this media bias in favor of dramatic stories in a 1998 column.

He wrote, “Let’s consider two headlines. FIRST HEADLINE: ‘Federal Reserve Board Ponders Reversal of Postponement of Deferral of Policy Reconsideration.’ SECOND HEADLINE: ‘Federal Reserve Board Caught in Motel with Underage Sheep.’ Be honest, now. Which of these two stories would you read?”

By focusing on the daily equivalent of the underage sheep, media can direct our attention away from the important systems that affect our lives. That isn’t the media’s fault; we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract.

But as long as we think of governance in terms of its entertainment value and media bias in terms of Republicans and Democrats, we’ll continue to be less informed than we need to be. That’s the real media bias.

Marjorie Hershey, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Indiana University

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

Undoing the damage done: What will it take to rebuild what’s left of our government?

Who remembers Tom Price? Gee, you might say, that name sounds familiar … he had something to do with the Trump administration, didn’t he?

You’re right! He was one of those guys who resigned from a cabinet position because he was abusing something … let me see … think I’ve got it … he was the one who took all those flights on private jets, something like a million dollars worth of flights, including on military aircraft during trips to Europe and Africa with his wife. He refunded $51,887 to the federal government, which he said accounted for the cost of his seat on private charter flights he took before he resigned from Trump’s cabinet. But that was just the cost of his seat. The total amount spent to fly old Tom Price around the world on private jets was more than $400,000 in taxpayer dollars. 

What cabinet position did he hold that made it necessary for so many trips on chartered private jets and other business aircraft? What was he doing that was so important that he was flying back and forth to Europe and Africa and making trips to Aspen and Salt Lake City and Nashville, and basically jetting all over the place on the taxpayers’ dime and staying in first-class hotels and eating out at expensive restaurants and taking his wife along with him a lot of the time? Oh, I remember! He was the secretary of Health and Human Services. He was the dude who resigned after only 231 days in office, the shortest term ever served by an HHS secretary. Price had been a right-wing congressman from Georgia who during his term in the House voted multiple times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, supported a Republican plan to privatize Medicare, voted to defund Planned Parenthood and sponsored the “Right to Life Act,” which would have defined life as beginning at conception and banned all abortions and many forms of contraception. 

Busy, busy man, old Tom, with all those flights around the world and fighting to repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood and banning abortion. Took up a lot of his time. In fact, it took up the time he could have spent studying the plan to contain pandemics which was left for him at the Department of Health and Human Services by the Obama administration. But old Tom Price didn’t study that plan, did he? No, he shelved the Obama pandemic plan, where it stayed as his successor, Alex Azar, was appointed. So it was Azar who was running HHS when COVID hit in February of this year, and it was Azar who left the pandemic plan on the shelf and was first put in charge of the pandemic task force at the White House, until Vice President Pence took over that job. It was Azar who appointed Brian Harrison, a 37-year-old former labradoodle breeder with zero education and zero background in public health as the department’s top man in charge of organizing the HHS response to the COVID crisis. Now he has overseen the appointment of two more nonentities with no background in public health or epidemiology to keep Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield “in line,” and to control messaging on the coronavirus pandemic coming out of the department. Oh, I almost forgot: Azar also supports ending the Affordable Care Act and defunding Planned Parenthood and banning abortion and every other whacked-out right wing idea that ever came down the pike.

Are you beginning to get the picture here? Health and Human Services is just one Trump cabinet department that has been led by not one, but two half-wit hacks and undercut by the White House from Day One. Both HHS and CDC have been hollowed out and weakened under the control of the Trump White House while some 220,000 Americans have lost their lives and 8 million more have been infected by the COVID virus.

Trump’s ravaging of the rest of the government has followed the same script. Remember Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency? He lasted just about a year before he resigned under the cloud of investigations by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the Government Accountability Office, the EPA inspector general and 11 other federal agencies and congressional committees. Pruitt was another Trumpazoid incompetent who flew around on chartered jets and used EPA employees to reserve tables for dinner at exclusive Washington restaurants. He set the EPA on a course to undo nearly every Obama administration environmental accomplishment. He fired all the scientists on the Board of Scientific Counselors and replaced them with representatives of industries regulated by the EPA. 

When he left the agency in disgrace, Pruitt was replaced by his deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, who proceeded apace to continue the fine legacy left to him by his predecessor. Wheeler has weakened regulations on coal fired electrical plants and declined to raise standards for “fine soot pollution” under a mandated review. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, Wheeler’s EPA announced that it would not enforce regulations for “routine compliance monitoring [of pollution], integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training and reporting or certification obligations.” In other words, polluting industries, here’s your get-out-of-jail-free COVID card, courtesy of your friendly EPA.

Donald Trump’s pillaging of the rest of the federal government is equally astonishing. He’s gone through cabinet secretaries like they were an order of Big Macs. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson? Gone early on, replaced by Mike Pompeo. Attorney General Jeff Sessions? Out the door in disgrace. In his place, the odious Bill Barr (after a brief appearance by the totally incompetent Matt Whitaker). Secretary of Energy Rick Perry? Bye-bye in a blink. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta? Resigned in disgrace for his connection to a kid-gloves plea arrangement with famed pedophile and presidential friend Jeffrey Epstein. Secretary of Defense James Mattis? Resigned in protest against Trump’s haphazard misuse of U.S. military forces. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke? Resigned rather than face federal investigation for using his office for personal gain. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats? Ousted in a Trumpian power play to politicize the intelligence community.

Trump has proceeded to appoint acting secretaries to replace expired acting secretaries. Recently, one of his attempts to get around the rules hit a wall when a federal judge in Montana ordered the removal of the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, who he found had been serving illegally for 400 days without Senate confirmation. Pendley has been an advocate of selling federal lands to the states or private citizens.

There is more, much, much more, but you get the picture. The damage Trump will be leaving to Joe Biden is incalculable. The death toll caused by his mismanagement of the COVID crisis and the numbers of infections increase by the thousands seemingly every day. The only good thing about a hollowed-out federal government will be the thousands of appointments Biden will be able to make upon taking office, and the dozens of executive orders he’ll be able to sign reversing Trump’s giveaways to polluters, drug companies and corrupt corporations.

All we’ve got to do is get out and vote to make that happen.

Is the pandemic making us drink more, or less? It’s complicated

Are people drinking more or less during the pandemic? It’s a question that’s been on the mind of researchers, and the public alike. Humans often turn to alcohol in difficult times, which comes with its own problems: research shows that when you turn to drinking to cope with stress it’s more likely to turn into a problem. Yet as recently as last year, studies found that American millennials just weren’t that into drinking, perhaps because of related trends in wellness and healthy lifestyles. 

Now that we’re seven months into the pandemic, researchers are beginning to look at data and polls to study how drinking behaviors have changed.

According to a recent report in the journal JAMA Network Open, Americans are drinking 14 percent more often during the coronavirus pandemic. The study compared responses from a survey of 1,540 participants of their self-reported drinking habits in spring to the year prior. For women, the increase was up to 17 percent compared to last year. Specifically, heavy drinking for women—which was defined as four or more drinks within a couple of hours—increased by 41 percent. The study’s participants were between the ages of 30 and 80; the data collected was from the RAND Corporation American Life Panel.

“Women were particularly affected in our data,” Michael Pollard, a sociologist and co-author of the paper told Salon. “The higher baseline distress, and likely greater increases in distress during the pandemic, suggest that women will similarly increase the use of alcohol to cope at higher levels than men; it is certainly a concern.”

Pollard said since women typically have higher levels of mental distress than men, coupled with larger increases in domestic labor at home, it’s no surprise that women reported drinking more than men once the pandemic started. The pandemic has had a greater economic and social impact on women than men. Women, and particularly women of color, are more likely to be “essential” workers, too, who are under particular stress.

“Heavy alcohol use by women specifically has been somewhat overlooked by the scientific literature, but clearly it is a real and growing concern,” Pollard told Salon. “For example, some of my colleagues at RAND conducted a review of the last 20 years of assessments of the efficacy of Alcohol Use Disorder treatments, and concluded that we simply don’t have scientific evidence to inform whether or not those treatments are as effective for women as men—because nobody has set out to study it, and because women are systematically under-enrolled in these studies.”

Indeed this study’s findings are congruent with what was reported on at the beginning of the pandemic. In the United States, alcohol sales increased by 55 percent the week ending March 21, 2020, compared to the previous year, according to Nielsen data. But this was also during a time when people were stockpiling because it was unclear whether or not the groceries stores would be safe, and how long the lockdown restrictions would last.

According to a separate study by researchers at Washington State University, one in four adults reported a change in alcohol use immediately after stay-at-home orders were issued. Interestingly, the study surveyed more than 900 twin pairs from March 26 to April 5, 2020. An estimated 14 percent of respondents said they drank more alcohol than the week prior.

“We expected that down the road people might turn to alcohol after the stay-at-home orders were issued, but apparently it happened right off the bat,” Ally Avery, lead author of the study and a scientific operations manager at WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, said in a statement. “It shows the need to make sure there is more mental health support since it had an impact on people right away.”

The situation varies between countries, curiously. A study by researchers at the University College London found that young Australians are actually drinking less during lockdown, partly because of the lack of social opportunities. Those who reported drinking less reports that they’ve had an improved financial situation and physical health. Similarly, a July poll from Alcohol Change UK found that 37 percent of 1,647 UK residents surveyed had attempted to manage their alcohol consumption during lockdown by having alcohol-free days, reducing the amount of alcohol they purchased, or attending a virtual support group. However, the same study did find that one in five of drinkers surveyed were drinking more frequently during the pandemic.

Notably, before the pandemic, Americans were drinking more than they were just prior to Prohibition.

“Consumption has been going up. Harms (from alcohol) have been going up,” Dr. Tim Naimi, an alcohol researcher at Boston University, told AP News in January. “And there’s not been a policy response to match it.”

Yet, as mentioned briefly above, there is a nascent movement of younger people abstaining. In the last few years, so-called “Dry January” — a monthlong abstinence from alcohol drinks — has become trendy.

“I have seen preliminary studies that suggest depression and anxiety peaked early in the pandemic, but returned back to normal after a month or two,” Pollard said. “A big question now is, will alcohol use behaviors persist, or will they go back to the way they were before COVID-19?”

It will be interesting to see if, as the pandemic continues apace, Dry January is popular in 2021.

All things considered, it appears that drinking patterns have bifurcated. Some drinkers now drink more, and others abstain more. The polar reaction suggests that many have reconsidered the role of alcohol in their life.

Steve Bannon’s back: Ex-adviser says Trump plans to claim victory early

One of President Trump’s most loyal propagandists is predicting that Trump will claim victory on election night as soon as he is ahead among Election Day voters. But that scenario is based on a misconception of how all ballots are counted and the early returns are compiled, according to election and legal experts.

“At 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock… on November 3, Donald J. Trump is going to walk into the Oval Office, and he may hit a tweet before he goes in there… and he’s going to sit there, having won Ohio, and being up in Pennsylvania and Florida, and he’s going to say, ‘Hey, game’s over,'” said Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO and former White House adviser, during a defiant speech on October 10 forum hosted by the Young Republican Federation of Virginia.

“The elites are traumatized. They do not want to go stand in line and vote. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a game-changer,” Bannon said. “It [the decisive factor] is what electorate shows up to vote on a vote that can be certified. That’s a vote that counts. And right now, what they [Trump critics] don’t want to talk about, is Donald J. Trump leads on people who are actually going to show up and vote on November 3, by 21 percent.”

Bannon’s prediction that Trump would defy norms by asserting that he won before indisputable victory margins were reported was not just another sign that Trump would not heed the rules governing 2020’s election. Bannon’s fiery speech was a glimpse into a propagandist’s mindset that drew on smears and distortions to fan partisan ill will. But his prediction of how Trump could claim an early victory was based on a flawed premise, because no early returns on election night were only going to contain the in-person votes cast on Election Day.

“The first reports are the county totals,” said Chris Sautter, an attorney who has specialized in post-election challenges and recounts for decades. “You don’t get the breakdowns [of votes cast in different categories such as early voting, mail-in votes, Election Day votes, and overseas votes] until after election night. It depends on the state.”

Other election administration experts confirmed that the election night returns would be a mix of all of the earliest votes cast—from early in-person voting sites, from absentee ballots that had been returned and processed, and from in-person voting on Election Day. (As of October 15, more than 16 million absentee ballots had been returned or cast in early voting, the U.S. Elections Project said.)

“There’s literally not a single credible journalist or analyst who would look at early returns in a close race with many ballots left to count and declare victory,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “If counting of all ballots magically ended at midnight on election night, we would have had a President Gore, and Donald Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency.”

“Most importantly, to do so would be to disenfranchise the millions of men and women in the military whose votes often don’t arrive until after Election Day,” Becker continued. “That said, many early in-person ballots and early-received mail ballots will be processed on election night, especially in states that allow early pre-processing of those ballots, such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio. So, many votes may be reported out that night.”

Sautter and Becker, a former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section attorney, operate in a world where facts, laws and election procedure dictate who wins elections—including post-election jury-like proceedings to ascertain voter intent on contested ballots. But the world of legal opinion is not the same as the sphere of public opinion, which is where Trump and Bannon shape narratives based on feelings, grievances and disinformation.

“Trump’s strategy is to create chaos, uncertainty,” Sautter said. “What Bannon is saying is if Trump is ahead on election night, I’m sure he will declare victory. Trump [also] may take some kind of legal action to try to stop the counting. I can’t imagine that would be successful. It would be like Florida in 2018. They [Republicans] filed a suit there and it got thrown out.”

“Distinguishing between these two things [electoral facts and fantasies] is really important,” said Justin Levitt, who oversaw the DOJ’s voting rights enforcement in the Obama administration. “I think there will be lots of the latter. I think there will be suits filed. I think there will be people screaming. I think there will be lots of tweets. What I have been saying of late is reminding people that a lawsuit without provable facts is just a tweet with a filing fee.”

White noise

But back in rural Virginia, Bannon spun out a narrative to a rapt audience that was filled with innuendo, grievances, premonitions and assumptions that the vote would be stolen.

“I don’t like loose talk about civil war, but I got to tell you,” Bannon continued, “when you hear what the Democrats are saying, what their rhetoric is. Remember, Hillary Clinton, their last presidential candidate, what did she say? Under no circumstances—no circumstances—is Joe Biden to concede… They’re going to keep counting until they get 270 Electoral [College] votes for Joe Biden, right? They are going to be voting by the pound and voting by the pallet.”

Actually, Clinton urged Biden not to concede on election night when votes were being counted, which is not the same as never conceding.

Bannon’s deliberate exaggerations and accusations about manufacturing votes went deeper than GOP cliches about Democratic cheating. Bannon has long promoted a white-centric nationalism, notably as the former head of Breitbart News. Now, flying in the face of both democracy and fact, he is asserting that in-person voting on Election Day is more American, and is more accurate, than voting beforehand via a mailed-out absentee ballot.

“They can’t beat Trump in the traditional way Americans have voted for 200 years,” Bannon said. “You go into a booth, close the curtain. Only two folks know, you and God, know who you vote for. Write it down, bang, done. You vote by mail—look, I vote by mail. Sometimes, I’m [an] absentee [voter]. I understand it is a risk. Multiple people are going to put their hand on your ballot. And it may not end up being certifiable. That’s the risk I took.”

Rather than unpacking Bannon’s distortions and contradictions—for example, absentee ballots originated in the 19th century’s Civil War, and Trump votes by mail—it is important to grasp the big picture he painted. Bannon relegated votes cast by millions of people, dominated by Biden supporters, into a second-class status. And he disparaged people voting with an absentee ballot as weak and un-American, because they had fallen for media reports about the pandemic.

“You chose not to go to a poll,” Bannon said. “The reason you chose is your mass media apparatus, which has dominated this country, was irresponsible and caused mass hysteria on your voters. That’s your problem. You’re not going to make your problem the nation’s problem. And we will not back down one inch. And I’ll tell you who is going to join us in that, a guy named Donald J. Trump.”

The driving force behind Bannon’s narrative, apart from a desire to keep Trump and the GOP in power, was polls and other voter data showing that more Trump supporters were planning to vote on Election Day and more Biden supporters were intending to vote with absentee ballots. In recent weeks, many Democrats have shifted their plans to voting early at in-person sites.

Bannon, nonetheless, built upon the lie that the pandemic was not a threat. He exaggerated problems in the little-known process of vetting returned absentee ballots. In that administrative process, a voter’s identity is first verified by officials who review how their ballot-return envelope has been filled out and signed. Only then are ballots taken out and counted.

Bannon claimed that in New York City’s June 2020 presidential primary, 30 percent of absentee ballots in Brooklyn and 20 percent of absentee ballots in Manhattan were disqualified because voters did not properly fill out envelopes or returned them too late. (Those high rejection rates did not occur across both boroughs, but only in specific localized settings. In 2018, the national rejection rate for absentee ballots was 1.4 percent, federal data reported. In Florida in 2019, it was 1.2 percent. In Wisconsin’s primary this past April, it was 1.8 percent. Sloppy signatures, lines left empty and mistakes with filling out the envelope were the leading causes.)

“Right now… they’ve requested 1.5 million absentee ballots in Pennsylvania,” Bannon said. “Ten to 20 percent will not be certifiable. What that means is it [is] going to be a dogfight in those rooms [in county offices where returned ballots are processed]. Remember, every ballot that can be certified should be certified. And that ballot should count. That’s a vote. But you’ve got a lot of things that you [absentee voters] have got to check off to get to certification, because you chose—you chose—not to go to a poll.”

As of October 15, Democrats requested 1.7 million ballots, Republicans requested 652,000 ballots, and other voters requested 290,000 ballots, the U.S. Elections Project reported.

Democrats and voting rights groups have filed scores of lawsuits to ensure that voters who incorrectly fill out a ballot-return envelope, or whose ballot is postmarked in time but does not arrive at election offices until after Election Day, will still have their votes counted. The Trump campaign and its allies similarly have intervened in those suits and filed their own suits to limit voting and vote counting options. Both parties are trying to shape the rules to their benefit, but some GOP suits are being filed for propaganda purposes and to undermine the results.

“Some of the lawsuits are being filed to generate public conversation that is misinformation or misleading about the illegitimacy of the process, about the existence of widespread voter fraud. These [claims] are not true,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It’s the same challenge that exists outside the litigation context. This has been part of the president’s M.O. in the lead-up to this election.”

There was no Democratic counterpoint to Trump’s assertions that the expansion of voting by mail in response to the pandemic was inherently fraud-ridden, which Bannon implied.

“They just keep counting until they win,” he said. “It’s got to be fought. And where it’s got to be fought is folks like you, as election officials, in that room, no back[ing] down. Every ballot has got to be certified. If it’s by the rules, it’s good. If it has any, a scintilla of not good, it’s not certifiable. Sorry, not sorry, right?”

While Bannon predicted that Trump would declare victory based on partial results, and his campaign would fight to disqualify as many absentee ballots as possible, Bannon repeatedly said that it was the Democrats and their allies who were going to cheat to steal the 2020 election.

“We’re not going to allow this election to be stolen, either through some shenanigans in the courts or some shenanigans in mail-in ballots that nobody can actually process,” he said. “That will not happen. And the way to make sure that does not happen is, number one, set the predicate on November 3 [by Trump declaring early that he won]. Once we set that predicate that Trump’s the winner on Election Day, that is mighty hard to unwind.”

“He’s [Trump] is not going to go quietly into that good night, trust me,” Bannon continued. “He’s going to put up a big victory on… [November 3] and he’s going to want his troops to back him up on it. So, look, we have a long haul. I don’t think this thing will be determined… until right before Inauguration Day… The Democrats have no intention of conceding.”

Bannon’s narrative hinges on his belief—which may be shared by Trump—that officials will segregate Election Day votes from the other ballots that have been cast and counted by election night. But that’s not how officials count and release early returns. Moreover, those early returns will include a record number of voters who cast their absentee ballots early and who voted at early voting sites.

American elections do not have separate and unequal ballots.

“We’ve always counted ballots for days after Election Day, and we will do so once again,” said Becker. “This is normal, and anyone who seeks to change the rules and put an artificial deadline on the process only reveals their ignorance.”

Alaska GOP senator routinely voted for policies that benefited family’s chemical company

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who faces an unexpectedly tight challenge from Democratic-backed independent Al Gross, has repeatedly cast votes in favor of policies that benefit the financial interests of his family’s multinational industrial manufacturing company.

Sullivan, first elected in 2014, has come under scrutiny in recent weeks as Democratic-aligned groups pour money into the Alaska race in a surprising effort to expand the electoral map. A recent investigation by Popular Investigation detailed connections between Sullivan and corporate donors pushing to develop Pebble Mine, a sprawling project in a part of Alaska home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a number of federally sanctioned tribal governments.

The Republican incumbent’s committee appointments and voting record reviewed by Salon appear to show links to another industrial interest with a record of environmental negligence: Republic Powdered Metals International (RPM), a sealant and coating manufacturer founded by his grandfather in 1947. Sullivan’s older brother, Frank, is the current CEO.

Senate records show that Sullivan holds between $1 million and $5 million in RPM stock. He has reported earning up to $300,000 in dividends and capital gains since filing his first financial disclosure in 2014. He has augmented that income with eight stock sales since 2018, bringing in a total of $495,000, the disclosures show.

Reached for comment, Sullivan campaign spokesperson Matt Shuckerow told Salon, “Unlike Al Gross’ closest adviser, former Sen. Mark Begich, who actively day-traded while in office, Sen. Sullivan has long delegated the oversight of his investments to financial advisers.”

The Associated Press reported in 2015 that Sullivan’s committee assignments, which oversee areas of interest to RPM, were his “top picks.”

“Sullivan said he is excited to get to work and pleased with his committee assignments, which he said were his top picks,” the outlet wrote. “Sullivan will serve on the committees of Commerce, Science and Transportation; Environment and Public Works; Armed Services; and Veterans’ Affairs.”

The Committee on Environment and Public Works conducts oversight for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has targeted RPM during Sullivan’s term. The conglomerate has paid more than $2.2 million in fines since 2015 to various environmental regulatory agencies, including the EPA, for violating the Clean Air Act and chemical reporting requirements, among other citations. 

RPM expressed its frustration with government oversight in its July 2020 annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, claiming that the government had burdened the company with “numerous, complicated and often increasingly stringent environmental, health and safety laws and regulations.”

That filing shows that an RPM subsidiary called Carboline agreed to a $1.3 million settlement with the EPA for violating the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act after a citation for what the company characterized as “the release or threatened release of hazardous substances” at the Lammers Barrel Superfund site in Beavercreek, Ohio. The final amount was still subject to approval at the time of the filing. 

Other subsidiaries of RPM have also been hit with fines in previous years. New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection filed a $192,000 citation with Kirker Enterprises in 2019 for failing to fully meet conditions for an air permit. 

Rust-Oleum, another RPM subsidiary, agreed to a $168,000 settlement in 2018 with the EPA for violating hazardous waste reporting requirements at its plant in Williamsport, Maryland. The same plant paid out another $133,000 one year later. (No waste was released, according to the EPA.) 

RPM paid out another $181,000 to the EPA in 2017 for violations of the Clean Air Act by Rust-Oleum. Its 2018 SEC filing disclosed that Rust-Oleum had struck a $455,000 settlement with California’s air quality regulator regarding hazardous compounds.

In committee, Sullivan voted against EPA regulations for certain harmful carcinogen contained in sealants manufactured and sold by RPM, such as formaldehyde. He also voted against a 2015 amendment which would have strengthened asbestos regulations. In the previous year, RPM subsidiary Bondex had paid $800 million to settle asbestos claims, pushing it to file for bankruptcy.

That amendment would have designated asbestos as a “high priority chemical for regulation under the law,” according to Congressional Quarterly. Sullivan’s vote was consequential, in that the committee rejected the amendment by a margin of two votes.

Sullivan also voted to confirm two EPA administrators nominated by President Trump — Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, the agency’s current head — who both later blocked proposed Obama-era regulations of a chemical implicated in a wrongful death lawsuit pending against an RPM subsidiary. Both nominees were confirmed along party lines.

The woman who brought the wrongful death suit settled with Rust-Oleum in June 2020. She also sued the EPA in 2019 for refusing to ban the chemical outright. That case remains pending.

In committee, Sullivan voted against a number of amendments to the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act to strengthen EPA oversights on chemical companies and compounds contained in RPM products. One amendment would have imposed new compliance requirements, while another would have required the EPA to consider the threat the substances posed to drinking water. Both amendments failed, and in the case of the latter amendment, Sullivan’s vote was decisive. (The amendment failed on a tied 10-10 vote.)

Sullivan also cast a pivotal vote on an amendment which would have allowed the EPA to investigate pollutants and toxic substances that may cause cancer and other disease clusters.

Throughout this time, RPM lobbied continually against environmental regulations and compliance standards that, in the company’s words, “could subject us to unforeseen future expenditures or liabilities, which could have a material adverse affect on our business.” Targets included the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act. 

The company’s CEO — Sullivan’s brother — commended the Trump administration’s approach to environmental regulations, telling Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2017 that he approved of the president’s “lighter regulatory touch.”

Sullivan, who sat on committees charged with overseeing military construction budgets and veterans’ affairs, also voted for budget expansions that opened new opportunities for RPM to secure millions in federal contracts, federal records searches show.

Beyond Sullivan’s stock sales and dividends, his campaigns have received more than $70,000 from RPM employees and executives. The company’s PAC contributed the maximum $10,000 to Sullivan’s 2020 re-election campaign, federal filings show.

Sullivan’s Senate office and RPM International did not reply to Salon’s requests for comment.

Melania Trump’s “aggrieved and self-pitying” White House blog post blows up in her face

First lady Melania Trump is airing her personal grievances on the White House website to the astonishment of readers.

President Donald Trump’s wife bashed her former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who recently published a tell-all book about the first lady and her family, in a blog post on the official White House website, reported Politico.

“As a country, we cannot continue to get lost in the noise of negativity and encourage ambition by those who seek only to promote themselves,” Melania Trump wrote.

“I have most recently found this to be the case as major news outlets eagerly covered salacious claims made by a former contractor who advised my office,” she added. “A person who said she ‘made me’ even though she hardly knew me, and someone who clung to me after my husband won the Presidency.”

Winston Wolkoff released recordings of her conversations with the first lady, who can be heard complaining about decorating the White House for Christmas and griping about criticism of the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.

“This is a woman who secretly recorded our phone calls, releasing portions from me that were out of context, then wrote a book of idle gossip trying to distort my character,” Melania Trump wrote. “Her ‘memoir’ included blaming me for her ailing health from an accident she had long ago, and for bad news coverage that she brought upon herself and others. Never once looking within at her own dishonest behavior and all in an attempt to be relevant. These kinds of people only care about their personal agenda — not about helping others.”

Social media users who saw the post were aghast.

Trump rejects California request for federal disaster aid to recover from catastrophic wildfires

After repeatedly downplaying the catastrophic wildfires that have ravaged California in recent months and falsely attributing the blazes to poor “forest management,” the Trump administration this week denied Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for federal disaster assistance needed to recover from the destruction the fires inflicted across the state.

The Los Angeles Times reported late Thursday that the Trump White House “rejected California’s request for disaster relief funds aimed at cleaning up the damage from six recent fires… including Los Angeles County’s Bobcat fire, San Bernardino County’s El Dorado fire, and the Creek fire, one of the largest that continues to burn in Fresno and Madera counties.”

Newsom, a Democrat, officially requested the federal relief in a September 28 letter warning that “the longer it takes for California and its communities to recover, the more severe, devastating, and irreversible the economic impacts will be.” According to the governor’s office, nearly 1,000 California homes were destroyed by the unprecedented fires, which scientists said were fueled by the human-caused climate crisis.

“Federal assistance is critical to support physical and economic recovery of California and its communities,” Newsom wrote.

The White House’s decision to reject California’s request was met with outrage by environmentalists and lawmakers who represent the state.

“On August 21, I led a 26-member letter asking [the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security] to investigate whether Donald Trump previously ordered FEMA to cut off wildfire aid to CA because ‘politically it wasn’t a base for him,'” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). “Now POTUS is in fact rejecting aid to CA this year. Despicable.”

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus tweeted that he “actually can’t believe this, and there’s been a lot happening lately. Trump must go.”

“That a sitting president—of any party—would deny their own citizens help during their time of greatest need, amid literal hellfire raining down on American cities, is beyond shameful,” Holthaus wrote.

“How President Trump continues to treat California is sadistic and depraved,” tweeted the Democrat-controlled House Homeland Security Committee.

As the Times reported, “A major disaster declaration allows for cost-sharing for damage, cleanup and rebuilding between the state and federal government. It also activates federal programs led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. California did not ask for a specific dollar amount because damage estimates are not complete.”

California is expected to appeal the Trump administration’s denial of federal aid, which comes a month after the president told state officials that “it’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” as they pressed him to acknowledge and act on the connection between climate change and the destructive fires.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said, dismissing the established link between human activity and rising temperatures.

Brian Ferguson, deputy director of crisis communication and media relations for the California governor’s Office of Emergency Services, told the Times Thursday that the “true cost” of the damage caused by the historic fires “won’t be known for months or years afterward.”

“What the state is looking for is the highest level of federal support, which requires the highest bars be cleared,” said Ferguson. “But we feel our case for those requirements has been met.”

Who decides when vaccine studies are done? Internal documents show Fauci plays a key role

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, will oversee most of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials in the U.S., but not that of the current front-runner made by Pfizer, documents obtained by ProPublica show.

According to a draft charter spelling out how most of the advanced COVID-19 vaccine trials will be monitored, Fauci is the “designated senior representative” of the U.S. government who will be part of the first look at the results. That puts Fauci in the room with the companies — including Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca — in deciding whether the vaccines are ready to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Fauci’s role, which has not been previously reported and was confirmed for ProPublica by the National Institutes of Health, could offer some reassurance in the face of widespread concerns that President Donald Trump wants to rush through an unproven vaccine. As Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, put it at last week’s debate, “If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it.”

But there’s a big caveat. Fauci doesn’t have the same hands-on role for the vaccine that seems poised to show results soonest: Pfizer’s. That’s because Pfizer opted not to accept government funding and participate in the federal program to develop a coronavirus vaccine, known as Operation Warp Speed. (The government did make an almost $2 billion deal with Pfizer to preorder up to 600 million doses of the company’s vaccine, but it isn’t contributing money to the vaccine’s development like it is for other companies.)

“(We) offered opportunities for collaboration with Pfizer,” said a spokesperson for the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the NIH. “Pfizer chose to conduct their Phase 3 study without Operation Warp Speed or NIH support.”

Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said Friday that the earliest his company would be ready to apply for authorization would be the third week of November. While Pfizer might know by the end of October if its vaccine is effective, it would need additional time to gather sufficient safety data to present to the FDA, Bourla said in an open letter on the company’s website.

Fauci’s role in overseeing the companies that are participating in Operation Warp Speed arises from a unique arrangement that the government set up to monitor the trials. Typically, clinical trials set up their own independent panels of scientists, known as a data safety monitoring board or DSMB, to watch out for safety concerns or early signs of success. But all of the vaccine trials in Operation Warp Speed are sharing a common DSMB whose members were selected by Fauci’s agency, the NIAID. They’re also sharing a network of clinical trial sites where some volunteers are recruited for the studies.

A DSMB is responsible for making recommendations such as halting the trial if there is a safety concern or letting the manufacturer know that there’s enough evidence to submit an application to the FDA. Ordinarily, a DSMB’s recommendation goes to the company running the trial. In this case, the U.S. government — which gets two representatives, one from the NIAID and one from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — will also have a seat at the table in deciding what to do next.

“Once the DSMB makes a decision, the DSMB provides the recommendation to not only the study sponsor but also to the” U.S. government, whose “designated senior representative” is Fauci, the NIAID confirmed in an email. Fauci declined to be interviewed.

That’s not the same as saying Fauci has the last word. The company and the government are supposed to reach a consensus, the agency said. But if they can’t all agree, the ultimate decision belongs with the company.

Still, it would be an improbably brazen move for a company to move ahead over Fauci’s objection, given his public stature, experts said. “These are the most important trials in medical history, this is the ultimate fishbowl,” said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “I don’t think any sponsor would dare defy the DSMB’s recommendation.”

While the mechanics of a DSMB may be unfamiliar to most members of the public, people probably know and trust Fauci, according to Amy Pisani, executive director of the national nonprofit organization Vaccinate Your Family. “(He’s) the sweetheart of the nation right now,” Pisani said. “I do think people have faith in Anthony Fauci.”

“Having Fauci with oversight is terrific,” Topol added. “The more people who are experts looking at it, the better. You can’t be careful enough.”

Other members of the DSMB for the COVID-19 vaccines, though not as well known as Fauci, are also widely respected in their fields. DSMB members are typically kept confidential to shield them from outside influence, but ProPublica has been able to identify a few members. The charter obtained by ProPublica described the group, which has about a dozen members, as having expertise in “biostatistics, clinical trials, infectious diseases, vaccine development and ethics.”

The panel’s chair is Dr. Richard Whitley, a professor of pediatrics, microbiology, medicine and neurosurgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His role became public when the university announced it, though the webpage was later taken down.

His leadership provides another level of comfort in the trustworthiness of the trials to those who know him. “He is not only famously bright but he is famously independent and outspoken,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt Medicine. “He’ll look at the data and tell you exactly what he thinks.”

Whitley declined to comment.

Susan Ellenberg, professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania and a former director at the FDA, told ProPublica in an interview that many people, including herself, were worried the NIH might be “pushed by the political leadership at HHS to release data” from trials prematurely, which could undermine the integrity of a trial. HHS, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the NIH’s parent agency. Her concern was that political leaders might not understand scientific arguments to not disrupt the trials when wanting to have data “to be able to move quickly in an urgent situation,” she said.

At the time of the interview, Ellenberg had not identified herself as a member of the NIH’s DSMB, but later acknowledged that she was a member.

Dr. Malegapuru William Makgoba, an immunologist based in South Africa, is one of a few international members of the DSMB. Makgoba is well known for his work on public health initiatives around HIV/AIDS, including the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative. Makgoba confirmed his role on the DSMB but declined to comment further.

The common DSMB appears to be unprecedented, if only because there have not previously been multiple vaccines in development for the same disease at the same time. Experts said the arrangement offers benefits such as bolstering the evidence available to show that any one shot is safe and effective.

Standardizing trial measurements should make the vaccines easier to compare head to head, which may be useful for knowing whether one is better or worse than another in certain subgroups, such as the elderly or people with compromised immune systems, according to Vanderbilt’s Schaffner.

“To me, it’s better for public health to have a fairly common assessment,” said Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax, which has received $1.6 billion from Operation Warp Speed and hopes to begin its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. this month as part of the NIH’s clinical trial network.

There may also be some benefits from a safety perspective.

If a potential safety issue appears in one trial, having a common data safety monitoring board for multiple trials means that the board knows to look out for that same issue across all the trials, said Dr. Tal Zaks, chief medical officer of Moderna. “When AstraZeneca had an adverse side effect, we have a DSMB looking at our trial — the fact that it’s the same DSMB means that there’s not one DSMB that has to go educate another DSMB,” Zaks said. (ProPublica’s board chairman, Paul Sagan, is a member of Moderna’s board and a company stockholder.)

AstraZeneca’s trial has been put on hold in the U.S. while the company and the FDA investigates what happened with a participant who had a bad reaction. It’s not yet clear whether the reaction was due to the vaccine or unrelated.

“AstraZeneca is committed to working with governments and key partners to ensure we develop and gain regulatory approval for an effective vaccine as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement.

AstraZeneca added that another benefit of joining the government’s consortium was that its large network of trial sites can help reach minority communities that are historically less represented in clinical trials and also more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Pfizer’s decision not to participate means that it and the other companies may miss out on some of these benefits of pooling resources. “It’s at least unfortunate, and not very sporting, as the British would say,” Schaffner said.

At the same time, there could be advantages to Pfizer’s going solo. “One of the greatest risks to this process is the perception of political influence, and in that regard, having parallel efforts, especially efforts seen as independent of one another and/or independent of perceived sources of political influence, is a good thing,” said Mani Foroohar, an analyst at the investment bank SVB Leerink.

Pfizer declined to comment on its decision not to join the government’s shared DSMB and trial network.

Whether it’s Pfizer or one of the companies participating in Operation Warp Speed, the final say on whether a vaccine is ready for public use belongs to the FDA.

The FDA has promised to present the data to an advisory committee of external experts in a public meeting. A preliminary meeting will be held on Oct. 22 to discuss, generally, the standards the FDA will seek to see before authorizing any vaccine. The agency has also committed to holding advisory committee meetings to review data from individual vaccine candidates.

Between the independent trial safety monitoring boards and the public advisory committee meetings, “any kind of hanky-panky there that people are worried about is going to (go through) multiple checkpoints,” Fauci said in an interview with Dr. Howard Bachner on the JAMA Network podcast on Sept. 25. “The big elephant in the room is, is somebody going to try to make a political end run to interfere with the process? … If you look at the standard process of how these things work, I think you can feel comfortable that it is really unlikely that that is going to happen.”

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In Trump’s America, there is death before due process

The federal government’s killing of Michael Reinoehl exactly two months before the November 3 presidential race ought to have been one of the most high-profile election issues being discussed in America. Instead, it has been almost forgotten save for some media outlets starting to question the official narrative of his death. The little-known self-proclaimed “antifa” activist was killed by federal agents on September 3. Officers claimed that he had fired shots at them before being gunned down. But a week after his killing, the Washington Post found that “the wanted man wasn’t obviously armed.”

The Thurston County sheriff in Lacey, Washington, where the suspect was killed, released a public statement saying his investigation team “can confirm… that Mr. Reinoehl pointed the handgun that he had in his possession at the officers at the time of the shooting.” The U.S. Marshals Service whose forces were the ones that shot Reinoehl released a similar statement claiming that the fugitive task force that had been sent to his location “attempted to peacefully arrest him,” but, after being shot at, “Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene.”

News outlets took the official statements at their word and dutifully reported the incident as one where a suspected killer opened fire on officers and was fatally shot in the course of his arrest. In other words, there was “nothing to see here.” But according to a New York Times investigation six weeks after his death, it remains unclear “whether law enforcement officers made any serious attempt to arrest Mr. Reinoehl before killing him.”

According to nearly two dozen witnesses that the New York Times spoke to, “all but one said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give any commands before opening fire.” Even though Reinoehl was armed at the time of his death, his handgun was found in his pocket and an AR-style rifle in a bag in his car, suggesting he did not threaten the officers trying to arrest him as official accounts had initially claimed.

Reinoehl was wanted in connection to the fatal shooting of a Trump-supporting right-wing activist named Aaron J. Danielson during Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon. President Donald Trump ranted on Twitter on the day he was killed, “Why aren’t the Portland Police ARRESTING the cold blooded killer” and adding, “Everybody knows who this thug is.” Later he hailed the fatal shooting triumphantly, saying in a Fox News interview:

“We sent in the U.S. Marshals for the killer, the man who killed the young man on the street.… Two and a half days went by, and I put out [on Twitter], ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him, and they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

In referring to Reinoehl as a “cold blooded killer” and “violent criminal” even though at the time of his death he was a suspect, Trump made clear that in his America, “law and order” means you are guilty before being proven so and can be targeted for extrajudicial assassination if those in power decide you deserve it. Such shocking words coming from any other head of state in the world would trigger instant condemnations from the U.S. State Department. Speaking to his supporters, Trump boasted of the “great job” that U.S. Marshals did in Portland, adding meaningfully, “you know what I mean.”

Attorney General William Barr, who appears to have no understanding of how the nation’s system of criminal justice is supposed to work, released a statement praising the federal troops’ actions and echoing Trump’s words in more official-sounding language. Barr called Reinoehl, “a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer,” and said before any investigation into the killing was complete that “[w]hen Reinoehl attempted to escape arrest and produced a firearm, he was shot and killed by law enforcement officers.” In doing so, Barr too justified this extrajudicial assassination as Trump did and went as far as calling the whole incident, “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.” He applauded “the fugitive task force team that located Reinoehl and prevented him from escaping justice.”

To Barr, the top law enforcement official in the nation, “justice” meant death, rather than arrest followed by charges and a fair trial. To Barr and Trump, the constant drumbeat of “law and order” is essentially a promise to fatally punish those perceived as enemies of the government.

In addition to the Washington Post and the New York Times, several other media outlets have corroborated that Reinoehl’s killing appeared unjustified. Rolling Stone characterizes one eyewitness’s account of the scene as “a violent ambush” that “resembled an execution.” Oregon Public Broadcasting in collaboration with ProPublica spoke to witnesses who said that the officers shot him without warning and “looked less like law enforcement officers than members of a right-wing militia.”

In a VICE News interview released just after his death, Reinoehl can be seen claiming that he acted in self-defense in Portland — just as an attorney for Kyle Rittenhouse, the Trump-supporting armed suspect in the Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing of two Black Lives Matter activists, said. With Reinoehl dead at the hands of U.S. Marshals, we will never know the truth.

Instead, Reinoehl now serves as the perfect symbol of the shadowy enemy that Trump rails against. A participant in Black Lives Matter protests, Reinoehl claimed he was “100% ANTIFA all the way.” The president’s promise to designate “ANTIFA” (which is an ideology, not an organization) as “a Terrorist Organization” has fed into dangerous notions designed to create panic among his base. It has raised the specter of “violent mobs” terrorizing communities that only swift government action of the sort aimed at Reinoehl can quell.

But who are the “violent mobs” really? In Trump’s world, armed self-defense is acceptable only for white supremacists who support him, not for the left-wing activists they routinely threaten and hurt. Since protests began earlier this year, according to NPR, “Right-wing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of at least 50 vehicle-ramming incidents” at protests against police brutality. Conservative news outlets including Fox News and the Daily Caller have encouraged such attacks. Even the Department of Homeland Security’s latest threat assessment identifies, “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists,” as “the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland” among what the agency designates as “Domestic Violent Extremists” or DVEs.

As if to underscore the threat, more than a dozen white men were just arrested (without being harmed) in connection with a kidnapping plot aimed at Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The governor, who is among several women who have faced Trump’s online ire, said, “I do believe that there are still serious threats that groups like this group, these domestic terrorists, are finding comfort and support in the rhetoric coming out of Republican leadership in the White House to our state house.”

In Trump’s America, white nationalist armed vigilante men reign supreme while those of us speaking out against fascism are symbolized by Reinoehl — and like him will be not be considered innocent until proven guilty. We will never know whether or not Reinoehl was guilty of murdering Danielson, as he was not given a chance to stand trial. In Trump’s America, there will be no law, only order. To Trump, “[t]here has to be retribution,” rather than due process. Among the many issues at stake in the November 3 election, this ought to be a central concern.

FBI investigating Hunter Biden emails as possible Russian disinformation operation: reports

The FBI is reportedly investigating whether emails published Wednesday by the New York Post in connection with widely discredited corruption allegations about Hunter Biden are part of a possible Russian effort to spread disinformation ahead of the presidential election.

NBC News first reported the existence of the investigation, followed by the Associated Press and CNN, which cite administration and congressional sources.

The alleged emails came to the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid through President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who claimed to have acquired a copy of a computer hard drive belonging to the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The authenticity of the emails has not been independently verified, and reporters pointed out major errors and holes in The Post story after it was published.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that U.S. officials repeatedly warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was a target of Russian intelligence — and any information he passed along might be tainted by his interactions with pro-Putin officials in Ukraine. Giuliani’s meddling in Ukraine led directly to Trump’s impeachment last year.

News outlets have repeatedly debunked allegations of corruption against the Bidens, and a roundly discredited investigation by Senate Republicans — predicated in part on information acquired by Giuliani from a Russian agent sanctioned by the Trump administration — found no evidence that the former vice president had engaged in wrongdoing related to his son’s business dealings.

Reports of the FBI investigation echo headlines from the final weeks of the 2016 election cycle, when U.S. intelligence agencies began probing whether individuals connected to the Trump campaign were involved in Russian government efforts to harm Hillary Clinton via dumps of emails stolen from Democratic officials.

Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company at the center of the corruption allegations against the Bidens, appeared to have been hacked by the same Russian GRU intelligence unit that participated in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, The New York Times reported in January. The hack occurred as Trump went on trial in the Senate for withholding aide to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the Bidens, according to the outlet.

The Times newly reported on Thursday that U.S. intelligence analysts had contacted individuals familiar with the Burisma attack last month after intercepting “chatter” indicating that emails stolen from the company might be leaked as an October surprise designed to damage Biden’s candidacy.

U.S. officials were specifically concerned that authentic Burisma material might be leaked alongside fake content, sources told the outlet. Such an occurrence would mirror the blend of real emails and forgeries dumped by Russia ahead of the 2017 elections in France, which were designed to make fact-checking difficult.

CNN on Friday reported that the new FBI probe was part of a broader investigation into Russian disinformation which pre-dates last fall’s House impeachment inquiry. The alleged influence campaign aims to link the former vice president to his son’s work with Burisma, according to the outlet. 

The Biden campaign denied The New York Post report, which was concluded to be so dubious by Facebook and Twitter that both platforms limited users’ ability to share links to the stories, moves which drew backlash from top Republicans. Twitter, pointing out that the reporting included personal phone numbers and email addresses and violated its policy on distributing hacked information, temporarily locked some accounts which pushed the story, including the official accounts of the Trump campaign and the White House press secretary.

Trump and his allies seized on The Post report to smear Biden on the campaign trail this week, but the corruption allegations appear to have had little impact over the past year: A Gallup poll published earlier this month found that voters view Biden as more honest than Trump by a 12-point margin.

The controversial report, which was published only three weeks before Election Day, drew from material obtained by two Trump allies: Giuliani and former White House and campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who is out on bail after being indicted in August on federal money laundering and obstruction charges. The outlet said it first learned about the emails from Bannon but acquired them through Giuliani.

Bannon, whom federal agents arrested three weeks ago aboard a yacht owned by Chinese billionaire fugitive Guo Wengui off of the Connecticut coastline, boasted in September to a Dutch media outlet that he was in possession of Hunter Biden’s hard drive. The Daily Beast on Friday reported that a network run by Guo had simultaneously hyped incriminating hard drives obtained by Chinese officials. Bannon and Guo have appeared in recent photographs with Giuliani.

A few hours after publication, the Trump-backing computer repair store owner who claimed to have first come across the alleged emails recounted a number of conflicting stories to a group of journalists in what was described as a “bizarre” and meandering interview.

The store owner, who referenced the debunked anti-Clinton Seth Rich conspiracy theory, abruptly ended the interview after claiming he had contacted Giuliani as a “lifeguard.”

“Ah sh*t,” the owner said as he ended the interview.

Giuliani has since contradicted both the store owner and his own original chronicle of events.

“It’s a garbage fire story with obscene numbers of legal holes and flaws,” national security attorney Bradley Moss told Salon on Wednesday.

Moss pointed out that while the legal implications for Giuliani were unclear, the repair store owner may have exposed himself to civil and criminal liability under state and federal computer privacy laws.

With “The Trial of the Chicago 7” we get a history of civil disobedience that’s very relevant today

Frequently “The Trial of the Chicago 7” resembles a 1960s-style heist flick as opposed a courtroom drama. This is most noticeable near the beginning of the film, as Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “A Few Good Men”) gives us a view of each of the eight famous anti-war radicals accused of conspiring to cause the riots at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago prepare for their day in court.

The scene is a sequence of moments edited together featuring the likes of Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden, antiwar pacifist David Dellinger, notorious “Yippies” Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale responding to the federal case thrown at them, one they’re well aware is a load of bull.

This being Sorkin, the montage is executed as a signature walk-and-talk, only this one bounces between cities, homes and headquarters, connected by a vivacious ’60s go-go groove bouncing in the background. As a whole it prepares the audience to witness a case that was supposed to be serious business that in the final edit is revealed to be a sham, pure theater – or as Hoffman accurately refers to it, a “political trial.”

Sorkin wrote and directed “The Trial of the Chicago 7” in a style most suited to maintain the attention of the 2020 audiences, one that slaps more than it shocks and battles the story’s inclination toward pure gravity. Part of this approach reflects the motley nature of the assembled defendants, who were charged as co-conspirators even though many had never met one another. Seale consistently reminds the jury and courtroom spectators that he doesn’t have a lawyer present and, in fact, was only in Chicago for four hours to give a speech; he wasn’t even present when the rioting took place.

But he didn’t have to be. In this story the charges aren’t connected to anything of concrete culpability but rather what these men symbolized. It wasn’t about what they did but what and how they thought.

Sorkin’s film is constructed to draw neon-bright parallels between this famous abuse of the justice system and the rampant inequities in our time.

Movies about pivotal cases in American history tend to be earnest showcases that pander more to the performer’s abilities than the audience’s interest. By inserting this 1969 court case into a cinematic genre that swings, Sorkin elevates the profiles of the eight civil rights activists railroaded by a government to the status of all-stars, as if to flip off the ghosts Richard Nixon and his Attorney General John Mitchell, two men who were eager to make examples of all the anti-war protesters making the administration look bad.

That said, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is also quite plainly an actors’ showcase – specifically for Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the activist Hoffman, and Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, although Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is unforgettable as Seale, spitting fire in the scene leading up to the judge ordering Seale to be gagged, chained and humiliated in full view of the jury and courtroom onlookers.

This is a repugnant moment in history begs to be recreated with the appropriate menace and depravity, and Abdul-Mateen II, along with Frank Langella’s vicious presiding Judge Julius Hoffman, do it justice. (Originally Seale was part of the eight men grouped together on the conspiracy charge but, following that travesty, his case was separated from the other seven.)

Sorkin writes passionate exchanges for each of the ensemble’s principal characters, underlining the real history inspiring each scene by interspersing archival footage of the actual riots and public figures connected to the case between dramatized frames at appropriate turns. But his most effective narrative ploy is to use Hoffman and Hayden as a case study of what happens when diametrically opposed styles of civil disobedience attempt to work toward the same goal.

Redmayne’s Hayden is clean-cut, respectful of process and willing to appease authority up to a point while Hoffman and his compatriot Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) wear their anti-establishment shagginess proudly and without apology. Together, they personify the central problems plaguing liberals to this day – that of an incomplete cohesiveness due to disagreements over conformity and propriety, of being so caught up in arguing over whether it’s better to push change from the outside or work from within that they risk seeing opportunities for victory right in front of them.

Sorkin speaks to this notion through Hayden when he berates Hoffman, saying that thanks to hippie burnouts like him history will view the Vietnam-ear antiwar protests not as organized and righteous by a coalition of strategists, but as a mess of long-haired burnouts nattering on about flower power.

In that moment the filmmaker announces what he’s seeking to avoid in case we haven’t already noticed the effort. To Sorkin’s credit, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” neither gets mired in any trappings of tie-dye and patchouli, nor does it collapse under the ballast of its own sense of seriousness.  

By amplifying the crooked spirit of the injustice as it was served here as opposed to straining to accurately recreate the case blow-by-blow as dictated by courtroom transcripts, the uninitiated viewer can easily draw the lines from this story to present day government’s efforts to curtail our First Amendment rights to protest.

Even those who aren’t seeking out those thematic connections will no doubt enjoy Sacha Baron Cohen’s effortless and lively portrayal of Hoffman and appreciate his effort to nail the real-life figure’s Boston accent, along with John Carroll Lynch’s take on Dellinger, a stalwart peacekeeper who can’t help but break at one key moment when the circus-like proceedings devolve from ludicrous to dangerously unequal.

Langella channels the energy of a graphic novel supervillain as Justice Hoffman, a man tightly bound to etiquette and lawful propriety and who is obviously ready to render his guilty verdict long before the trial begins. The list of recognizable stars doing solid work here is lengthy, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as do-gooder young federal prosecutor Richard Schultz and, in a memorable cameo, Michael Keaton as the previous administration’s far more honest attorney general. People who enjoy watching Strong’s work in “Succession” will be entertained by his hazy and passionate take on Rubin.

Together the actors make quite the watchable crew, companions and adversaries alike. And if “The Trial of the Chicago 7” doesn’t quite come together as neatly as a viewer might expect of a story about a landmark case such as this, maybe that’s in its favor. It may be messy, but it’s fleet-footed and it means well, and in the way of any good caper flick it extols the virtue of breaking the law for all the right reasons, come what may.

“The Trial of the Chicago 7” is currently streaming on Netflix.

Conservative argues the attacks on Hunter Biden are crossing the line

With President Donald Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in countless polls and the election less than three weeks away, Republicans are hoping for some type of “October surprise” that will derail Biden’s campaign. To fulfill this wish, some right-wing media outlets have been obsessing over the contents of a laptop hard drive that, according to the New York Post, allegedly belonged to his son, Hunter Biden. Conservative Ed Morrissey discusses the laptop in an op-ed for Hot Air, arguing that the attacks on Hunter Biden are crossing the line.

“Rather than delve into business or political revelations,” Morrissey explains, “the NY Post chooses today to report on personal e-mails, photos and the pain and partying they reveal. In a way, it’s a more human side of Hunter than we’ve so far seen.”

In the New York Post article, reporters Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge write, “Hunter Biden’s e-mails and texts show not just a politician’s troubled son angling for lucrative overseas business deals — they also reveal a concerned father, a fun-loving friend and a man tortured by the deaths that have devastated his family.”

But Morrissey is critical of the Post’s reporting, saying, “I suppose the Post can argue that they are trying to paint a more balanced portrait of Hunter, but I somehow doubt that he or his family will appreciate that nuance. There is something very creepy about publishing the personal e-mails of a public-figure-once-removed like Hunter, and especially those of his daughter in a time of financial crisis.”

Morrissey adds, “On top of that, none of what’s revealed in this report has anything to do with public policy. It’s private conversations and private behavior with no connection to anything to voters’ lives or choices. It’s an unwarranted intrusion of privacy with no real purpose other than to offer a prurient look into Hunter’s ‘wild life (and) pained soul’ when Hunter’s not running for anything. Imagine the outcry that would arise if NBC did this to Tiffany Trump.”

The conservative writes although the Post is claiming that the material on the hard drive is entirely Hunter Biden’s, he has his doubts.

“It’s possible that it’s all Hunter’s,” Morrissey writes, “but it’s also very possible that some of it isn’t.”

Morrissey stresses that the material on the laptop still needs to be “authenticated.”

“The potential for dirty tricks looks rather large,” Morrissey warns. “Until this data gets fully authenticated by an outside agency — hopefully the FBI, which reportedly has the laptop — the earlier reporting isn’t reliable, and this manipulative story doesn’t do much to boost the Post’s credibility either. The best we can assume is that this story signals that the Post doesn’t have much more to wring out of this October surprise.”

Watchdog group accuses Amy Coney Barrett of “unconscionable cruelty” in teen rape case

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has been accused of “unconscionable cruelty” by a watchdog group over her role in an appellate court decision overturning a district court which found a Wisconsin county liable for millions in damages to a woman who alleged she had been repeatedly raped by a jail guard.

“After a 19-year old pregnant prison inmate was repeatedly raped by a prison guard, Amy Coney Barrett ruled that the county responsible for the prison could not be held liable because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties. Her judgment demonstrates a level of unconscionable cruelty that has no place on the high court,” Kyle Herrig, president of the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon. “The only thing more concerning than the rush to confirm by Senate Republicans is what we are learning about Amy Coney Barrett’s extremist record. It is hardly surprising that she has dodged question after question during her testimony.”

Barrett was one of the three judges on a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel which reversed a $6.7 million verdict against Milwaukee County in 2018 after a corrections officer was charged with repeatedly raping a pregnant 19-year-old inmate.

Former corrections officer Xavier Thicken was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault in 2013 after the woman alleged that he had raped her during and after her pregnancy at a jail run by the controversial former Sheriff David Clarke. Those charges were dropped when he agreed to plead guilty to felony misconduct in public office in 2014. 

The woman later filed a lawsuit against Milwaukee County. In her testimony, she alleged that Thicklen had raped her in different parts of the jail when she was eight months pregnant and demanded that she perform oral sex on him after giving birth.

A jury awarded the woman $6.7 million in 2017, which was upheld by District Judge J.P. Stadmueller before the Seventh Circuit Court overturned the ruling in September 2018.

Barrett joined Judges Daniel Manion and Robert Gettleman in reversing the district court ruling against the county, though it upheld the judgement against Thicklen. Mannion wrote in the unanimous opinion that the county was not responsible for the guard’s conduct.

“Conduct is not in the scope if it is different in kind from that authorized, far beyond the authorized time or space, or too little actuated by a purpose to serve the employer,” he said.

“Even when viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to (the woman) and the verdict, we hold no reasonable jury could find the sexual assaults were in the scope of his (Thicklen’s) employment,” the opinion stated. “The evidence negates the verdict.”

Manion noted that the training materials stated guards were prohibited from having sex with inmates. 

“The undisputed facts and reasonable inferences point ineluctably to the conclusions that Thicklen’s abhorrent acts were in no way actuated by a purpose to serve county,” he wrote. “He raped (the inmate) for purely personal reasons, the rapes did not benefit county but harmed it, he knew the rapes did not serve county, and the rapes were outside the scope.”

With the ruling, the judge acknowledged that the woman “loses perhaps her best chance to collect the judgment. But (the law) does not make public employers absolute insurers against all wrongs.”

In a similar case this year, however, Barrett joined a majority of the full Seventh Circuit Court to find that Wisconsin’s Polk County was liable in a case where a jail guard sexually assaulted five women hundreds of times.

The case was filed after former prison guard Daryl Christensen was convicted of sexually assaulting the women hundreds of times over three years in 2016. Two of the victims, identified as J.K.J. and M.J.J., sued Christensen and Polk County in federal court, according to Courthouse News.

A complaint filed by one of the women alleged that the Polk County Sheriff’s Department was liable, because it failed to protect her from Christensen and chose not to accept state-provided training materials on prison rape.

The lawsuit largely echoed the allegations in the criminal complaint, accusing Christensen of leading women inmates to areas of the jail where there were no security cameras before digitally penetrating them and forcing them to perform oral sex on him.

Christensen was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and a jury awarded the women $11.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, according to Courthouse News. Polk County was ordered to pay $4 million of the award, which the outlet noted was “the only part of the award the women will ever possibly receive.”

A split three-judge Seventh Circuit Court panel overturned the ruling against the county last year, with the majority arguing that it should not be held liable for actions taken by a “rogue guard” in violation of the jail’s policy.

The full court voted to rehear the case in December, and it voted 7-4 to hold the county responsible in May. Barrett joined the majority.

“The jury was furnished with sufficient evidence to hold Polk County liable not on the basis of Christensen’s horrific acts but rather the county’s own deliberate choice to stand idly by while the female inmates under its care were exposed to an unmistakable risk that they would be sexually assaulted — a choice that was the moving force behind the harm inflicted on J.K.J. and M.J.J.,” Judge Michael Scudder wrote in the majority opinion.

Scudder added that “the jury was entitled to conclude that if Polk County had taken action in response to the glaring risk that its female inmates’ health and safety were in danger, J.K.J. and M.J.J.’s assaults would have stopped sooner, or never happened at all.”

Barrett penned an influential decision last year which made it easier for college students accused of sexual assault to sue their universities over the handling of investigations.

She wrote the decision for a Seventh Circuit panel which ruled that Purdue University might have discriminated against a male student accused of sexual assault when it suspended him for one year, costing him a spot in the Navy ROTC program.

“It is plausible that [university officials] chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man,” Barrett wrote in the decision.

Barrett said the discrimination claim was plausible, in part because the Obama administration had pressured schools to prioritize sexual assault investigations and later opened two investigations into Purdue.

“The Department of Education made clear that it took the letter and its enforcement very seriously,” Barrett wrote. “The pressure on the university to demonstrate compliance was far from abstract.”

Emily Martin, the vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, expressed concerns that Barrett’s description of the Education Department’s efforts to go after campus sexual assault was evidence of discrimination against men.

Martin told The Washington Post that late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a champion of women’s rights and lamented the prospect of “replacing someone like that with a judge who is eager to use the language of sex discrimination in order to defend the status quo and to use the statutes that were created to forward gender equality as swords against that very purpose.”

Beth Barnhill, the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, penned an op-ed this week warning that Barrett “holds extreme positions on areas of the law on which victims of sexual assault depend.”

“Survivors want and deserve a Supreme Court that works for all of us, yet a previous ruling from Barrett made it easier for students who are held accountable for sexual assault to sue their schools for sex discrimination,” Barnhill wrote. “She suggested that a school’s commitment to taking sexual misconduct seriously is evidence of sex discrimination against the people who caused harm. This is deeply problematic and troubling for survivors.”

Are the machines that count our mail-in ballots safe?

Back in August, when President Donald Trump slowed down the United States Postal Service to make it more difficult for people to vote against him by mail, the widespread concern was that he was attempting to steal the election by suppressing mail-in votes. Yet as it turns out, any sufficiently embedded group or intelligence agency could cheat their way to victory even without directly suppressing mail-in votes, thanks to the haphazard way in which we actually tabulate those ballots.

“Almost all votes in the US are counted by machine,” Lawrence Norden, director of the Brennan Center’s Election Reform Program, told Salon by email. “Mail ballots are often counted by a central scanner and most states conduct audits afterward to check some portion of the paper records against the machine totals. The ‘gold standard’ of such audits is the ‘Risk Limiting Audit’ which uses statistical methods to ensure a high degree of confidence that a software error or other problem with the machine tally did not result in the wrong winner.”

Mark Lindeman, interim co-director at Verified Voting, told Salon that only a “small” number of jurisdictions continue to hand-count all of their ballots. Most of them use machines to do so — even those where thousands of people are voting by mail.

“Many different systems are used to do this,” Lindeman explained. “If you’ve ever voted in person using an electronic scanner, some counties count their mail ballots using those — one ballot sheet at a time. Most use higher-capacity batch-fed scanners that may be able to scan as many as 300 sheets per minute. Most of these systems first capture a digital representation of the ballot, and then use software to determine the votes.”

Lindeman noted that, while there is “no evidence” that any of these machines have been hacked during an election, there are other concerns about their reliability.
 
“There are known cases in which scanners have been misprogrammed, producing wrong vote counts, generally in local contests,” Lindeman said. This does not always happen for nefarious reasons, since “often an election contains many different ballot styles — different combinations of contests are included, so a candidate may appear at different locations depending on the ballot — and it’s hard to rigorously test all the styles.”

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, echoed Lindeman’s observation about whether voting machines have been hacked.

“No documented hacks ‘in the wild,’ but definitely misconfiguration errors and demonstration hacks,” Stark told Salon by email. “Georgia’s new system was recently caught ignoring valid votes. Chain of custody is always a serious concern, too, both before and after the ballot is received by the jurisdiction.”

Stark added, “Georgia’s Dominion system is terrible: it ‘erases’ marks that are obvious to a human reading the ballot. There are many things that can go wrong, from faulty signature matching to bad scanner settings to misconfiguration of the tabulation software to voters using inappropriate pens or marking the ballot poorly … And all these things can be deliberately weaponized to disenfranchise targeted groups of voters.”

Lindeman expressed particular concern about the state of voting in 2020 because of the pandemic.

“Everyone should be prepared for delays in reporting the results,” Lindeman warned. “It takes time to process ballots even before they’re scanned and tallied.”

“Also, I can tell you from direct observation that if operators try to rush the procedure for scanning mail ballots, the scanners jam. I want my ballot to be handled by people who are focused on being careful and right, not racing imaginary Election Night deadlines.”

He also argued that “no electronic system should be assumed to be secure. We advocate for testing, rather than trusting, the accuracy of these systems. Specifically, we advocate rigorous post-election audits of the vote counts.”

Stark told Salon the same thing, writing that “they are not secure. We need strong physical custody of the ballots and manual risk-limiting audits to check whether the tabulation found the right winners.”

While election machine issues are always a concern, Republican attacks on voting by mail — as well as the constant loss of millions of ballots “due to frequent errors on the part of the voters, election administrators and the U.S. postal service” — are so great that, as Steven Hill of The Globalist wrote earlier this month, “if you want to be sure that your vote will count, voters in competitive races should NOT mail in their ballots.”

He added, “Instead, they need to show up in person to vote, either before or on Election Day. Despite the dangers of the pandemic, voters need to do the heroic act of standing in line with their masks on, as we do when we stand in line at the grocery store.”

Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch believes Joe Biden will beat President Trump in a “landslide”: report

Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox News and an influential ally of President Donald Trump, believes Democratic rival Joe Biden will win the presidential election in a landslide, according to associates. 

“Disgusted” with the response to the coronavirus pandemic, the media mogul has privately complained about the president’s refusal to listen to experts, The Daily Beast reported on Thursday. (Fox News has fueled this problem, multiple studies show.) 

Murdoch, whose embrace of Trump boosted the crass New York billionaire’s ascension in 2016, now believes Biden will cruise to victory on Nov. 3.

“After all that has gone on,” he reportedly told one associate, “people are ready for Sleepy Joe.”

Murdoch’s friends said the media mogul never took Trump seriously — and their relationship was born “out of business necessity,” according to the report.

In fact, he publicly expressed a similar opinion early in the president’s first campaign. One month after Trump threw his hat into the ring, Murdoch tweeted, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?”

The Beast reached out to Murdoch regarding Biden’s chances and his opinion on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. The media responded, “No comment except I’ve never called Trump an idiot.” (The latter was a reference to a 2018 report from Michael Wolff’s insider White House account “Fire and Fury,” in which the News Corp chairman was quoted as calling the president a “f*cking idiot” following a discussion about immigration.)

One day earlier, a News Corp tabloid published a hotly disputed series of stories surrounding alleged emails between Biden’s son Hunter and officials connected with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. One expert told Salon that the incendiary work based on unverified emails was “a garbage fire story with obscene numbers of legal holes and flaws.”

The Beast report matches a Vanity Fair story from September, which reported that Trump had “screamed” at Murdoch this summer over alleged “unfair” coverage of his administration from Fox News, which the president once viewed as an ally.  

The “humongous blowup” came in a phone call, during which “Trump yelled that Fox’s coverage is unfair and the polling is fake,” according to Vanity Fair. “Sources who’ve spoken with Trump told me Trump thinks Murdoch wants him to lose,” journalist Gabriel Sherman wrote.

Rupert’s youngest son, James, gave more than $2 million with his wife to support Biden and other Democratic campaigns over the summer. Citing editorial disagreements, James Murdoch stepped away from the family empire in July. He still retains voting rights.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” James Murdoch told The New York Times in a recent interview about his decision to leave. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.”

James Murdoch said those differences complicated editorial decisions to the extent that “it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”

Museums are combining childcare and education that’s more affordable than private tutoring

As early as March of this year, many parents realized that their children likely would not physically attend school for the fall semester due to the pandemic. This led to a mad scramble to make other arrangements. 

Some parents opted for “pandemic pods,” which are essentially groups of 10 or fewer students learning together in a home environment with mutually agreed upon health precautions being taken outside the classroom. Some turned to websites like Selected for Families and Schoolhouse, professional services that match families with tutors. Others simply waited for guidance from their local school district, many of which held off to make determinations about plans for the upcoming school year as they tracked local cases of the novel coronavirus. 

Meanwhile, cultural and community organizations across the country — like museums, recreation centers, and history archives — spent the summer temporarily closed to the public. Many have since reopened by adding online learning assistance and in-person programs to their list of services, which while not accessible to every student, has become a financial lifeline for working parents and the institutions themselves. 

For many parents, this is a joint childcare and schooling solution

The Frazier History Museum in downtown Louisville, Ky., launched their NTI — or non-traditional instruction — from the Frazier program on Aug. 31. It’s an all-day program with workstations for students in second through ninth grades. While the students each follow their own school curriculum, museum educators are on hand to help answer questions, assist with technology, and host end-of-day activities in the galleries. 

Mick Sullivan, the manager of youth and family programs at the Frazier, says that the program averages about 10 students, each of whom are required to bring their own mask, laptop or other device, headphones with microphone, school supplies, and lunch. 

The museum is following state-mandated sanitation requirements and pandemic precautions. 

“When people come in, they’re getting their temperatures checked,” Sullivan said. “We’re doing hand washing and sanitation. Everybody has their own workspace with well over 15 square feet around them. Everyone also has their own specific sets of curriculum, so there is no sharing of materials.” 

Finding this kind of all-day childcare with qualified educators has been top of mind for many parents since the summer. According to an August Washington Post-Schar School nationwide poll, 50% of working parents said it would be “harder” or “impossible” to do their jobs if their children’s schools provided only online instruction this fall, while 50% said it would have no effect.

“I talk to the students’ parents every day, and the people that are making use of our offerings, they’re people who work downtown,” Sullivan said. “This is a convenient solution where they know their kids are safe, they are getting the support that they need, while they can be at work.”

NTI from the Frazier costs $250 per week for non-members and $200 for members; in contrast, according to a recent Vox report, private tutoring can range anywhere from $25 to $75 an hour, while the cost of “pods” is split among the parents of participating students. 

Other museums in the state — like the Kentucky Science Center and the Explorium of Lexington — have launched similar programs, as have YMCA branches across the country. 

In Ann Arbor, Mich., the local YMCA branch launched an all-day Learning Center for students in kindergarten through third grade. Like the Frazier program, students operate in 10-person pods. Per the course description, “program curriculum includes, but is not limited to, welcoming and relationship building activities, mindfulness moments, get-up-and-move exercises, outdoor adventures, snack time, and light academic support. Participants must be registered in a virtual school curriculum with a synchronized classroom.” 

The cost for students is $220 per week for a five-day option and $90 per week for a two-day option. There are also scholarships available for students. 

“We’ve heard from so many working parents throughout the COVID crisis that when they have to go work on site, they need a place for their children to be with adult supervision and learning opportunities,” says Toni Kayumi, executive director of the Ann Arbor YMCA, told Second Wave Media. “In preschool, they knew to budget for [child care]. But pre-COVID, parents didn’t have to think about full-day child care for school-aged children, and that’s an additional expenditure that was not in the family budget.”

The benefits and barriers of going digital

For many community institutions, the pandemic has also highlighted the benefits — and barriers — to going digital with some of their educational programming. The Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C., is there to help. 

In 2018, the IMLS launched the Museums for Digital Learning program, a special initiative focused on building  museums’ capacity to connect with teachers and students by “bring[ing] together museums of various disciplines, sizes, and geographic regions to contribute to a shared digital platform offering collections-based educational resource kits.” The program was piloted with the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in Indianapolis, the Field Museum in Chicago and History Colorado. 

On Oct. 8, the organization announced it would be expanding the reach of the program by bringing on 10 additional museums and cultural centers, including the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, the RISD Museum at Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. 

“One of the goals is building the digital capacity of museums of all types, all disciplines,” said Paula Gangopadhyay, the IMLS deputy director at the office of museum services. ” Whether it’s a zoo, aquarium, children’s museum, history museum — small, medium or large. The goal is also to meet the needs of the K through 12 sector, because we find that teachers are always looking for authentic, curated and engaging digital resources.” 

She continued: “We found, even just through the analysis of the grants that we are giving out, that there is a pretty big divide between large museums that have the resources to offer digital offerings, and the small- and medium-sized museums that have great resources, but they just don’t have the bandwidth to translate those into educational resources.” 

Gangopadhyay said the interest in the Museums for Digital Learning program has increased so sharply since the beginning of the pandemic, the organization is eyeing a second round of expansion. 

“As soon as the press release [announcing the ten museum expansion] went out, 14 more reached out to say, ‘When can we join? We are ready. When are your onboarding demos?'” she said. 

These new opportunities for museums highlight both systemic inequities and necessary lifelines

As with any educational opportunity, some students are bound to get left behind due to systemic inequities. As I reported in July, some education equality advocates were concerned that inherent to the “pay to pod” structure, as well as digital learning, as a whole, is the potential for vulnerable students being left behind. 

Dr. David Stovall, — professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the intersection of race, place and school — pointed out that many parents did not have the resources to pay for a private pod instructor, and that digital learning may be inaccessible to some of the country’s most vulnerable students.

“I’m also really concerned about it because here in Chicago, what we noticed from March to June is that 60% of CPS [Chicago Public School] students never logged in for digital learning,” Stovall said. “And then the other part of that is that, even before COVID, 60% of CPS students’ access to internet service was actually done via phone.” 

Using those statistics as a baseline, is it likely that those students are going to be the ones benefiting from museums’ new digital collections and all-day educational opportunities? Probably not. However, those same opportunities are a thin lifeline for our nation’s cultural and community institutions. 

According to a July report from the American Alliance of Museums, one-third of museum directors were not confident about their museums’ survival over the next 16 months without additional financial relief. And 17%  said they didn’t know if their museums could survive that long without relief, while 16% believe their museums face significant risk of closing permanently in that time without relief.

When we spoke in July, Dr. Stovall said that now was the time for districts to realize that the inequities facing their students could no longer be concealed behind schoolhouse walls. “This is really that moment where we have to really come to grips with some of the structural inequities that are now exacerbated because now we don’t even have the semblance normalcy,” he said. 

This school year also offers communities an opportunity to assess the ways in which local institutions are stepping up to enrich the lives of students during an unprecedented school year — and perhaps consider how those contributions could be consistently expanded for the students who need it most.

Donald Trump is “the worst American president in modern history”: New York Times editorial board

The New York Times editorial board on Friday dropped a massive essay that outlines the case against re-electing President Donald Trump to a second term.

The essay does not hold back in describing Trump’s presidency in apocalyptic terms, and it begins by saying he “poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.”

The editors then cycle through a list of grievances against the president, whom they accuse of having “gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world,” as well as having “abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations.”

The editors also eviscerate Trump for drawing no lines between the public office he holds and his private business interests, as well as his “breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans.”

The essay then takes stock of Trump’s place in American history — and finds that he will rank very poorly.

“Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” the editors write. “In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems, because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.”

Read the whole editorial here.

A dueling town halls upside: Media finally focuses on the wide gulf between Biden and Trump

NBC did a terrible disservice to the public by ceding to Donald Trump’s demand to counterprogram Joe Biden’s ABC town hall on Thursday night. But the net effect on political journalism turned out to be quite positive.

The dueling town halls actually forced several top journalists to directly address the extraordinary imbalance between the two candidates and what they represent, rather than get distracted by the spectacle.

Just as I was despairing over how so many campaign stories understate the cataclysmic consequences of a second Trump term — normalizing the election, treating it like a game, framing the coverage as if there were a rational choice each way — a small step forward: Our top political reporters were faced on deadline with the obvious, extreme contrast between a deranged, blustery, power-hungry liar with no sense of decency and no plans on the one hand, and a relatively normal human being with relatively mainstream goals on the other.

And to a greater extent than I expected, that came across in the coverage.

In fact, I consider the main news story in the New York Times, by Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck, a signal moment for the Times, which has traditionally been way too stenographic in its spot-news coverage, leaving crucial context to euphemism-filled sidebar “news analyses” and fact-checks.

The Times’ main story made it clear that Trump and Biden are operating in different worlds, only one of which is real. Right from the top:

President Trump spoke positively about an extremist conspiracy-theory group, expressed skepticism about mask-wearing, rebuked his own F.B.I. director and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a televised town hall forum on Thursday, veering far away from a focused campaign appeal. Instead, he further stoked the country’s political rifts as his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., pushed a deliberate message anchored in concerns over public health and promises to restore political norms.

Burns and Glueck explained:

On the central issue of the election, the coronavirus pandemic, the two candidates appeared to inhabit not just different television sets but different universes. Mr. Biden has made the full embrace of strict public health guidelines the centerpiece of his candidacy, while Mr. Trump has continued to defy even the recommendations of his own government on matters as basic as the use of masks — a pattern that persisted in their opposing events on Thursday.

And they had evidence:

At the moment that Mr. Trump was effectively defending a fringe corner of the internet, Mr. Biden, the former vice president, was speaking about corporate tax rates and citing the business-analysis service Moody’s, underscoring the extraordinary gulf separating the two candidates in their worldviews, policies and connections to factual reality.

It may not be a complete coincidence that these reporters and their editors felt emboldened to be so straight with readers around the same time that the folks on the Times’ opinion side were dropping their amazing (if horribly over-designed) closing argument in the 2020 election, with the says-it-all URL: “donald-trump-worst-president.html.”

The editorial board wrote that “Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.”

The editorial included this very poignant and appropriate appeal:

The enormity and variety of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.

Times reporters were not alone in directly addressing the gaping contrast between the two candidates evidenced on Thursday night.

Evan Halper, Eli Stokols, Melanie Mason and Brittny Mejia led off their story in the Los Angeles Times with admirable boldness:

As President Trump angrily refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory or accept responsibility for the surge of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., Joe Biden laid out his policy plans in a more muted style on a separate stage.

They explained:

Trump was defiant and loose with the facts; Biden, deep in the policy weeds and soft-spoken. Biden emphasized that he would try to unify the nation and work to build consensus with Republicans. Trump focused on attacking Democrats in Congress and blaming liberal mayors and governors for urban unrest and the spread of the coronavirus.

At the Dallas Morning News, Todd J. Gillman and Gromer Jeffers Jr. wrote:

In tone and content, these were less competing events than parallel universes.

As Biden sedately clarified his views on fracking and expounded on the wisdom of green infrastructure investment, Trump was defending QAnon, the shadowy conspiracy cult that holds that he will save the nation from a secret cabal of child molesters.

They explained:

It was not exactly a debate, but if you took the time to watch both, or at least the highlights, it did the job in some ways — perhaps even better, since they couldn’t bicker or drown each other out, and the incentive to rehearse zingers was lacking.

Jonathan Tamari and Sean Collins Walsh wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that Trump “had a combative exchange with NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory, misrepresented a study about the effectiveness of face masks, and wouldn’t say if he had been tested for the coronavirus before his debate with Biden in late September.”

By contrast:

Biden, in the event hosted by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, answered policy questions the way a typical candidate does: answering some directly, skirting others, citing data that backed up his point while steering away from details that might hurt it.

The Associated Press story by Jonathan Lemire, Will Weissert and Darlene Superville backed into it a bit, but eventually described “crystalizing contrasts” in “dueling televised town halls that showcased striking differences in temperament, views on racial justice and approaches to a pandemic that has reshaped the nation.”

And they noted what I thought was perhaps Biden’s most defining moment:

He turned introspective when asked what it would say if he lost.

“It could say that I’m a lousy candidate, that I didn’t do a good job,” Biden said. “But I think, I hope that it doesn’t say that we’re as racially, ethnically and religiously at odds as it appears the president wants us to be.”

The Washington Post blew it, unfortunately. Michael Scherer, Jenna Johnson and Josh Dawsey offered up a much less informative take on the night’s events – maintaining a safe moral distance rather than confidently showing readers the truth.

They described “a jarring contrast of… opposing political styles and approaches to major issues like the coronavirus pandemic” and noted that the events “appeared to be broadcast from entirely different dimensions.” But their focus was on the optics, not the difference in the candidates’ approach to governing or relationship to reality:

The soft-spoken Biden leaned back in a white chair, relaxed and conversational as he hit upon notes of optimism and uplift. Trump’s appearance was heated and at times abrasive, with the candidate leaning forward as he defended his record and challenged the motivations of moderator Savannah Guthrie.

And the article was full of stenography lacking in sufficient pushback:

In one of the most notable exchanges, he said he did not know about QAnon, a loose-knit online community that was recently banned from Facebook. Supporters of the group, which shares false stories, including ones about Democrats abusing children, regularly appear with signs and apparel at Trump’s rallies.

“They are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that,” he said about the group before attempting to pivot the conversation to talk about left-wing radicals like self-described anti-fascist protesters.

In a Washington Post fact-checking sidebar that should have been reflected in the mainbar, Salvador Rizzo, Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly reported that “Trump spun a web of falsehoods like a whirling dervish, while Biden talked in depth and at length on a range of policy issues, leaving us with a handful of claims to check.”

Their first fact-check was a particularly crucial one, that Guthrie failed to sufficiently address. Trump outrageously lied — for the third time that day — that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “85 percent of people who wear masks catch” Covid. The report from the CDC of course said no such thing.

Bad Takes

There were, not surprisingly, some very bad takes as well.

In a limp USA Today article, Jeanine Santucci Rebecca Morin reported that the town halls “had plenty of tense moments,” then launched into an insipid rehash.

The Reuters headline – “In split-screen town halls, Trump and Biden squabble over coronavirus response” — should encourage everyone associated with it to look for another line of work. Steve Holland and Michael Martina contributed a truly subpar lede avoiding any kind of useful information:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Thursday criticized what he called President Donald Trump’s “panicked” response to the coronavirus pandemic, while Trump defended his handling of a crisis that has killed more than 216,000 Americans.

It was all process over substance for Reuters:

The split-screen showdown offered a stark reminder of the many ways the campaign season has been changed by a pandemic that has prompted more than 18 million people to cast ballots more than two weeks before Election Day on Nov. 3.

And it wasn’t all roses at the New York Times, I should note.

Media writers Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin concluded way too glibly that “The election may hinge on which type of programming Americans want to spend the next four years watching.”

(More people, it turned out, watched Biden.)

World-weary Times veteran Adam Nagourney wrote that the clash of town halls “was not much of an improvement” over the insane mockery Trump made of the Cleveland debate. And Nagourney focused almost exclusively on the optics, declaring it “an open question whether Mr. Trump’s gambit of trying to push Mr. Biden off the stage worked to his advantage.”

To Nagourney, Trump’s outrageous elevation of QAnon was a problem because he “stomped on his own message.” Trump’s calumny about masks was an issue because he “clung to an unpopular posture on masks and the pandemic.” And so on.

(I noticed that Shane Goldmacher’s co-byline vanished sometime Friday morning. I’m going to venture that he didn’t want to be associated with such garbage takes.)

Trump’s comments on QAnon very much deserved the special attention they got from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump. Even CNN’s Chris Cillizza called them “really, really, really bad.”

Finally, however, the worst take came – not surprisingly – from the Washington Post’s washed-up elder statesman Dan Balz, who wrote, pretty much like he always does, that Trump missed a golden opportunity to turn everything around:

President Trump had an opportunity at a town hall forum Thursday night in Miami to begin to turn around his struggling candidacy. Instead, under pointed questioning from the moderator, he reverted to the confrontational style that delights his most loyal supporters but that has left him in a deficit position in his campaign against former vice president Joe Biden.

Balz wrote, wistfully, that “It was not the kind of performance likely to attract support from the voters Trump needs to win.”

None of the news articles achieved what the American people need and deserve the most from campaign coverage: constant, clear and unambiguous context about the urgent need to stop the extraordinary damage Trump has done to the country.

But NBC brass’s shameful decision to give in to Trump may have, ironically, emboldened the press corps to draw the contrasts a bit more vividly. These two men are not comparable.

Rudy Giuliani’s daughter calls on Americans to vote out Trump and his “cruel, selfish politics”

Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of former LifeLock spokesperson and Trump personal Rudy Giuliani, called for Americans to vote for the Biden-Harris Democratic ticket in a scathing rebuke of the “toxic” Republican administration. 

“My father is Rudy Giuliani,” Giuliani wrote in an essay published Thursday in Vanity Fair. “We are multiverses apart, politically and otherwise. I’ve spent a lifetime forging an identity in the arts separate from my last name, so publicly declaring myself as a ‘Giuliani’ feels counterintuitive. But I’ve come to realize that none of us can afford to be silent right now.”

Giuliani, a 31-year-old Los Angeles-based LGBTQ+ filmmaker, “shunned her famous last name” while at Harvard. Instead, she used the last name of her other famous parent: “Law & Order” actor Donna Hannover. In her essay, Giuliani maintained that “being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog” is “a difficult confession — something I usually save for at least the second date.”

“To anyone who feels overwhelmed or apathetic about this election, there is nothing I relate to more than desperation to escape corrosive political discourse,” she wrote. “As a child, I saw firsthand the kind of cruel, selfish politics that Donald Trump has now inflicted on our country. It made me want to run as far away from them as possible. But trust me when I tell you: Running away does not solve the problem. We have to stand and fight. The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Giuliani, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, first announced her endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden in August when she tweeted a photo of herself with his running mate, Kamala Harris.

Giuliani recalled getting into debates about politics with her father, a former assistant U.S. attorney, when she was 12, or  “probably before I was emotionally equipped to handle such carnage.”

“It was disheartening to feel how little power I had to change his mind, no matter how logical and above-my-pay-grade my arguments were,” she wrote of their disputes.

Even though those arguments crackled with “an occasional flash of connection,” Giuliani added that she was never able to change her father’s perspective. That painful “chasm” has grown since Trump’s rise.

“I imagine many Americans can relate to the helpless feeling this confrontation cycle created in me, but we are not helpless,” Giuliani wrote. “I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.”

In the weeks leading up to the release of her essay, Giuliani stepped up her social media presence, at times targeting her father’s own work on behalf of Trump.

“Trump is the one lying about Hunter Biden,” Giuliani tweeted last month, directly replying to a tweet from her father about what he dubbed the “Biden Crime Family,” adding: “And I, for one, do not support spreading false gossip about a politician’s child. Just sayin…”

Senior intelligence officials warned the White House twice last year that Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine had been compromised by Russian intelligence, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

While Caroline Giuliani acknowledges that Biden was not her first choice — she hints that she had initially wanted a more progressive candidate, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — she appeals to fellow progressives to not cast a protest vote, pointing to a range of threats from a second Trump administration, including civil rights and the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.

“We are hanging by a single, slipping finger on a cliff’s edge, and the fall will be fatal,” she writes. “If I, after decades of despair over politics, can engage in our democracy to meet this critical moment, I know you can, too.”