Can L.A. County turn around its nursing home debacle?

For many, the health disaster that has befallen Los Angeles County’s skilled nursing facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a dangerous recipe comprising slow response, lax oversight and profits superseding quality care. When it comes to blame, start with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LAC DPH), the agency charged with policing these facilities.

By May the situation had become so dire so quickly that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to appoint an inspector general (IG) to oversee the county’s more than 300 such facilities and make recommendations for improvement. Today many are hoping the IG’s upcoming interim report, whose release appears imminent, will help answer this burning question: How can the county turn things around and ensure that nursing home operators properly protect their residents?

Through the LAC DPH, Los Angeles is the only county in the state contracted by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) to handle oversight of its own nursing homes. But last month, L.A. County skilled nursing facilities ombudsman Molly Davies, a frequent LAC DPH critic, asserted that the state should sever that contract – set to expire at the end of June 2025 – and pick up the reins of oversight itself. This isn’t the first time such a call has been made. During contract negotiations last year, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), another prominent critic of the nursing home industry, argued in a letter to the state senate against extending the contract due to L.A. County’s “abysmal” performance.

“I would think it should be seriously considered,” said Eric Carlson, directing attorney with Justice in Aging, an advocacy organization, about the idea of the state assuming oversight of L.A. County’s nursing homes.

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Nevertheless, many experts urge caution when it comes to state intervention – not least of all because of the CDPH’s own troubled legacy of protecting California’s nursing home residents. “Why do we assume the state will do it better?” warned Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine.

A 2018 audit found that the state has not “adequately addressed ongoing deficiencies related to the quality of care that nursing facilities provide.” California also has one of the highest rates of complaints per 1,000 nursing home residents in the country.

During the pandemic, the CDPH has come under fire for things like failing to provide vital testing for state nursing home inspectors, and for substantiating less than 3 percent of complaints made during the first four months of the pandemic, a marked drop from the same period two years before – leading experts to fear lax oversight.

Between the state and the county, “It’s like rolling the dice – I don’t think the state’s much better,” said Jamie Court, director of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

And so, a second question emerges: What changes can and should LAC DPH – and, more specifically, the agency’s Health Facilities Inspection Division (HFID), which directly oversees skilled nursing homes for the department – independently institute?

CANHR’s Michael Connors breaks down his recommendations into a number of key areas, one of which concerns what he calls “epidemic levels” of abuse and neglect in L.A. County nursing homes. “Public officials never acknowledge it, or do anything to stop it,” he said. Proper enforcement of minimum staffing requirements would help, Connors added. Indeed, this national study found 75 percent of the nation’s nursing homes failed to meet federal nursing staff requirements.

Another problem, warn experts, is that many instances of elder abuse either go unreported or aren’t properly investigated.

While state data shows that the number of open complaint cases in L.A. County has dropped in recent years, the average age of those cases has steadily grown and currently stands at more than three years – this, despite a state law requiring that investigations into nursing home complaints be completed within 120 days. “It’s not uncommon for residents to die before complaints about their treatment are investigated,” said Connors, who advocates for swift resolution of complaints but not by “sweeping them under the rug.” There’s damning precedent here. In an audit issued just six years ago, the state excoriated the county for a pattern of mishandling complaints.

Both advocates and industry insiders point to the need for tougher policing through more frequent and harsher penalties for at-fault nursing homes, a responsibility of both the county and the state. According to state data, the number of cited deficiencies that L.A. County has issued during the last quarter has almost halved from what it was at the end of 2019. The percentage of substantiated allegations is at its lowest level in nearly four years.

When it comes to monetary penalties, L.A. County nursing homes have been issued nearly $3.6 million in fines since the start of 2019, according to state data, but the bulk of the citations are for lesser Class B penalties, which come with a maximum fine of $2,000. Statewide during the fiscal year 2018-2019, only about 3% of the 18,520 deficiencies issued to California nursing homes resulted in a monetary citation.

“At for-profit entities, these skilled nursing facilities respond to fines,” said Dr. Ying-Ying Goh, director of the Pasadena Public Health Department. Citations and requirements for an action plan “usually result in rapid compliance,” she added.

An LAC DPH spokesperson responded to questions about the IG inspection and other issues for this story by saying that the agency is “working diligently to provide the Inspector General with all requested information for their investigation.”

Capital & Main sent a similar list of questions to the nonprofit California Association of Health Facilities, which represents some 900 skilled nursing facilities and is the state’s largest continuing education provider for long-term caregivers. In a statement, spokesperson Deborah Pacyna wrote that it’s “not appropriate for us to comment on a contractual arrangement between the CDPH and LA County, particularly because of their regulatory oversight over our facilities.”

Having said that, Pacyna added: “In general, our association doesn’t think it makes sense for individual counties to set their own standards given what we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic. We’ve been experiencing a myriad of government regulations from a variety of county, state and federal entities. These interagency conflicts create a lot of confusion and needless administrative work for facilities as they try to figure out how to comply with different governmental directives.”

Some experts see recent tough scrutiny of the nursing home industry in Los Angeles as an opportunity to discuss prescriptive, fundamental revisions to the status quo. The for-profit model underpinning much of the nursing home industry “works against achieving high-quality health care,” said Goh, who raised the prospect of alternate models, like a nonprofit or a publicly funded system.

Numerous studies appear to show that nonprofit nursing homes provide better quality of care than their for-profit counterparts. One study, for example, found that for-profit nursing home residents were nearly twice as likely as those in nonprofit facilities to suffer health problems associated with poor care. Some, however, urge caution.

“Not-for profits have trouble also, and there are good not-for-profits and there are bad not-for-profits,” said Wasserman, former CEO of the state’s largest chain of for-profit nursing homes. Rather, he added, “We must minimize perverse incentives in the for-profit side of the industry.” Towards that end, Wasserman and others look for broad shifts within county health department leadership. If at the top there isn’t an understanding of the long-term care industry that’s coupled with “transparency and accountability,” he added, “then we’re never going to get ahead of this.”

Wasserman’s views on the state of the agency’s hierarchy is echoed by others. A new Capital & Main investigation found a pattern of systemic problems within the HFID, including “incompetant” management at the top. Tracy Greene Mintz, a licensed clinical social worker who provides consultation to nursing home social service departments, said that “entrenched leadership” at the county health department has led to an organization mired in “bureaucratic sludge.”

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The pandemic has hit Pasadena’s nursing home residents especially hard. Over the past few months, state public health officials have taken control of two Pasadena nursing homes because of financial negligence, and suspended the license of another, Golden Cross Health Care, for quality of care problems. Pasadena Assistant City Manager Nicholas Rodriguez said that there are “serious management issues with the way in which nursing homes are monitored and addressed” in the county. During the pandemic, he said, there has been a revolving door of both state and county inspectors covering individual facilities, resulting in “disjointed communication” and mismanagement of “crisis situations.”

Kenneth Hayashida, a retired physician and member of a community advisory board (CAB) that oversees four elder care facilities in L.A. County, also believes there’s a “critical” absence of coordination in the way information is shared between the county, the public and nursing home operators that needs to be addressed. Hayashida shared with Capital & Main various emails he sent over many months to county health officials and to facility operators asking for important COVID-related health data, but which went unanswered – a scenario he described as ultimately “dangerous” for facility residents.

A not insignificant hurdle towards reform appears to be the tremendous sway that the nursing home industry exerts at both the political and administrative levels. While nursing homes have a powerful voice “through their professional trade organizations,” said Rodriguez, “the patients have very little.” Health care institutions are among the biggest spending lobbyists in the country. When the pandemic first struck, the CEO of California’s largest nursing home industry group gained what The Sacramento Bee called “open-door access” to state regulators.

The “probability of influence” is “most concerning,” said Wasserman. He pointed to an April “strategy” meeting between Los Angeles’ county health department and operators of skilled nursing facilities, during which the county offered advice to the industry on such things as “positive messaging” surrounding COVID-positive facilities.

“What the county should care about is assuring the highest quality of care – they shouldn’t be worried about what stakeholders think,” said Wasserman, who advocates a restructuring of the HFID and the wider health department so that leadership positions are filled with individuals who make “evidence-based, expert-driven” decisions focused squarely on what’s best for nursing home residents. “If [the inspector general’s] report doesn’t recommend significant change in the structure and function of the leadership of the department,” he added, “I will be very disappointed.”

With Senate control at stake, Trump and COVID haunt vulnerable Republicans

The week that Iowa reported its 90,000th confirmed case of COVID-19, Sen. Joni Ernst sat behind a plexiglass partition and told a debate audience watching from home what she thinks about masks.

“Even though they’re homemade, they work,” said Ernst, an Iowa Republican, showing off a mask emblazoned with the logo of Iowa State University, the largest university in the state.

But what about requiring people to wear masks when they cannot safely distance themselves? On that, she sided with the state’s Republican governor and President Donald Trump, contradicting evidence that states with mask mandates have seen bigger drops in coronavirus cases than those without: “We know that it doesn’t work,” she asserted about mandates.

Trump and COVID-19 loom large in this race and they are putting Ernst in a precarious position. In less than six years, she has gone from being a rising star — who was reportedly under consideration to become Trump’s vice presidential running mate in 2016 — to running neck and neck against a political newcomer, businesswoman Theresa Greenfield. The race is critical to the Republicans’ hopes of keeping control of the Senate.

Part of her problem is Trump. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll last month showed more than 1 in 3 Iowa voters think Ernst’s relationship to Trump is “too close.”

Art Cullen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who runs The Storm Lake Times in northwestern Iowa, recently wrote: Ernst “is in lockstep with Trump and McConnell on nearly every issue,” referring to the Senate’s Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell. “Iowans don’t like that. They like mavericks.”

But another part of her problem is how the Trump administration has mishandled the response to the pandemic. Iowa suffered from some of the nation’s bigger COVID-19 outbreaks, with the state reporting in recent days record numbers of hospitalizations. It has been bad enough that last week the White House coronavirus task force called on Iowa to institute a statewide mask mandate.

Greenfield is capitalizing on Ernst having toed the party line on downplaying the COVID-19 threat. The Register poll found that Greenfield, who is campaigning on the ideas that Ernst has done too little to protect Iowans during the pandemic and been too friendly to corporate donors, had a slight edge over the incumbent senator, 45% to 42%. That result is well within the poll’s margin of error. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday also found Greenfield has a slight lead over Ernst, 50% to 45%, just outside the poll’s 2.8-point margin of error. Political analysts say the race is a toss-up.

It doesn’t help Ernst that Trump has lost strength in Iowa. Polls show the president, who won the Iowa vote by more than 9 percentage points in 2016, is in a dead heat with the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.

And that decline could very well be because of COVID-19. A New York Times analysis released this summer showed voter support for Biden grew by about 2.5 percentage points locally when a county experienced “extremely high levels” of COVID-19 fatalities — similar to the way support for elected officials drops during wartime in areas that have lost troops.

Those deaths were costing Republicans running for the Senate “as much as they are costing the president,” the analysis found.

In August, Ernst fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory amplified by Trump and at least one other vulnerable Republican that only 10,000 Americans had died of COVID-19. (More than 185,000 had died at that point.) She said at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, that she was “so skeptical” of the official death toll and raised the possibility that doctors were inflating the numbers for financial gain.

Her comments sparked a sharp backlash and, a few days later, she released a statement concurring with the official death toll from public health experts. The Ernst campaign did not respond to an interview request for this story.

In a statement last week, Greenfield said elected officials must listen to public health experts and set clear examples to help Iowans take the crisis seriously. “By pointing fingers and playing politics, not passing the relief Iowans urgently need, and refusing to apologize for her dangerous comments about the Covid-19 death toll, Senator Ernst has failed to put Iowa first during this pandemic,” she said.

Last spring the virus spread through the state’s meatpacking plants, potentially exposing thousands after Trump ordered the plants to stay open. In early October the state’s fourth-largest city, Sioux City, ranked in the top 10 of affected metropolitan areas nationwide, with about 64.3 cases per 100,000 residents.

Students returning to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa in August sparked two of the largest outbreaks nationwide at that time, prompting an editorial in the University of Iowa’s student newspaper: “The University of Iowa is not safe.”

Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who has refused calls to impose a mask mandate, closed bars in six counties for less than three weeks before working to loosen quarantine restrictions — against the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 15% of likely voters in Iowa said COVID-19 is the most important issue, although just 1% of Republican voters said the pandemic is their top concern, according to a recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll. The most important issue is the economy, 31% of likely voters say.

Iowa has borne the blow of Trump’s trade disputes, with farmers forced to accept millions in federal bailout money after a tit-for-tat tariff war with China and other nations cut off crop exports.

Leonard Foster of Mason City, Iowa, 82, spoke of a neighbor who was struggling to sell his grain and cattle because of the disputes. The future of Social Security and Medicare are his biggest concerns, though he said he also worries about his children and grandchildren contracting COVID-19. A lifelong Democrat who had voted for Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s other Republican senator, he is not planning to back Ernst.

“She’s agreeing with Trump too much, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Ernst faces pressing questions about her party’s failure to agree on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court will hear a case next month that could overturn the law, an outcome that looks more likely if Trump’s latest nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is seated in time to participate. Ernst has insisted she supports the ACA’s popular protections for preexisting conditions as critics point out that her past votes to repeal the law would have eliminated those protections.

Congress’ failure to renew aid for struggling businesses and families has left some Iowans feeling, at best, that the government is not doing enough and, at worst, that politicians like Trump are hampering economic recovery.

Melissa Warren of Wellman, Iowa, said her husband has been sick with COVID symptoms and unable to work since March. Though he was hospitalized for pneumonia and remains ill, she said he has not tested positive for the virus. That disqualifies him from the few federal protections against COVID-19 bills.

Their high-deductible insurance plan is expensive, and he does not qualify for other benefits. After visits to specialists like cardiologists and pulmonologists, the medical bills are piling up, Warren said.

A Methodist pastor who works with low-income communities, Warren described presiding over one of the first funerals in Iowa for a COVID victim and the fear and pain of a family that could not even gather to grieve due to public health restrictions.

“Watching, for example, the president choosing to not wear masks, to give information that’s incorrect, has been very devastating for communities trying to build themselves up and care for one another,” she said in an interview before the announcement of Trump’s own diagnosis.

Calls for Congress to impeach Bill Barr grow: DOJ now a “vehicle” to advance Trump’s reelection

A team of legal experts is calling on the House of Representatives to immediately launch formal impeachment proceedings against Attorney General William Barr for an array of abuses during his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement official, including wielding the powers of the Justice Department to advance the political objectives of President Donald Trump.

In a detailed 267-page report (pdf) released Monday, lawyers from the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington made the case that based on his words and actions as attorney general, “Barr appears to embrace an autocratic view of the power of the executive branch, specifically presidential power, and he views his own extensive authority as flowing from this nearly unbounded view of presidential power.”

“This authoritarian worldview limits the degree to which Mr. Barr regards himself as bound by the rule of law and makes him see himself as entitled to ignore the laws, ethics, and historical practices that have helped to ensure that the work of the department is in line with the values of a democratic nation,” the report reads.

Bill Barr is using the powers of the DOJ as a vehicle to support Donald Trump’s political goals by pursuing investigations designed to justify Trump’s conduct in the 2016 campaign and discredit Mueller’s investigation.

Barr needs to go.https://t.co/rAihqgMxvh

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) October 13, 2020

After closely examining Barr’s record since his confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate last February, the legal experts conclude that Trump’s attorney general is guilty of numerous transgressions and politically motivated decisions that warrant his impeachment, including:

“Seriously and intentionally” mischaracterizing the findings of the Mueller report in Trump’s favor;
Appointing U.S. Attorney John Durham to review the origins of the Mueller probe, prompting concerns of a politically motivated ploy to announce “high level indictments” right before the November election;
Political interference by the Justice Department in the cases of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone;
Exploiting “loopholes in the law” to justify deploying federal troops to crush protests in U.S. cities like Portland, Oregon at Trump’s behest;
Ramping up “surveillance and other law enforcement activities aimed at the political left,” including allegedly tapping protesters’ phones; and
Repeatedly stonewalling attempts by Congress to conduct lawful oversight of Justice Department activities; and
Making “scores of unsubstantiated claims” suggesting that mail-in voting is highly vulnerable to mass fraud, a narrative also peddled by Trump.

The legal experts said a “common theme” that emerges from their findings is Barr’s repeated “use of the DOJ to further President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.”

“The working group came to the reluctant conclusion that Attorney General Barr is using the powers of the Department as a vehicle for supporting the political objectives of President Donald Trump,” the report reads. “It appears that the department has transitioned from one that is subject to law, to become one that instead views the application of law as politically discretionary; moving from rule of law to rule by law.”

“Such a rule by law system,” the report continues, “is the hallmark of regimes that are democracies in name but not in fact.”

Trump’s performing “a good deal worse” in 7 “critical” Rust Belt swing counties compared with 2016

If former Vice President Joe Biden carries every state that 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won four years ago and flips Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, he will defeat President Donald Trump in November and be sworn in as president of the United States in January 2021. Biden, of course, has other possible paths to victory in addition to the Rust Belt; Florida, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are among the Trump states in the Sun Belt that are in play for the former vice president. But flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is a high priority for Biden’s campaign, and according to journalist Daniel McGraw, Biden has a very good chance of doing that if seven Rust Belt counties are any indication.

McGraw, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 13, takes a look at swing counties in Pennsylvania (Northampton, Erie, Luzerne), Michigan (Macomb) and Wisconsin (Chippewa, Brown, Racine). The journalist describes them as Rust Belt swing counties that Trump won in 2016 and stresses that in most of them, he isn’t performing well in 2020.

McGraw explains, “In March of 2019, I asked a simple question: President Donald Trump won the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by a combined 77,000 votes — what counties in those states would have changed that if they had not swung his way?…. We pared it down to just seven counties total: three in Pennsylvania, one in Michigan and three in Wisconsin. Think about it this way: there are 3142 counties in the United States. President Trump could lose reelection if 3135 counties voted as they did in 2016, but seven counties do not.”

McGraw notes that in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, Trump “beat Clinton by 5000 votes after” President Barack Obama “beat” 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “by 6000.” In that county, according to a Morning Call poll, Biden is leading by 7%. And Erie County, Pennsylvania, according to McGraw, is a place where “Trump beat Clinton by 2000 votes” and “Obama beat Romney by 20,000 votes” — as well as a place where, in 2020, Biden is leading by 11% with voters who are 65 or older, according to an AARP poll.

Luzerne County, McGraw observes, is one of Trump’s best counties in Pennsylvania: he won Luzerne by 20% in 2016. But it’s uncertain whether Trump can “hold” that margin in 2020 in Luzerne.

McComb County, according to McGraw, is a Michigan County where “Trump beat Clinton by 48,000 votes” and “Obama beat Romney by 16,000 votes” — and where “the number of absentee ballot applications for this election” is “215,000 this year compared with 121,000 in 2016.” Those applications, McGraw writes, are “not good for Trump” in a “state where Trump only won by about 11,000 votes.”

In Racine County, Wisconsin, McGraw explains, “Trump beat Clinton by 4000 votes” and “Romney beat Obama by 3600 votes” — and in Wisconsin’s Chippewa County, “Trump beat Clinton by 6000 votes” and “Romney beat Obama by 150 votes.” Meanwhile, Brown County, Wisconsin, McGraw adds, is a place where “Trump beat Clinton by 14,000 votes” and “Romney beat Obama by 2300 votes.” And Wisconsin, McGraw emphasizes, is a state that is being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic — and polls are showing that most voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

“In sum: of the critical seven counties, none of them look better for Trump than they were in 2016,” McGraw writes. “And most of them look a good deal worse.”

Postmaster General DeJoy’s six-figure donations to GOP convention align with Senate probe of wife

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose political contributions are the subject of multiple congressional investigations and a campaign finance complaint, donated nearly $700,000 to the host committee who put on the Republican National Convention, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

One $250,000 donation came the same day that DeJoy gave $210,600 to Trump Victory, a donation which is currently part of an inquiry led by Senate Democrats into a series of donations surrounding the nomination of his wife, Aldona Wos, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy, a Republican mega-donor and logistics mogul, was the convention’s lead fundraiser before being appointed postmaster general last spring by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors. Congressional Democrats and secretaries of state have questioned a series of reforms made by DeJoy over the summer, which they allege appear to be part of a coordinated effort to leverage the USPS to aid the re-election of President Donald Trump.

DeJoy has denied the allegations.

Filed last Friday, the Charlotte Host Committee’s report lists four contributions from DeJoy between late December 2018 and March 31 of this year, which amount to a total $685,230.

DeJoy’s penultimate donation of $250,000 came Feb. 19, 2020, or the same day he made the $210,600 donation to Trump Victory, the joint fundraising vehicle shared between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. Six days later, Trump nominated Wos to be an ambassador.

The donations align with a series of major donations made by DeJoy to the Trump campaign and Senate Republicans leading up to his wife’s nomination as ambassador, a Salon investigation revealed. Senate Democrats announced last month that they were opening an investigation into the donations. Wos’ Senate confirmation remains pending.

DeJoy was previously tapped to raise cash for the 2020 Republican National Convention. Host committees — non-profits — depend on corporate and individual donors to fund the extravagant nomination celebrations every four years. The high-profile political events are an attractive target for corporations with lobbying interests, Brett Kappel, a nonprofit and lobbying law expert at D.C. firm Harmon Curran told Salon.

“The host committee is a 501(c)(3) organization, so these contributions are tax deductible,” Kappel said. “Lobbying expenditures, in contrast, are not tax deductible as business expenses.”

This year’s committee reported taking in more than $44 million in receipts, and it spent more than $38 million of that amount. Trump all but canceled the convention amid after North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, refused to suspend public health restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. While Republican delegates still met formally in Charlotte, Trump ultimately gave his acceptance speech from the White House lawn.

DeJoy’s $700,000 outstripped contributions from some corporations. Software maker Oracle, for example, which has business before the Trump administration in the form of a bid to purchase the social media platform TikTok, contributed $500,000. Private prison corporations Geo Group and CoreCivic gave $250,000 each. Telecom giant AT&T donated $1 million.

A local company called Charlotte Pipe & Foundry — a century-old company owned by the wealthy Dowd family, whose executives have been reliable financial backers of Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. — gave $500,000 to the committee.

Charlotte Pipe, which employs some 1,200 people, announced this May that it would relocate its flagship plant out of the city to nearby Stanly County. David Teppen, the hedge-fund billionaire and owner of the Carolina Panthers, has eyed the company’s property for a new stadium.

Charlotte Pipe also gave $25,000 to the NRA Victory Fund in August 2020, the same month as the convention, FEC records show. The donation was itemized as “other federal receipts,” meaning it was not money but a permitted equivalent such as gold or securities. Charlotte Pipe, which is privately owned, does not have shares to sell off, and the company does not manufacture gun parts, a company spokesperson told Salon. (The Tillis campaign has been accused of illegal coordination with the National Rifle Assocation.)

The same day that Charlotte Pipe gave $250,000 to the convention committee, the company donated $25,000 to Results for NC, a PAC affiliated with the Tillis campaign. Another Tillis-backing super PAC, American Crossroads, has poured millions into helping the embattled candidate salvage his re-election bid. It is also led by a USPS official.

A House committee announced last month that it was launching its own investigation into DeJoy following reports that he led an alleged criminal straw donor scheme by reimbursing employees at his former company for donating to GOP candidates. That was followed by an announcement from Senate Democrats of the probe into DeJoy’s donations connected to his wife.

Later that month, a campaign finance watchdog filed an FEC complaint against DeJoy and his former company XPO Logistics alleging that the scheme continued at least through 2018, in total allowing DeJoy to disguise possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions.

Those contributions included over $50,000 to Trump Victory.

DeJoy denies all wrongdoing.

Psychiatrist Judith Herman: Trump’s collapse in the polls has “undeniably” made him more “dangerous”

Dr. Judith Herman, the co-founder of the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Health Alliance and a longtime psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, has been warning about President Donald Trump’s mental health since the 2016 election, when she called on then-President Barack Obama to request a “full medical and psychiatric evaluation” of the president-elect.

Since then, Trump’s “grandiosity” has grown even worse, Herman said in an interview with Salon, and his supporters approach “cult behavior.” With Trump’s poll numbers plummeting and his attempts to sow doubt in the results of the election, the specter of violence amid calls for an uprising have made him even more “dangerous,” she added.

Herman, who was among the dozens of mental health professionals who expressed concern about the president’s mental health in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” and spoke out at events hosted by psychiatrist Bandy Lee, spoke to Salon about Trump’s “mental status” amid his electoral trouble and the dangers posed by his “cult”-like supporters.

Salon: Why did you decide to publicly speak out about the president’s mental health?

Herman: Well, it started with the election of 2016, which I was kind of shocked and upset about like many people. And so what I did was I wrote a letter in November 2016 to President Obama, who was still president then. And a couple of my colleagues signed on, and it was a very short letter. It just basically said, “I’m worried about the mental instability of this president-elect — and for these reasons. And is there a way to require him to have a fitness evaluation that would involve the complete medical and psychiatric eval assessment by neutral professionals?”

And of course the answer was “no.” There is no such mechanism. There is, actually, for high ranking military officers — except for the commander-in-chief. They have to go through a fitness evaluation every year. And I never did hear back from the president — Obama — but the letter . . . did go public. Huffington Post got hold, and it went viral. And Gloria Steinem read it at the Women’s March and put it on her website, which was very exciting.

And so then Bandy Lee contacted me. She was putting together what she called a town hall meeting in March of 2017 . . . We basically said, “We have a duty to warn, or duty to be what Robert Lifton calls the “witnessing professionals,” when we think someone is a danger to the country.”

You’ve discussed the Goldwater rule, which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures they have not examined, and the American Psychiatric Association has been very critical of mental health professionals that have spoken out. Have you experienced a backlash as a result of your decision to speak publicly?

No, not personally. I mean, I’m still a member of the American Psychiatric Association. Actually, I’m a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association — for what that’s worth. When we were working on the book, Robert Lifton and I called ourselves “village elders.” But some contributors to the book resigned from the APA either over this issue, or I think Bandy had resigned quite some time before. But, no. I mean, my attitude was if they wanted to kick me out of the organization, that was OK with me. But I haven’t actually experienced any problems.

You said ahead of Trump’s presidency that you were particularly worried about how Trump’s “psychopathology might be amplified by his access to power.” How have you seen that play out during his administration?

Oh, unfortunately it has been pretty much what we predicted. I mean, you have grandiosity, you have a tendency to deny reality and you have paranoia and attraction to violence. And it seemed to me that all of those things would be amplified by access to power. I mean, the grandiosity and the insistence on his own alternative facts — as one of his spokespeople put it so delicately — has been enabled by all of his courtiers and his sort of cult followers, particularly around denying reality during the coronavirus pandemic.

I mean, it does approach that kind of cult behavior — including the MAGA hats and the willingness to expose themselves to a lethal pathogen — because loyalty to the cult leader requires it. And his grandiosity is now . . . to the point where there is a sense that he is immortal or invulnerable or invincible. He could conquer the virus by being this Superman-great leader.

I think Tom Friedman had a column in The Times the other day that said, “Trump’s not Superman. He’s Superspreader.” And it seems even worse now that he’s out of the hospital and claiming that he feels great.

He’s claiming to have found a cure.

Yes. Well, I mean, now he’s on dexamethasone, which is a steroid known to produce euphoria, and grandiosity and psychosis as a side effect for some patients. If you have a tendency in that direction in the first place, it probably doesn’t help. But, yes, it’s become more florid, certainly. as time has gone by.

And then, of course, the incitements to violence and the paranoia have similarly become more explicit — more frequent. And now, he is retrieving wilder and wilder conspiracy theories and obsessing with particular enemies. So I would say that you can’t really know his mental status without a direct examination, but what we see of his mental status looks more floridly disturbed as time has gone by.

You described him as a cult leader. What do you think pulls his supporters into that cult to begin with?

Oh, I wish I knew. I mean, let’s not minimize misogyny and white supremacy . . . If he can be said to have principles, those are the only two he’s got — and they’re very consistent. And, I think, certainly there is a hardcore [following] for whom that is the most important thing. For others, I’m puzzled. I mean, I do think the politics of resentment clearly . . . not just the resentment of women and Black people who don’t know their place anymore, but the resentment of people who feel disrespected and that their issues and their wellbeing are not reflected in ordinary politics. It needs an extraordinary leader to shake things up — change things.

I mean, I think those two ingredients by themselves would make maybe the kind of third party that we’ve had periodically right along . . . when various segregationists ran for president, for example. But I think the fact that there are very powerful and wealthy enablers is what transformed this into the takeover of a major political party, and the success of the Electoral College. And then, of course, the implementation of their program has nothing to do with the white male working-class and rural folks who feel left behind.

That’s been a running theme in Republican politics, though. An aggrieved white base supports the candidate who mostly works to advance the interest of the rich.

Yeah, it has been. I mean, many of the things we’re seeing in this presidency are not new at all. Certainly we’ve had demagogic leaders before. We’ve had this kind of alliance. I think that this particular configuration of the Republican Party began probably when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and said, “We shall overcome.” And the solid South, which had been a Democratic one-party state became a Republican one-party state for a long time.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Trump might not accept the results of the election. You’ve warned in articles that his narcissism just “can’t bear” the thought of losing. How do you think he might respond to a loss? And does it even matter whether he loses by a little or a lot?

Oh, I think it matters a lot in terms of how successful his call for an uprising will be. I mean, he clearly has in mind . . . that his Proud Boys, a combination of militias, probably the armed folks that we saw in Washington when he tried to drive out the protesters, when he had to have a photo-op in front of the church with the Bible. They turned out to be from ICE, and other immigration enforcement and Park Police. And it was a mix of basically paramilitaries. And I’ve been thinking about the ICE people as, in some ways, the equivalent of the SA in Nazi Germany — the Sturmabteilung. And I think the call for an armed uprising should be taken very, very seriously. He doesn’t kid around. When he says he would not be willing to accept the results of any election he lost, I think that does really need to be taken very seriously.

There was a report that the FBI busted up a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich.

Yes. Well, there have already been two armed incursions into the legislature in Michigan that closed down the legislature. I mean, this is not a joke.

But the question is: Are these going to be isolated, scattered bands that can be relatively easily contained or not? Or are they going to have an army of lawyers and other establishment enablers contesting every bit of the election? And I think the only way — it’s that combination again that gives you fascism. And I think the only way to prevent that is to have a very clear cut result.

Are you worried that Trump may become even less restrained once he’s out of the White House?

The problem is as soon as he’s out of the White House, he faces multiple [possible] criminal charges, as well as civil liabilities. And that’s not going to go anywhere — that’s going to progress. And, I mean, I do have enough trust in our institutions. Or hope, I guess, might be a better word, to think that there will be a reckoning. Now, what will happen to his mental status under those circumstances? I think it’s not going to be pretty. I mean, it’s already not pretty.

But when do you say if someone veers over into psychosis, right? What’s the judgment call? And that’s not a judgment call that one can make from a distance. I mean, in that sense — I think most of the time the Goldwater rule is perfectly appropriate. Don’t make diagnoses from a distance. Ordinarily, we have our patient’s permission and all that, but what we can assess from a distance is dangerousness. And when the person in the most powerful office in the world is floridly and undeniably dangerous, I think we have to take it seriously. We also have to hope that any crazy military orders that he gives will not be followed.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

“Totally Under Control” shows all the ways the Trump administration let a virus win

Over the last four years, Donald Trump‘s administration has kept fact checkers and truth-seekers several levels occupied. Those who aren’t actively correcting his statements busily dig for precedent or corroborating evidence to prove their take on reality isn’t simply yanked out of thin air, that it is accurately represented.

Such a task shouldn’t be difficult. But “Totally Under Control” shows how needlessly tough it is under an administration that has pitted science against politics and the economy, and for experts with extensive backgrounds on pandemic response against Trump loyalists more eager to remain in the president’s good graces than to curb the spread of a pandemic he’d rather would simply disappear, like magic.

“Totally Under Control” is a 123-minute indictment of the Trump administration’s disastrous mishandling of this pandemic, which is exactly what a person expects from an Alex Gibney documentary. No fan of this administration, Gibney has had an especially prolific 365 days thanks to this administration’s bungling; this is his third Trump-related documentary released since last November, after “Citizen K,” and HBO’s “Agents of Chaos.”

Understandably, Gibney could direct this project alone, especially given that he decided it needed to be made in April, “in the middle of the New York sh*tshow,” according to the film’s press notes. Demonstrating this are the recurring instances of perspective shots taken from behind the interview subjects, showing them speaking to a small screen surrounded by extensive plastic sheeting, behind which a camera operator is lurking.

There’s a touch of levity in those glimpses; more than this, however, it calls attention to the obscenity of this new normal.

Works born in the midst of crises and times of high anxiety risk becoming victims of the creator’s frustrations, but Gibney and his co-directors Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan sidestep those pitfalls.

By carefully walking the viewer through the pandemic’s timeline from the emergence of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 to the most recent headline-grabbing developments, it reconstructs recent history to remind us of how recently and quickly this pandemic changed life as we know it. Simultaneously, it calls attention to the many missed opportunities officials could have seized that may have altered the course we’re on, and the inexcusable idiocy behind decisions such as contradicting expert recommendations that people wear masks in public.

Somehow ignoring scientific advice became an act of patriotism, the film observes. That misguided fervor will take more than a regime change to undo.

“Totally Under Control” moves with a variation of the anxious urgency that drives “Agents of Chaos” owing to its connection to the here and now. Just as that film dives into Russian interference with the 2016 elections and was released weeks before the 2020 edition, the final frame of “Totally Under Control” confirms how close to release the three filmmakers had to update the production.

It simply a text card that reads, “One day after the completion of this film, President Donald Trump revealed that he had tested positive for COVID-19.”

In light of the two hours’ prosecution that spells out this administration’s spectacular bungling of its response to this pandemic, those word should have an air of poetic justice to them. But they don’t because we’re still living with the effects of that failure. “Totally Under Control” simply adds the doleful confirmation that all this could have been avoided if not for Trump’s narcissism and ego, his and his cronies’ zealous belief in the myth of American exceptionalism and his administration’s purposeful dismantling of any plans or structures informed by expertise.

Mind you, despite their even-keeled strategy in taking on this story, “Totally Under Control” is far from a dispassionate film. Nearly every scientific or medical expert who agreed to sit for an interview has at least one point in their testimony where they are at the very least at a loss for words.

Rick Bright, who was removed from his position with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) after going to the press with what he knew about this administration’s intentional misleading the public regarding hydroxychloroquine, nearly breaks down in tears as he’s retracing the steps that led to his decision to effectively garrote his government career for the sake of protecting the public.

“It’s not easy to come forward in this administration, OK?” he says, adding, “It was a very hard process to lay our careers on the line to push back” against the Food and Drug Administration’s insistence upon rushing the treatment to consumers at the White House’s insistence and despite any evidence of its effectiveness.

But this is an appropriate response when placed in context of the documentary’s central question: Why did the United States fail to reckon with a danger for which it should have been so well prepared?

The answers are exasperating – and to the credit of Gibney, Harutyunyan and Hillinger ( who worked on the FX docuseries “The Weekly”) the blame doesn’t entirely fall on this administration. Just most of it.

“Totally Under Control” explains why the federal stockpiles of protective medical equipment should have been adequately supplied under Barack Obama’s administration but, unfortunately, were not. As with all past presidencies, military spending was prioritized over preventative allocations for other departments, including those tasked with pandemic preparedness.

As with any film of this sort, much of “Totally Under Control” is in effect a replay of the news that’s come before that takes time to highlight aspects of the pandemic narrative that likely escaped our attention or might have been underreported.

One alarming testimonial comes from Max Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy who volunteered to assist the White House COVID-19 Supply-Chain team headed up by Jared Kushner. Kennedy assumed he would be providing auxiliary support to a team of experts, only to discover that he was part of a 10-person crew of 20-year-old volunteers “all just with private laptops, nobody with any industry relationships, no experience working in supply chain” Googling mask manufacturers online and contacting them through their personal email accounts.

He left in mid-April, as the pandemic was ravaging Manhattan and state governors were bidding against each other – and the federal government itself – to secure PPE for its own state medical facilities and frontline workers.

“My takeaway was really that I still feel that I haven’t worked for the government,” Kennedy says. “We were so far outside of it. I mean, we were . . . every single person that we reported to up the chain of command was a political appointee. The number of FEMA employees I met, I could count on one hand, and they were fleeting interactions. It taught me about how this administration works, and it seemed to work in this case outside of the government.”

This makes “Totally Under Control” a case study of how this administration works against the interests of the public and for the enrichment of corporate entities and the personal financial portfolios of everyone involved. And if the professionals here can’t hide their aggravation or befuddlement at the administration’s criminal inability to refrain from politicizing a deadly virus, no sane and feeling viewer can blame them.

We’ve reached a point in this presidency’s lifespan at which the public surely must be numb to so many accounts of willful negligence and mishandling of issues that impact the entirety of the American population – the economy, the environment, systemic injustice and now, the public’s health.

Within the last four years, Trump has inspired more than 1,200 books about his life and his governing methods, positive and negative. A count of every special report, hour-long news special and documentary such as this would eclipse that number by a wide margin.

“Totally Under Control” serves as a record of Trump’s dereliction of his duty to protect the American people that’s also a testament to the efforts of the respected and accredited medical professionals who have done their best to step into the void he’s left.

“There’s a misconception that public health failed. The truth is that political leaders failed to follow public health guidance, and that’s what caused avoidable disease, death and economic destruction,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC.

Frieden and other medical professionals aren’t sharing such opinions out of vindictiveness but rather, dismay, anger and sorrow. For people like Dr. Taison Bell, the COVID-19 ICU Director at UVA Medical Center who sounded the alarm regarding the pandemic’s disproportionately heavy toll on communities of color, testifying isn’t merely a matter of satisfying one’s conscience. He’s doing it, he says, because in every case he sees his own family and the risks they face.

When he reads names of people who fell sick or died of COVID-related illnesses, he says he sees “smiles and hugs and tears and barbecues. They’re not numbers on a paper.”

“Totally Under Control” is currently available on demand and premieres on Hulu on Tuesday, Oct. 20.

The coronavirus may live longer on some surfaces than previously believed. Here’s what that means

Scientists already know that the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, is primarily transmitted through airborne particles known as aerosols that are either inhaled or ingested. One lingering question, though, has been how long the disease can survive on surfaces after landing there. A new study has a potentially troubling answer — namely, that the virus can stay on surfaces like banknotes, glass and stainless steel for up to four weeks.

The study found that fomites, or objects that are likely to carry infection, can contain live specimens of the novel coronavirus for weeks. These include “high contact surfaces such as touchscreens on mobile phones, bank ATMs, airport check-in kiosks and supermarket self-serve kiosks all acting as fomites for the transmission of viruses,” a group of scientists from Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), wrote in their study. Published in the Virology Journal on Monday, the researchers argued that the SARS-CoV-2 virus “remains viable” for 28 days or longer when it dries on “non-porous” surfaces, meaning that it would be possible to get infected the novel coronavirus in a room with a conventional temperature and humidity level (68°F and 50% humidity).

They note that the SARS virus, a related coronavirus, also managed to regain its infectiousness after remaining dried up on plastic for 28 days at room temperature.

That has implications particularly for the kinds of things that people touch everyday and trade between each other, particularly currency. As the authors explain, money is regularly passed between large groups of people, and banknotes made of paper and polymer can both carry live specimens of the novel coronavirus. “The persistence of virus on both paper and polymer currency is of particular significance, considering the frequency of circulation and the potential for transfer of viable virus both between individuals and geographic locations,” the authors explain.

Debbie Eagles, deputy director of the the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness and one of the paper’s co-authors, told CNET that their study reinforces the existing consensus that there is a “need for good practices such as regular handwashing and cleaning surfaces.”

Prior to this paper, scientists did not always believe that the novel coronavirus could survive on surfaces for very long. A study from the New England Journal of Medicine in March speculated that the virus could survive for up to 72 hours on plastic, for up to 48 hours on stainless steel and for up to 24 hours on cardboard. Carolyn Machamer, a professor of cell biology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, explained to the university’s tech hub that “you are more likely to catch the infection through the air if you are next to someone infected than off of a surface. Cleaning surfaces with disinfectant or soap is very effective because once the oily surface coat of the virus is disabled, there is no way the virus can infect a host cell.” A Chinese doctor, Wang Zhou MD, expressed a similar view in March, writing that viruses can survive “for several hours on smooth surfaces” and “if the temperature and humidity permit, they can survive for several days.”

Dr. Mark McKinlay, the director of the Center for Vaccine Equity at The Task Force for Global Health and who is working closely with the CDC in its response to the virus, told Salon in May that breathing in the virus is still much more of a concern than transmitting the virus through touch.

“This new CDC guidance is clarifying that it is not as easy to become infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus from hard surfaces as it is to become infected via person-to-person contact, via respiratory droplets,” McKinlay explained. “That’s why the guidance on social distancing is so important to follow. However, it does not mean that the virus is never spread through contact with surfaces, just that it is not the predominant route of transmission.”

Still, even if breathing another’s infected air appears to be the most probable path of infection, there is evidence of people acquiring the coronavirus by touching objects that other coronavirus-positive people have touched. In New Zealand, which has so few cases of COVID-19 that contact tracers are able to precisely follow the path of infections, public health experts traced two recent infections to an elevator lift button and a trash can. “This particular [trash] bin had a lid that required you to lift the lid,” the island nation’s director of public health, Dr Caroline McElnay, said at a press conference.

The recent evidence regarding the coronavirus’ life on surfaces suggests that those with compromised immune systems or who are specifically concerned about transmission may want to be diligent about wiping down oft-touched public surfaces, currency, or avoiding touching these in the first place.

Johnson & Johnson is pausing its COVID-19 vaccine trial after “unexplained illness” in volunteer

In a setback to the hope for an imminent COVID-19 vaccine, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson announced Monday that it is pausing development of its experimental vaccine because one of their volunteers is suffering from an unexplained illness.

“We have temporarily paused further dosing in all our COVID-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials, including the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE trial, due to an unexplained illness in a study participant,” Johnson & Johnson explained in its statement. “Following our guidelines, the participant’s illness is being reviewed and evaluated by the ENSEMBLE independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) as well as our internal clinical and safety physicians.”

After explaining that they are acting out of caution to make sure that any possible vaccine released by the company is as safe as possible, Johnson & Johnson emphasized that they are only implementing a study pause and not a regulatory hold. The difference, the statement explained, is a regulatory hold is required an outside public health authority. They emphasized that they chose to pause their experiment and “typically do not communicate study pauses publicly.” The pause was first announced by Stat News.

Vaccines are drugs that create active acquired immunity from specific infectious diseases. They usually contain agents that either resemble or are manufactured from the disease in question, weakening or killing them before being injected into patients so that their immune systems can both destroy the immediate threat and teach the body how to defend itself from that threat going forward. For a population to achieve herd immunity, scientists generally believe that roughly 70 percent of its members need to be vaccinated.

It also takes time to properly and safely develop vaccines, as Yale University professor of pediatrics and epidemiology Dr. Eugene Shapiro explained to Salon last month. Vaccines have to first be tested in small groups to guarantee that they are safe; and then in larger groups, both to further test their safety and to contrast the results of vaccinated patients with those who receive a placebo.

“Vaccine development is a high risk undertaking, especially for a new disease,” Dr. Albert Ko, department chair and professor of epidemiology and of medicine at Yale University, told Salon by email. “The development and evaluation of multiple types of vaccine candidates mitigates the risk of failure and increases the hope that we will have successful safe and effective vaccines.”

At the time that it put a pause on its testing, Johnson & Johnson’s drug was in Phase III of its clinical trial, meaning that the company was attempting to confirm the safety and effectiveness that it had seen in its first two trials. The company had previously expressed cautious optimism about its experiments, telling Salon last month that “we anticipate that our Phase Three trial will initiate later in September pending discussions with regulators, and possible first vaccine batches for potential emergency use available in early 2021, pending results from ongoing and upcoming clinical studies.”

There are a number of other companies and institutions also in various stages of developing vaccines including Oxford University (in conjunction with AstraZeneca), Moderna, Pfizer, Inovio, Novavax, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi.

According to the Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, there have been nearly 38 million cases of COVID-19 diagnosed worldwide, with more than 7.8 million of those in the United States. So far more than 215,000 Americans have died of the deadly disease.

Salon reached out to Johnson & Johnson for comment and was referred to their original press release.

From the “Green Book” to Buicks, PBS’ “Driving While Black” examines the history of Black mobility

Black mobility has always come with its limitations in this country. A vision of a better life met with fear entrenched the journey. The automobile for many African Americans was a utility of safety, freedom, and opportunity. Shackling someone cruising along the highway is difficult. Historian Dr. Gretchen Sorin has done extensive fieldwork on the subject, culminating in her book “Driving While Black,” which was published earlier this year. The book provides the basis for the two-hour PBS documentary of the same name, directed by Sorin and Emmy-winning filmmaker Ric Burns.

The documentary examines “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a small directory of Black-only businesses, restaurants, staying accommodations, and gas stations that were safe for African Americans to use while traveling. The book was published by New York mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936-1966. Its chief goal was to no longer need printing.

The film traces the fight for Black mobility from the Black codes, meant to control Black people’s freedom of movement after the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which depended on the automobile. Today, systemic racism still haunts Americans while doing just about anything while Black: shopping, eating, sleeping, and working. Most recently, Black travel guides have caught on as a topic of popular interest through films and TV shows like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” and the Oscar-winning, yet controversial film “Green Book.” Now we get to parse through its history.

In “Driving While Black,” we learn how car choices, travel guides, Black-only businesses, and informal communications networks helped to keep Black people safe, as they traveled from coast to coast and prodded towards equality. Sorin spoke to Salon about the film and Black mobility.

The following is lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you and Ric Burns first come together to turn your book into a documentary?

Ric Burns and I have known each other for about 25 years. I was comfortable with him telling my story and working with him. I think that we need accomplices and allies to see inequality. I think he is a brilliant storyteller and filmmaker, and I thought he was the right person to work with me on this project.

What did you find most fascinating about “The Negro Motorist Green Book” when you first began this research?

It’s like the light bulb went off when I started looking at cars and thinking about what travel was like for African Americans. I started talking to people and doing an oral history about travel experiences: vacations, visiting family in the south, and traveling for business. During the same time that the car is becoming popular, African Americans are starting to be hired in major corporations and they need to travel for business.

You have musicians, athletes, business and corporate executives who are traveling, and all of these people who are traveling in automobiles need places to stay and eat. The research just grew and grew, but it is really all focused around the automobile, and how the experiences for African Americans were far different than their white colleagues, neighbors, and just white people in general.

It’s interesting that the “Green Book” [guide] was sponsored by Esso. What was this all about?

It definitely had enlightened self-interest I would say. Esso was a part of Standard Oil, and Standard Oil was owned by the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers were devout Baptists and believed in equality indeed still to this day. Standard Oil was broken up, but the Esso company continued to support equality. They were smart. They knew that African Americans were a potential big market. They were the ones that said, “We will make our restrooms and our gas stations available to African Americans,” so African Americans go and buy their gas. Why would you go buy your gas at a gas station where they won’t let you use the bathroom? It was interesting because when I would go ask folks what gas stations they would use, everyone would say Esso. Some people didn’t even know why they went to Esso gas station because it was almost like a family tradition.

Decisions about what type of car to purchase were largely about safety for African Americans, the Buick becoming one of the most popular cars for this demographic. Can you tell me about this?

I wonder if Buick even knows that African Americans drove their cars and thought that they were so important, because a Buick was like a second tier of cars and it was still a really reliable, big, and heavy car. Buicks were popular with African Americans all over the country.

It’s interesting how later on in hip-hop culture, the car becomes even more tethered to one’s identity.

I think the car has always been reflective of identity, but it becomes more of a status symbol if you can afford a better car, if you can afford a Cadillac or you can afford a Mercedes-Benz. The irony is that it also opens up African Americans more to the police. The very thing that African Americans were using to keep themselves safe, law enforcement was viewing as indicative of drug or criminal activity.

The establishment of the highway then provides a coating of safety for people. Can you tell me about that evolution?

You didn’t have to go through little communities that you didn’t know anything about. You could just stay on the highway and hopefully if you needed gas or needed to use the restroom you could just stop off at a gas station.

I think the most frightening story is the one about the little boy who is traveling to a funeral with his aunt and uncle, and they make the wrong turn. They are driving down the wrong street in Waco, Texas and as they are traveling they see a mob setting a Black man on fire. Someone sees them in the car and yells out, “There is some more. Let’s get them,” so they took off after them. The highways eliminate that possibility while driving through these little towns.

The problem is that the highways often go right through communities, and urban renewal goes right through Black communities, so for example my grandmother’s house in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My grandmother had a tiny little brick house up on a hill. I remember as a child we used to stay there every summer, and that house was taken by eminent domain, and they put a highway right through her house. You know Urban Renewal is also called Negro Removal.

“Lovecraft Country” highlights the “Green Book”-inspired “Safe Negro Travel Guide”; “Queen & Slim,” rehashes the unfortunate circumstances that can occur when encountering the police; and “Green Book,” replays history. What are your thoughts on the portrayal of Black mobility in these projects?

The “Green Book” movie I have seen and commented on. It’s a great Hallmark movie. It’s what you wish the world was like. Everyone starts off as a racist in the movie and by the time it ends everyone is hugging each other. They’ve dropped their racism and we wish things were like that. I don’t really think “Green Book” was about the [actual] “Green Book.”

I took issue with the fact that all the places that the main character stays in are all dumps, and certainly not all the places in the “Green Book” were dumps. There were some incredible luxury places to stay around the country. There was one in Miami, New York, Philadelphia, L.A. There were beautiful luxury hotels for African Americans and there were incredible resorts as well. They weren’t all seedy motels, but for that movie they needed to be seedy.

The “Green Book” had a wide range of places to stay from staying at guest houses and staying at private homes to staying at these luxury hotels and resorts. I’m not trying to be nostalgic about segregation, but African Americans had built a network of these hotels and restaurants, guest houses and tourist homes, because they were needed by Black people when they traveled. It represented entrepreneurship.

What do you hope people ultimately take away from the film?

I would like people to realize that this is a well-documented history, but I’d also like people to say, we really need to think about how we change policing in this country. President Barack Obama convened a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and it was the police who made these recommendations. The majority of police in this country want to do the right thing. We have a blueprint for what needs to be done and how it can be fixed. I think we have a moment when Black and white people have come together as accomplices and allies to solve a problem. We are seeing that the people who are demonstrating are both Black and white. It’s not just Black people saying there needs to be a reckoning here. It’s white people as well.

“Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” premieres Tuesday, Oct. 13 at 9 p.m. on PBS.

Trump advises Brett Kavanaugh to sue his accusers, trigger full public review of evidence

President Donald Trump on Monday advised Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to sue women who have accused him of sexual assault, a move which would trigger an investigation and public review of the evidence against him.

Amid the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, Trump offered the advice in response to a tweet from the House Judiciary Committee Republicans urging Americans to “remember what they did to Brett Kavanaugh. We don’t owe the Democrats anything.”

“He should sue the women, and all of those who illegally worked with them, for false and disgusting accusations!!!” Trump tweeted, alleging a crime without providing specific evidence.

Two hours after dragging the Kavanaugh accusations back into the limelight, Trump professed his admiration for former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who resigned from the network in disgrace after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and sustaining a toxic work culture at the right-leaning network for decades.

Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation hearings became a political flashpoint after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accused him of pinning her to a bed, groping her and trying to take off her clothes at a high school house party. Ford characterized the incident as “attempted rape.”

Not long after she came forward, Ford was joined by two other women: Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her at a dorm party while the two were freshmen at Yale; and Julie Swetnick, who claimed that Kavanaugh had been present at high school parties where gang rapes occurred.

“I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room,” Swetnick said in an affidavit. “These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.”

Kavanaugh categorically denied all of the allegations, and his confirmation hearings played out against the backdrop of the national #MeToo reckoning. Following the contentious hearings and a brief FBI inquiry into the claims, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the high court in October 2018.

It is highly unlikely that Kavanaugh will sue. Legal experts point out that a suit would trigger “discovery,” a portion of the trial process where each party may bring their own evidence to the table.

Attorney Melissa Schwartz, who managed public relations for Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings, pointed out what such a move could mean for Kavanaugh.

“Sue the women…like the multiple credible women who came forward? And those of us who were proud to serve them pro bono?” she tweeted. “That means ACTUALLY investigating their claims and the dozens of witnesses ignored by the Committee.”

Sue the women…like the multiple credible women who came forward? And those of us who were proud to serve them pro bono? That means ACTUALLY investigating their claims and the dozens of witnesses ignored by the Committee. Let's do it (cc: @kabarkoff @LisaBanksKMB @DebraKatzKMB) https://t.co/YcDxlxLBiG

— Melissa Schwartz (@MSchwartz3) October 12, 2020

Whereas elected GOP officials controlled the scope of confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, a full civil trial with evidence and witnesses would be a different matter. Kavanaugh would have to again explain his denials under oath, this time in front of an impartial judge.

A trial would also mean the world would again hear from Ford — whom even Trump found a credible witness — as well as Ramirez, who reportedly was denied the opportunity to provide evidence during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Trump previously tweeted that Kavanaugh should sue in response to those reports, which surfaced last year.

“Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop? They are trying to influence his opinions. Can’t let that happen!”

Trump has been accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women. He is currently fighting one woman’s request in court for a DNA sample to support her allegation of rape.

Trump’s current nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, belongs to an obscure ultra-conservative Christian sect called People of Praise. Former members say the group teaches wives to obey their husbands at all times — and provide sex on demand.

Texas counties can offer only one drop-off ballot location, federal appeals court rules

Texas counties may collect mail-in ballots at only one location, a federal appeals court ruled late Monday, once again upholding an order from Gov. Greg Abbott that restricts voting options.

Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several sites where voters could deliver their ballots, Abbott ordered Oct. 1 that they would be limited to one.

A number of civil rights groups sued in at least four lawsuits, calling the order an act of voter suppression that would disproportionately impact low-income voters, voters with disabilities, older voters and voters of color in Democratic counties. A federal judge on Friday sided with those groups, blocking Texas from enforcing the ruling.

But a three-judge panel on the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted that ruling on Saturday and on Monday gave a more formal word on the matter in a written opinion.

“Leaving the Governor’s October 1 Proclamation in place still gives Texas absentee voters many ways to cast their ballots in the November 3 election. These methods for remote voting outstrip what Texas law previously permitted in a pre-COVID world,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan for the panel of three judges all appointed by President Donald Trump. “The October 1 Proclamation abridges no one’s right to vote.”

Travis County had designated four locations and Harris County — home to 2.4 million registered voters and spanning a greater distance than the state of Rhode Island — had designated a dozen before Abbott’s order forced them to close most sites. Fort Bend and Galveston counties also planned to use multiple locations, according to court documents.

Voting rights advocates and local election administrators said the extra sites were critical for helping voters cast their ballots safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Texas is set to receive an unprecedented number of absentee ballots this year, and amid concerns over U.S. Postal Service delays, advocates say, in-person drop-off locations are critical.

Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins has not hesitated to say the governor’s decision amounts to voter suppression.

“To force hundreds of thousands of seniors and voters with disabilities to use a single drop-off location in a county that stretches over nearly 2,000 square miles is prejudicial and dangerous,” Hollins said earlier this month.

In some states, voters can simply leave their ballots in boxes outside town halls or local churches. Not in Texas, where voters must show an election worker an approved form of identification and can only bring their own ballot.

Abbott had argued that the measure was necessary to ensure election integrity, but he did not provide any evidence and his office did not answer questions about how limiting the highly regulated drop-off locations would do so. In court filings, lawyers for the Texas attorney general’s office wrote that some counties wouldn’t provide “adequate election security, including poll watchers” — “inconsistencies” that the state argued “introduced a risk to ballot integrity.”

Abbott said that poll watchers must be allowed at the drop-off sites, as they are at in-person voting sites. Experts say voter fraud is rare, but Republican officials in Texas and nationally have sought to cast doubt on the security of absentee ballots even as their political party calls on its own voters to use them.

The appeals court ruled Monday that Texas did not need to show evidence of voter fraud to justify its decision to limit counties to one location.

“Such evidence has never been required to justify a state’s prophylactic measures to decrease occasions for vote fraud or to increase the uniformity and predictability of election administration,” Duncan wrote for the court.

One voter who sued the state over the order, 82-year-old Ralph Edelbach, said in court documents that closing the site nearest his Cypress home will mean he adds an extra 20 miles each way to his trip to deliver his ballot, forcing him to spend nearly 90 minutes round trip.

That inconvenience will only be greater, advocates say, for voters with disabilities or those without reliable access to transportation.

The groups that sued the governor include the Texas and National Leagues of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Legislative Black Caucus.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

“I would have waited all day if I had to”: Hours-long lines mar first day of early voting in Georgia

Some Georgia voters were forced to wait more than 10 hours to cast their ballots on the first day of early voting in the state.

There were several reports of technical glitches, but state officials said the hours-long waits primarily were the result of “record turnout.” Some voters braved lines for up to 11 hours on Monday.

Nearly 128,000 Georgians voted on Monday, up from 91,000 in 2016, according to the secretary of state’s office. While the first day drew high turnout, the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted that 253,000 voted early in a single day on the Friday before Election Day four years ago.

Georgia, which saw similar wait times during a primary impacted by shuttered polling sites and a shortage of workers, has shut down 214 polling places since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Critics accused the state of “voter suppression” in response to videos showing long lines on Monday.

“This is a picture of voter suppression,” former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., tweeted. “Why do Americans have to wait in lines this long?”

Previous poll closures disproportionately impacted communities of color, though it is unclear whether the same trend continued on Monday.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said the long waits were unsurprising because of voter “enthusiasm.”

“Georgia is seeing record turnout for early voting because of excitement and enthusiasm of the upcoming election,” Raffensperger spokesman said Walter Jones told CNN. “Long lines are to be expected — voters need to be aware of all of their options, including three weeks of early voting, no-excuse absentee and in-person voting day of the election.”

But technical difficulties did contribute to the delays. Voting at the Atlanta Hawks’ State Farm Arena was delayed for about an hour due to a glitch with electronic pollbooks used to check in voters, multiple individuals reported.

“I am very upset that we were put into this position,” Hawks CEO Steve Koonin told CNN. “That’s why we required people on site, and I’m glad to say it got resolved quickly.”

“It was a little frustrating,” Atlanta voter Adrienne Crowley told AJC.

But voters were generally prepared for the waits — and eager to make their voice heard.

“I would have waited all day if I had to,” Crowley said.

Cobb County voter Steve Davidson said he could not leave, because the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and other civil rights figures had fought for too long to give Black voters like himself the right to vote.

“They’ve been fighting for decades. If I’ve got to wait six or seven hours, that’s my duty to do that,” he told the Associated Press. ” I’ll do it happily.”

“I think the positive thing is that there’s a lot of people out there waiting to vote,” Fulton County elections director Rick Barron told Georgia Public Broadcast. “We expected to have lines on the first day — a lot of people have been anxious to vote for a long time — so we were expecting this.”

“We’re seeing extreme and tremendous turnout on the ground and around the state,” Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told AJC. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm around this election, and you’re going to see high turnout. Because of that, we’re going to see lines.”

More than 600,000 voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, including about 470,000 who have voted by mail. The state is expected to be one of the key swing votes in the upcoming election. President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden are separated by about one to two points in recent polls, and the Cook Political Report has rated both of its Senate races as toss-ups.

Election experts predicted that the lines would improve once the early rush died down.

“Early voting gives people a choice when they wish to vote, a large number of people are enthusiastic to vote at the first chance they get, thus long lines,” University of Florida professor Michael McDonald said on Twitter. “Ironically, they report high satisfaction with their voting experience. Lines will shorten after the initial rush.”

James Murdoch says his family media empire legitimizes disinformation and obscures facts

James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox and the youngest son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, has admitted that he stepped away from his father’s media empire, in part, because it legitimizes disinformation and obscures facts.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important. But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas,” Murdoch told The New York Times in his first major interview since his exit.

In the interview, conducted by Maureen Dowd for a profile published Oct. 10, Murdoch explained why he had “pulled the rip cord” with the family business.

“A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation, and I think it’s often taken advantage of,” he said. “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.”

“And I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made,” he continued. “So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”

Murdoch left the News Corp board in July, citing editorial disagreements. The company owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the U.S., in addition to The Sun, The Times and Sky News overseas. His resignation letter read, in its entirety:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I hereby tender my resignation as a member of the Board of Directors of News Corporation (the “Company”), effective as of the date hereof.

My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.

James Murdoch has made no secret about the ideological gap between him and what he has characterized as the “American political project” of Fox News, a network whose fawning pro-Trump opinion programming has been compared to North Korean state TV. After Trump praised “very fine” white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, Murdoch gave $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League and told friends in an email that “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”

Murdoch told The New Yorker in 2019 that there were “views I really disagree with on Fox” before he abandoned the company later that year. In January 2020, Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, expressed their “frustration” with climate change denialism at News Corp as wildfires torched 46 million acres in Australia, their home country. (Fox News personalities pushed a false story about arson driving the fires, which was picked up from Murdoch-owned outlet The Australian.)

Asked in The Times interview about his thoughts on Fox News peddling misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, Murdoch replied, “Look, you do worry about it, and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis. Climate is also a public health crisis. Whatever political spin on that — if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”

James and Kathryn Murdoch gave $2 million to help elect Biden and Democrats, it was reported earlier this summer.

Though Murdoch no longer has an official position on the corporate board, he retains his share of the Murdoch Family Trust, which still has voting stakes in News Corp and Fox Corporation — a position Murdoch has suggested was relatively inconsequential. He has launched an independent foundation called Quadrivium, which is dedicated to supporting voter participation and climate-change initiatives.

“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he told The Times. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”

Men accused of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer also discussed “taking” governor of Virginia: FBI

The militants in Michigan who plotted to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had a similar plot in the works for Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the FBI revealed on Tuesday.

Per The Washington Post, FBI Special Agent Richard Trask testified during a court appearance in the city of Grand Rapids that the militants accused in the Whitmer plot also discussed targeting Northam during a meeting that took place in Dublin, Ohio, earlier this year.

“At this meeting they discussed possible targets, taking a sitting governor, specifically issues with the governors of Michigan and Virginia, based upon the lockdown orders,” he said.

Both Whitmer and Northam were targeted by President Donald Trump earlier this year for their efforts to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, and the president tweeted out “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” this past April at a time when armed militants were protesting lockdown orders.

Amy Coney Barrett refuses to say whether Trump has the authority to unilaterally delay the election

President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, on Tuesday said that she will keep an “open mind” when it comes to the president’s threat to unilaterally delay the November election.

At a Senate Judiciary hearing, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) noted that Trump had recently said that he wanted to delay the upcoming election due to dubious claims of voter fraud.

“Does the Constitution give the president of the United States the authority to unilaterally delay a general election under any circumstances?” Feinstein asked the nominee.

“Well, Senator, if that question ever came before me, I would need to hear arguments from the litigants and read briefs and consult with my law clerk and talk to my colleagues and go through the opinion writing process,” Barrett replied. “So, you know, if I give off-the-cuff answers then I would be basically a legal pundit and I don’t think we want judges to be legal pundits. I think we want judges who approach cases thoughtfully and with an open mind.”

Watch the video below from CBS News:

Why are Republicans obsessed with Amy Coney Barrett’s kids? To troll feminists

Hey, folks, did you know that Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, has a lot of kids?

If not, good on you for not watching a single second of the first day of the farce playing out in the Senate chambers this week, as Republicans — who previously claimed that Barack Obama had no right to fill a Supreme Court seat a full seven months before a presidential election — rush to cram Barrett onto the court only days before the next one. Anyone who tuned in, or who simply flipped through C-SPAN on their way to watch something else, heard Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee talk glowingly about Barrett’s family — she has seven children, two of them adopted — as if it was were a miracle sent directly from heaven.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, proving he’s not “pro-life” by going mask-free despite his COVID-19 diagnosis, raved about how Barrett was “the oldest of seven children” before having seven kids of her own, offering the opinion that maternal “responsibilities have undoubtedly helped you throughout life.”

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa falsely declared that Democrats are “attacking you as a mom and a woman of faith.” (This is repeatedly claimed by Republicans, but I remain unaware of any Democrat who has attacked Barrett on either count.)

“I bet there’s many young women, like my own two daughters, who marvel at the balance that you’ve achieved between your personal and professional life,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. That distinguished gentleman — now facing an unexpectedly tight re-election battle against Democrat MJ Hegar — failed to note that Barrett has a net worth of $2.6 million, a $200,000 salary as a professor at Notre Dame and a husband who is a partner at a prestigious law firm. So the answer would seem to be that Barrett’s family can afford to hire lots of child care while she pursues her professional goals.

And so on and so forth. Republicans were way more interested in Barrett’s accomplishments as a producer and adopter of children than in her legal résumé. Part of that is because Republicans would rather talk about anything other than Barrett’s legal record, since they don’t want the public to know about her opposition to the Affordable Care Act, her desire to end legal abortion and strip women of contraception access or her association with anti-LGBTQ groups.

But this is also just about trolling feminists. The implicit argument in hyping Barrett’s big family along with her successful career is one that anti-choice activists have been making for a long time: Women don’t really need contraception or abortion access in order to succeed socially and professionally, and feminists who say otherwise have a sinister agenda.

Indeed, the longstanding claim of the religious right is that feminists aren’t really pro-woman at all, but are in fact working on behalf of sleazy men who want to exploit women for their bodies. In this narrative, women do not actually enjoy sex, but instead use it solely as a tool to secure a breadwinning mate and a big brood of kids. Feminists who support abortion rights and widespread access to birth control are luring women away from their true natures for the benefit of horndog men.

“Women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy,” a famous quotation from anti-choice activist Patricia Heaton, has been adopted as the motto for this mentality.

“[S]exual equality is found not in imitating men’s capacity to walk away from an unexpected pregnancy through abortion, but rather in asking men to meet women at a high standard of mutual responsibility, reciprocity and care,” anti-choice activist Erika Bachiochi wrote at Politico, defending Barrett’s nomination.

Feminism, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has stolen away “sex and romance and marriage and child-rearing” from women, and “conservative feminism” of the Barrett variety is about restoring those things. (He elides the fact that the plan is to restore such things by force by making alternatives illegal or unavailable.)

In this deranged worldview, any woman who says she doesn’t want to get pregnant is assumed to be suffering from false consciousness. The possibility that women desire sex for reasons other than trapping a man in a domestic partnership and making a bunch of babies is treated as preposterous. Women who insist that they actually want other things are treated with pity and condescension, as if they don’t know their own minds.

People who make these arguments tend to call themselves “feminists for life” or “conservative feminists.” But there’s nothing feminist about any of this, since it all rests on the view that women are too stupid and too easily misled to be permitted control over their own bodies.

All this patronizing rhetoric, to be clear, is just a churchy cover for deeply-rooted sadism and misogyny.

Anti-choicers know full well the misery that springs from their preferred policies. They know women may die or suffer serious injuries from illegal abortions. They know that families who have more children than they can care for suffer from poverty. They know that giving children up for adoption is usually heartbreaking. They know that shotgun marriages are often unhappy and one big reason divorce rates were much higher in the past. They know that most women simply don’t have Barrett’s resources to hire other people to care for their children so they can pursue their career ambitions.

They know these things, just as they know that women have sex for their own pleasure and not just to please men (or ensnare them). Just as they know that most Americans want small families, and many don’t want children at all.

But that’s the point: All that misery is viewed as just punishment for women who want sexual freedom and equality. But conservatives also know that the public is repulsed by open displays of sadism and hatred, so instead we get this pursed-lip, praying-for-you condescension, clad in pseudo-feminist drag.

Trolling feminists is joyful in itself for many leading Republicans, but there’s another reason for the Barrett baby parade: Distracting their own voters from how radical her right-wing worldview really is.

Barrett’s policy positions and her likely future judgments are deeply unpopular with Americans, including many Republicans. For instance, 72% of voters — and 62% of Republicans — want the federal government to protect insurance coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Barrett is expected to end that if she is seated on the court in time to hear an upcoming case meant to kill off the Affordable Care Act. On abortion, 66% of Americans, and 47% of Republicans, believe that Roe v. Wade should be left alone. Barrett is expected to be part of a conservative majority that will eventually vote to overturn it. A whopping 92% of Americans believe birth control is morally acceptable, and are likely to take a dim view of a letter Barrett signed claiming it was “morally obtuse” to require insurance companies to cover contraception.

By parading around Barrett’s large family and pretending that feminists are “attacking” her for having a lot of children — when what feminists really oppose is forcing childbirth on the unwilling — Republicans can turn this confirmation into yet another culture-war conflict instead of a dispute about the issues. Now their voters are all riled up about an imaginary liberal assaults on faith and family, instead of perceiving that Barrett is there to assault both their religious and sexual freedoms.

There were many conservative judges Republicans could have picked to dismantle the ACA and reproductive rights. They went with an anti-choice fanatic with seven kids to taunt feminists with the implication that only weak and stupid women need birth control and abortion. The hope is that their own voters will be so ecstatic over “triggering” feminists that they won’t notice that their own rights and health care are being stripped away too. Feminist tears won’t pay for anyone’s health insurance, but by the time Republican voters realize that, it will be too late.

California GOP refuses to comply with attorney general’s order to remove “illegal” ballot drop boxes

The California Republican Party said it would not comply with state Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s order to remove unofficial ballot drop boxes, which officials say are “illegal.”

The state GOP admitted that it was responsible for erecting fake “official” drop boxes in front of churches, gun stores and gyms. Secretary of State Alex Padilla said the boxes had been set up in “violation of the law.”

Becerra and Padilla on Monday sent cease-and-desist letters to the GOP, which ordered the party to remove the collection boxes in Los Angeles, Orange and Fresno counties.

“Anyone who knowingly engages with the tampering or misuse of the vote is subject to prosecution,” Becerra said during a Monday news conference with Padilla, in which he called the boxes “fake.”

“It is illegal to tamper with a citizen’s vote,” the attorney general continued.

The boxes were “not permitted by state law,” Padilla said, adding that “if they refuse to comply, we’ll of course entertain all of our legal options.”

Hector Barajas, a spokesman for the California Republican Party, told The New York Times that the GOP would not comply with the order and instead continue to set up the boxes without adding any label identifying them as a Republican effort.

Barajas argued that a 2016 law allowing “ballot harvesting,” which allows a third party to submit mail ballots on voters’ behalf, protects the practice.

“There is nothing in any of the laws or regulations cited in that advisory that indicate private organization drop boxes are not permitted,” he said. “The way Democrats wrote the law, if we wanted to use a Santa bag, we could. A locked heavy box seems a lot safer.”

State officials rejected that argument in a letter sent to the state GOP and several county chapters.

“The use of unauthorized, non-official vote-by-mail ballot drop boxes does not comply with state law governing ballot collection activities, which also require that persons to whom a voter entrusts their ballot to return to county election officials provide their name, signature and relationship to the voter,” the cease-and-desist letter read.

The letter added that the state also had strict rules governing the security of official drop boxes.

“If you are in possession or control of any vote-by-mail ballots received through these unauthorized, non-official drop boxes, we demand that you immediately return and surrender those voted vote-by-mail ballots to the appropriate county elections official,” the officials said.

Padilla said votes submitted through the boxes would still be counted, but Becerra acknowledged that the state had “no idea” what happens to the ballots after they are submitted.

The state GOP has remained defiant.

“As of right now, we’re going to continue our ballot harvesting program,” Barajas told the Associated Press.

Becerra and Padilla suggested that the state might take legal action if the GOP does not comply by its Oct. 15 deadline.

“We hope that the message goes out loud and clear to anyone who is trying to improperly solicit, obtain and manage a citizen’s vote that they are subject to prosecution,” Becerra said. “I’m trying to be careful with how I say this, but the reports we are hearing are disturbing.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, accused Republicans of cheating by setting up the “illegal” boxes.

“Nothing reeks of desperation quite like the Republican Party organization these days — willing to lie, cheat, and threaten our democracy all for the sake of gaining power,” he tweeted. “These unofficial drop boxes aren’t just misleading, they are illegal.”

“Nervous breakdown”: President Trump attacks Fox News and Drudge Report in early morning tweet spree

President Donald Trump promoted a website operated by a Fox News regular and attacked other conservative media outlets.

The president hyped the new Bongino Report, a news aggregator owned by gun-loving commentator Dan Bongino, and attacked competitor Drudge Report and Fox News, as well.

“Congratulations Dan. You, Breitbart and others have decimated the business at Drudge,” Trump tweeted. “It’s gone the way of the @NBA, ratings down 70%. People want the TRUTH! Drudge Report sold out, suffered a massive ‘nervous breakdown’. Happening @FoxNews also???”

Congratulations Dan. You, Breitbart and others have decimated the business at Drudge. It’s gone the way of the @NBA, ratings down 70%. People want the TRUTH! Drudge Report sold out, suffered a massive “nervous breakdown”. Happening @FoxNews also??? https://t.co/Zr07XdHtNx

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

Trump complains Fox News allows anti-Trump ads unlike “the old days”: “Roger Ailes was the greatest”

President Donald Trump lashed out at Fox News on Monday over negative ads airing on the right-leaning network ahead of Election Day.

Trump, who has repeatedly appeared on Fox News for softball interviews and offered to call in weekly to “Fox & Friends,” has often tried to pressure the network into even more fawning coverage. He criticized Fox News on Monday after appearing on at least three of the network’s Trump-friendly Fox News shows in only four days.

“@FoxNews allows more negative ads on me than practically all of the other networks combined,” the president claimed, without evidence. “Not like the old days, but we will win even bigger than 2016. Roger Ailes was the GREATEST!”

.@FoxNews allows more negative ads on me than practically all of the other networks combined. Not like the old days, but we will win even bigger than 2016. Roger Ailes was the GREATEST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2020

Ailes resigned as the longtime CEO of the network in 2016 following a slew of sexual harassment allegations. He died in 2017.

“I didn’t realize the extent to which Roger really was a predator,” former Fox News booker Laurie Luhn said in 2016 after coming forward despite signing a non-disclosure agreement. Likening his behavior to “psychological torture,” Luhn alleged that Ailes had repeatedly pressured her into performing sexual acts until she suffered a mental breakdown and attempted suicide.

Former hosts Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Andrea Tantaros were among Ailes’ many other accusers.

Trump’s praise of an accused sexual predator drew heavy backlash on Twitter.

“Lying predator praises lying predator,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif, wrote.

Media reporter Yashar Ali also pushed back on Trump’s characterization of his relationship with Ailes.

“Roger Ailes with a sexual predator who destroyed women’s lives and also would have had no tolerance for most of the president’s antics especially in the past year,” he tweeted. “The president and Roger would have barely been speaking right now. He may have been the subject of tweets.”

Trump’s complaints about the network come as his floundering campaign focuses the majority of its cable ad spending on Fox News, whose viewers already overwhelmingly support him.

Trump’s campaign has spent 52% of its cable spending on Fox News since the spring versus 9% on CNN and 6% on MSNBC, according to NBC News. Trump has spent far more money than Biden on cable ads, outspending him $15 million to $2.5 million over that time. But Biden plans to heavily outspend Trump across all advertising in the final weeks of the election.

Though Trump’s campaign has raised a ton of money, it has already blown through more than $820 million. The campaign cut ads in key states like Michigan and Pennsylvania last month amid its cash crunch.

Trump has tried to push back on the reports, even though documents show his campaign hemorrhaging money for much of the year.

“I keep reading Fake News stories that my campaign is running low on money. Not true, & if it were so, I would put up money myself,” Trump claimed on Tuesday. “I will spend additional money if we are not spending enough!”

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Trump campaign had also pulled ads in the battleground states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio.

“It seems the Trump campaign has reached the point where they have to do some triage,” Travis Ridout, the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads, told the outlet. “They don’t seem to have enough money to run ads everywhere.”

Martha McSally, Lindsey Graham have dozens of excessive campaign contributions

In recent weeks, a number of political campaigns and committees have received letters from the Federal Election Commission notifying them that they may have violated federal rules and regulations governing campaign finance, such as inaccurately reporting expenditures or accepting campaign donations in excess of the legal limit from dozens of people.

These letters are not uncommon, and not necessarily indicative of wrongdoing — the assumption is that campaigns want to follow the rules but may have made mistakes in the heat of the contest. When the FEC notifies a campaign that it has taken too much money from donors, for instance, the letter lists the names and donation histories of the supporters who gave too much, so the campaign can isolate the over-limit amounts and refund, reattribute or redesignate that money. They have 60 days to do this before they must report back to the FEC.

Some of those lists this year, however, have been exceptionally long — a phenomenon that election experts attribute to automated recurring donations over a long and particularly intense campaign season.

For instance, Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., received two separate notices last week, one of them 38 pages long and the other 41 pages. Each flagged excessive contributions from around 60 donors, for adjacent reporting periods. Her colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, received a nine-page list that alone flags a total well above $150,000 in excessive donations that the campaign must explain to the FEC.

In a similar letter to President Trump’s re-election campaign last month, the FEC flagged more than 35,000 contributions from 1,045 donors, totaling more than $4.5 million in donations that the campaign needs to explain and reconcile. That list was 855 pages long. On Oct. 1, the FEC sent the campaign another letter flagging excessive donations, this one 814 pages long.

The Biden campaign received a letter as well, but it was 700 pages shorter.

While McSally’s Democratic opponent, astronaut Mark Kelly, has not received a request from the FEC, Graham’s challenger — powerhouse fundraiser Jaime Harrison — has, and it was comparable to Graham’s in length.

Brett Kappel, campaign finance expert and attorney at the Washington, D.C., firm Harmon Curran, told Salon that these letters are unusually long, especially at this point in a campaign, and especially the letters to Trump. He points to two key factors: Trump’s unprecedented decision to open his re-election campaign the day he was inaugurated, and automated recurring donations sent to the campaign, or through platforms such as Winred or its Democratic analogue, ActBlue.

“You have to consider the possibility that some of these serial donors may not have fully appreciated what they were doing when they signed up for recurring contributions,” Kappel said.

The McSally notices illustrate this point. The contribution history of one single recurring donor, Bruce P. Bengtson, accounts for more than 10 full pages, or 25% of the list. Other donors take up multiple pages, such as Bill Deaton, whose name appears on 215 line items in one letter.

Deaton, founder of a Kentucky-based data-processing company, was fined $1 million and sentenced to a year of home detention in a federal fraud case in 2010. FEC records show he has contributed $6,706 to McSally this year. The individual limit for a full election cycle is $5,600.

The Graham campaign also appears to have erred in some of its bookkeeping, according to the FEC, and the Harrison campaign needs to explain several donors with foreign addresses and three sources identified as “possible prohibited entities.” (While the letter does not elaborate on the latter, one of the names — PCCC, LLC — appears to have been identified as a difficult-to-trace entity in a Center for Public Integrity analysis of 2016 donations to Hillary Clinton.)

One of the over-limit donors to Graham, who has taken to begging for campaign cash in recent Fox News appearances, was Washington attorney Ty Cobb, formerly a lawyer for Trump during the Russia investigations. Cobb has given Graham $1,000 above the $2,800 general election maximum.

A handful of names, however, are on the lists for both Graham and McSally. All those people, according to FEC searches, appear to be retirees. A closed-quote Google search of these donors brings up something unusual: Their names also appear in the headlines of what look like online news articles announcing their donations.

For instance, a man named Henry L. Collins III gave $4,350 to Graham’s campaign between April 30 and June 30, in a series of dozens of donations between $50 and $500. During that same period, he gave $4,425 to McSally. FEC records show that as of July 15, Collins had contributed a total $14,745 to McSally, nearly $10,000 above the individual limit, and as of June 30 had given about $8,400 to Graham, an excess of $2,800.

On July 1, Collins’ name was featured in a headline for an article in something calling itself PHX Reporter that read: “Martha McSally’s campaign committee receives $2,705 from Henry L. Collins III.”

But PHX Reporter is identical to another site called Western South Dakota News, which on July 14 announced Collins’ $500 contribution to Liz Marty May, a Republican congressional candidate. (Collins did not reply to Salon’s request for comment.)

For that matter, Western South Dakota News looks exactly like the Treasure Coast Sun, which looks like the Columbia Standard — a site that published stories about individual contributions to both Graham and Harrison. Collins’ name appears in a list of top donors for the month of May on a Columbia Standard article — and three other donors on the list appear to have exceeded the legal limit with contributions from that month alone.

These sites are part of a larger network of what could fairly be described as fake news sites — webpages that publish algorithm-driven content, much of it anonymous and automated, targeted at hyper-local audiences. Those networks of sites — dubbed “pink slime,” a play on “yellow journalism” — have tripled in size as Election Day approaches. And they’re part of an even larger network, connected to a conservative PAC.

That network, however, also appears to publish campaign refunds at times. One repeat McSally donor who spoke with Salon said that he had been refunded money multiple times over the last year, most recently last week, after the McSally campaign’s most recent FEC letter. Earlier refunds made it into the pink slime headlines. The latest news apparently has yet to break.

The McSally, Graham and Harrison campaigns declined to comment for this article.

Why the Democrats must fight to stop Barrett: With her on the court, the ACA is toast

Donald Trump and his henchmen keep promising to protect health insurance coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions. They’re lying to you, probably because it’s what they do best and also because the president has no idea how to spell “ACA,” much less describe what’s in the law.

The truth is that Trump’s entire agenda circulates around re-election and erasing the Obama legacy because he’s all about revenge — petty, self-serving Mafia-cosplay — and he doesn’t really care if his own supporters aren’t able to buy affordable health insurance due to his nincompoopery. This is why the president and his sidekick, Attorney General Bill Barr, are refusing to defend the ACA in court after a ludicrous ruling by a Trump-supporting Texas judge who also doesn’t understand how the law works.

That 2018 decision by Judge Reed O’Connor found that the individual mandate, which required everyone to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, was unconstitutional even though Trump and Mitch McConnell had successfully reduced the mandate penalty to zero in late 2017. Without the mandate, O’Connor decided, the entire law had to be flushed. The George W. Bush-appointed jurist, like his messiah in the White House, obviously didn’t understand that the mandate has little to do with the vast majority of the law, namely the myriad consumer protections and more. O’Connor had an agenda. A pro-Trump agenda. And here we are.

Nevertheless, this is the ruling that’s headed to the Supreme Court for oral arguments beginning Nov. 10, and if Trump gets his way, the Court will agree with O’Connor’s nonsensical decision, repealing the entire law — threatening insurance coverage for millions of Americans without any safety net whatsoever from the Trump Republicans.

That’s much less likely to happen if Amy Coney Barrett isn’t confirmed and seated in time. The ACA case is part of the reason why McConnell is rushing Barrett’s confirmation — she could end up being the deciding vote, so they need her on the bench by the second week in November. On the other hand, if she’s not seated in time, the outcome would likely be a 4-4 stalemate, returning the matter to the Fifth Circuit, which agreed about the unconstitutionality of the mandate but ruled that the rest of the law was OK.

The bottom line here is that if Barrett is confirmed and seated by Nov. 10, there’s a solid chance the ACA will be repealed, along with protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

If Trump and Barrett are victorious, more than 21 million Americans will lose their insurance, and at least 133 million non-elderly Americans with prior illnesses or injuries won’t be able to buy either first-time coverage or replacement coverage for the policies they lost. To put it in more concrete terms, Americans with everything from COVID-19 to cancer to diabetes to hypertension to obesity to acne to, yes, pregnancy will potentially be denied new insurance, or be egregiously ripped off by insurers.

Naturally, Trump and his goons keep promising to protect those Americans. In fact, Trump has signed at least one executive order that pretends to shield them from being denied by insurers. Meaningless gesture. During the Barrett hearings on Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, tweeted that Trump “WILL protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. He has signed an executive order to that effect.” Trump himself tweeted, “Will always protect pre-existing conditions!!!”

Nope. No, he won’t. It’s a scam.

Protecting those Americans requires much more than just a pledge and a symbolic executive order. Even if Trump somehow codifies that order into a law passed by Congress, he’ll have to do a lot better than merely announcing, Voila! You’re protected! Believe me!

The fact is that without the ACA, some people with pre-existing conditions might be able to buy health insurance — horrible insurance policies that are expensive as hell and cover almost nothing. Without the ACA’s consumer protections, there’s no point. (And by the way, the ACA’s consumer protections apply to all Americans: those who have insurance through their employers as well as those who buy on the individual marketplace.)

See, the ACA not only allows previously sick Americans to buy insurance, it also allows them to buy insurance at the same rates as healthy people. Take away the ACA, and previously sick people might as well not buy insurance at all.

Before the ACA, people with prior injuries or illnesses could occasionally find a company that would cover them. But such coverage was ludicrously expensive, often pricing those customers out of the system entirely or forcing them into medical bankruptcy. Likewise, those policies might not cover the pre-existing condition itself — people with cancer, for instance, wouldn’t be covered for it. In those cases, what’s the point of having insurance at all? You’d go broke (or die first) with or without it.

That’s why the ACA mandated equal access for everyone. The law forces insurers to cover all Americans equally, while applying caps on premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, irrespective of prior medical conditions. Here’s where the mandate comes in. Not only does the mandate help finance the premium subsidies for lower-income Americans, it also helps keep costs low by making sure the maximum number of people are buying policies. Without the mandate, rates could start to climb more rapidly. The law also eliminated the practice of “rescission,” in which people were routinely booted from their coverage the moment they were diagnosed with a major illness.

Without the ACA, rescissions will return, rates will spike, more than 133 million Americans will be screwed, thousands will die and no one will be safe. No one. That’s the Trump health care plan, ladies and gentlemen.

And Amy Coney Barrett is on the verge of helping him accomplish this horrifying victory.

Trump’s obsession with repealing the ACA is one of many reasons why Barrett should be forced by the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to pledge under oath to recuse herself from ACA-related matters, especially the current challenge kicked off by Judge O’Connor. While we’re here, she needs to recuse herself from possible challenges to the 2020 election as well. It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to realize Trump needs a Bill Barr character sitting on the Court, not only to help him with his crusade against vote-by-mail ballots but also to carry the ball over the goal line in his years-long preoccupation with repealing the ACA. Given what we’ve witnessed from Trump in the past, it’s safe to assume that a corrupt bargain was struck and that Barrett was nominated primarily because she pledged to do his bidding. He’s given us no reason to assume differently. Again, that’s why Barr was nominated as AG — to protect Trump. Period.

If the Trump Republicans were serious about making sure everyone can buy affordable health care coverage — which of course they’re not — they’d need to explain exactly how repealing the ACA will make things better. Trump needs to tell us in detail, perhaps at the final campaign debate with Joe Biden (assuming that even happens), how he’ll stop insurers from bankrupting or killing Americans. Don’t hold your breath, though. He’ll never explain that because he can’t. Nor is he capable of learning how. All he cares about is jabbing at Obama while fluffing his fanboys, many of whom suffer from, yeah, pre-existing conditions. Trump wants to “own the libs” again, and if he wins this fight over the ACA, he will. He’ll also own tens of millions of other Americans, including his own loyalists.

All told, Trump is only protecting himself. He’s a sadistic, brittle little man who cares only about winning re-election. He’ll gladly stand on a mile-high stack of dead bodies to reach that goal.

Cornel West on Trump, the virus and the future: “Imagine a world that is worth fighting for”

Eleven days ago, Donald Trump was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus. His administration continues to hide the truth about Trump’s health status.

Contrary to official word from Trump’s mouthpieces, Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine reports that Trump was at one point severely ill and at substantial risk of not surviving:

Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different.

“I could be one of the diers,” he said. …

Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”… Then he admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.

“This thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president said. “You can tell it can go either way.”

More incredibly, the New York Times reports that Donald Trump planned to dress as Superman on his release from the hospital, reveling in his pretend-Übermensch status to thrill his supporters:

In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer. He ultimately did not go ahead with the stunt.

Trump is an expert political performance artist, a professional wrestling heel who is also the (illegitimate) president of the United States. Contrary to the hopes of too many members of the chattering class, Trump’s brush with death has not humbled him or caused some type of personal revelation that would cause him to become less cruel, vile and tasteless.

While in the hospital and during his supposed convalescence, Donald Trump has continued his fascist authoritarian behavior, demanding that leading Democrats like Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton be charged with treason for their supposed “coup” attempt. During a phone interview with Fox News last Thursday, Trump continued his attacks on Sen. Kamala Harris, the first black woman to be nominated on a major-party presidential ticket, calling her a “monster” and a “communist,” among other slurs.

As befits a malignant, narcissistic cult leader, Trump is again holding rallies where his followers can display their love and devotion to him, even though he is likely still contagious with the coronavirus and few attendees at his rallies wear masks. As the leader of a literal death cult, Donald Trump has been fully transformed into a human bioweapon. He is now an example for his followers, who are willing to do his bidding whatever that entails.

Several of Donald Trump’s followers were recently arrested by the FBI for plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and perhaps kill her. These right-wing terrorists also planned to attack police and other law enforcement agents if need be. The Trump regime has never explicitly disavowed the right-wing militias and other terrorist groups who serve as the president’s foot soldiers and hooligans.

Given Donald Trump’s manifest evil, a not-insignificant number of Americans were happy that he was sickened by COVID-19. For them, Trump’s illness was a form of karmic justice, in which a man who has hurt so many through his negligent or criminal response to the pandemic (and other willfully cruel policies) was finally receiving his comeuppance. There was also the hope that Trump’s illness might end the national nightmare of his presidency.

What do such emotions and reactions — including the obligatory demands that Trump must be sent positive wishes and prayers — reveal about America’s culture at present? Is there a “right” or “wrong” way for the American people to react to Trump’s illness? Given their professed values, should liberals and progressives be held to a higher standard in their reactions to Donald Trump’s encounter with a life-threatening disease?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. Cornel West. He is a philosopher, public intellectual, activist, scholar and author of several bestselling books, including “Democracy Matters,” “Race Matters” and “Black Prophetic Fire.”

West is professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard and a professor emeritus at Princeton. In this wide-ranging conversation he also shares his thoughts on democracy and the recent presidential and vice-presidential debates, as well as how the American people should best focus their emotions and energies once Trump is no longer president.

You can also listen to my conversation with Dr. Cornel West on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

You are a philosopher. How should people manage their feelings about Donald Trump having been sickened by the coronavirus? Is it wrong to be happy at the possibility of Donald Trump receiving his comeuppance and karmic punishment from COVID? He has done so much evil.

What you are feeling is Janus-faced. Your feelings have two sides to them. Any kind of love and justice has to have serious accountability. In that way, Donald Trump has been unaccountable. As such, death would be a certain kind of accountability. There is nothing wrong with that conception of accountability. But the other side is a certain kind of contempt and revenge in the form of “You did it to us. Now we’re going to do it to you. You’ve been doing us in. Now somebody — God, providence, fate, fortune — is going to do you in.”

Democratic accountability is not same thing as revenge or divine retribution or the like. It is of a different register. Democracy is about human justice. Democracy is for we mortals. It’s for we finite folk. And we finite folk, we’ve got to have some control over our propensity toward contempt and revenge, or it just adds more to the contempt and revenge in the world. But if we lean into love and justice and there’s some accountability — with Trump getting sick, it may have been a certain kind of accountability, in terms of the virus coming back to haunt him — there is a different kind of spirit at work, one that you want to preserve.

Are liberals and progressives allowed to enjoy schadenfreude, those feelings of joy at another person’s just and deserved misfortune? Or is that sentiment outside of what it should mean to be a progressive?

The best of what it means to be a progressive is that one never succumbs to any kind of bitterness, revenge, hoping somebody collapses or even laughing at somebody’s misfortune or downfall. You are using that person, such as Trump, as a point of reference for your own sense of who you are and what you’re doing. Don’t surrender those values.

That’s the reason why Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” If you are really concerned about poor people and the wretched of the earth, then when you love your enemy, you’re not loving the part of them that are gangsters. You’re not loving their hatred. You’re not loving their domination. You are just recognizing that they too are made in the image of God. Therefore you are using the point of reference for who you are, in the best of your own tradition as a barometer and guidepost. There is nothing sadomasochistic about loving one’s enemies. Do not ever let them set the terms upon which you define yourself and your reality. If you do such a thing, you will be reacting to their hatred your whole life.

What of this expectation that the American people should send Donald Trump goodwill because he was hospitalized and apparently in perilous condition? As some have pointed out, such an expectation is emotionally abusive, in which where the victim is somehow supposed to empathize with and care for the person who is hurting them.

You must ensure that you are living a high-quality life in your own mind, heart and soul. When you are wishing Donald Trump goodwill, all you are saying is, “I refuse to be the gangster you are because you have been giving us ill will.” I do believe that the golden rule is still worthwhile. And if a higher power takes Donald Trump away, then he’s gone.

How does one resolve an expectation that they should wish goodwill on an evil person such as Trump?

There is an element of a person’s humanity that is never fully reducible to one’s gangster and thuggish activity. That’s why the golden rule still has some applicability. Donald Trump still has loved ones. He still has folks who care for him. That means he is still a human being. Once you completely remove someone from the human family, you end up doing the same things that have been done to Black people with racism and white supremacy. If you let yourself be seduced by such forces and put people outside the human family, than you end up in the gutter along with the people who committed that first wrong. I refuse to go there.

The type of conversation we are engaging in is very rare in America’s public discourse. The Age of Trump and this season of death has created a moral test for the United States and its people.

We saw that during the vice-presidential debate. The spiritual decay is so deep. Donald Trump has contributed to such a debased public culture and political culture that you have someone like Mike Pence, who can rationalize American fascism with a smile and be calm doing it. The moderator, Susan Page, made no attempt to keep Pence accountable whatsoever. Kamala Harris was doing the best she could to preserve her dignity. She knew Pence would be lying nonstop. She knows the disrespect is coming at her and the arrogance is flowing from Pence right at her. The condescension is flowing. The haughtiness is flowing against her too. Pence was trying to seize control of the debate and no one was trying to impose accountability on him. Kamala Harris tried several times. She did the best she could.

Pence’s behavior during the debate was just the culture of neofascism in real time, done with a smile. We should not be overwhelmed and surprised by such an assault. We must be honest and candid about the depths of the decay and decrepitude that we as a nation are dealing with, in the form of Trump and Pence and their allies and movement.

When I see Mike Pence I think of Indiana, which was a fortress for the Ku Klux Klan during the early 20th century. In another era, Pence would be the type who could go from the Klavern to the boardroom of a bank. I worry that too many people believe that evil does not wear a business suit.

I believe that Mike Pence has been Trumpified. He has been shaped even more in the image of Donald Trump since becoming vice president. Pence loves the power. He loves the visibility. He loves the position of being vice president. In that way we can see the deepening corruption of Mike Pence’s soul. That is why Pence was overflowing with toxic masculinity during the debate. Pence acted like he does not have to listen to anyone. Somebody asks Pence a question and he responds like they are nonentities. Pence just decides to ignore them and say what he wants to say. When Kamala Harris would try to interject and have her time, Pence looked at her like, “Do you really expect me to respect you? I’m Mike Pence. I’m part of the neofascist culture. We don’t respect people like you.” In doing that, Pence was also disrespecting the American people as the audience for what should have been a very important dialogue.

Any discussion of Mike Pence should also include “Christian fascist” in how he is described.

Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. He got 65% of white men and over 50% of white women. That is another sign of the cultural decay in this country. White supremacy is the public face of American neofascism. From the Ku Klux Klan to the White Citizens Councils, white Christians have always played a fundamental role in promoting white supremacist attitudes and practices.

In terms of deliberative democracy or communicative democracy, what did you see when you watched these first two debates?

Public life in America has become so emptied out and vacuous that the very notion of there being a public conversation, let alone a high-quality public conversation, is gone. The debates are an empty theatrical spectacle of talking points, at their best, and at their worst just bully-driven attacks and assaults on each other. I mean, Harris is much more intellectually talented than [Pence] is. In that way Joe Biden did not have any chance at all in his debate with Donald Trump.

Trump’s debate with Biden was an exercise in fascism and authoritarianism. Trump won that debate, by those criteria. Unfortunately, too many people in the mainstream media and the general public keep applying old, comfortable standards, and in doing so frame their understanding of Trump’s strategy, and this political moment more generally, around polls and focus groups. Trump’s goal was to mock the premise of even having a debate. It was all the worst sort of demagogic, authoritarian political theater for him.

I would go even farther. I would say that Trump was not only was mocking, but fascist. One of the rhetorical strategies of a fascist is to beat your audience down, make the people feel as though there is no hope. The people must be made to feel that there is no other possibility. They may hate you, the authoritarian fascist and demagogue, but they hate the whole political process too. The people then become downtrodden in spirit: Their spirits are so crushed they cannot be moved to vote for anybody.

When Trump left the debate, he and his people likely said, “You not only won, you achieved your objective. You beat Biden down. You beat the moderator down. You beat the audience down. You beat the American people down.”

We are in a world-historical moment. As Election Day approaches, and whatever may happen next in this country it feels exhilarating, scary and exhausting all at the same time. As human beings we do not see a moment of such consequence very often, if ever, in our lifetimes. Please help me navigate those feelings – feelings which I am sure many other people in this country and around the world are also experiencing. It is like rollercoaster of sorts.

It is like living in the 1960s in Africa, Asia, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the apartheid American South. Between 1955 to 1970 was to live in the most world-historical transforming moment in a very long time. At present, we are living in a similar moment, with the Age of Trump and this upcoming election. But in this moment as compared to the previous one, there is ecological catastrophe, economic catastrophe, social catastrophe and spiritual catastrophe. There is a lack of ability for too many to imagine a world and reality that is worth fighting for, sacrificing for and even dying for.

Let us assume that there is some type of justice in the universe and Donald Trump is voted out on Election Day or otherwise removed from office. When that happens, there are going to be parties and celebrations in the streets. A joyous wave will sweep over the United States. What should good Americans do with that energy going forward?

If the leader of a neofascist movement dies, that is the easy victory. Now we have to deal with the source of the fascist movement itself. To do that here and now, American society must reshape a whole discourse and public conversation to make sure that poor people and other vulnerable people are at the center of the conversation and the agenda for change. If we maintain our core values and commitments, then if we are killed in the struggle we can say, “Here’s the gift. Something bigger than me, because my life itself was a gift that came from something bigger than me.” That sacrifice helps to sustain and create the positive change.

What can body language analysis really tell us?

Last week, tens of millions of people tuned into the first debate between President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Similar viewership is expected for the next two contests — assuming they go ahead following Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis last week — as well as for Wednesday’s vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City. Along with listening to the candidates’ words, many viewers of the closely watched political spectacles will also pay attention to the debaters’ demeanor, posture, tics, and gestures.

Body language can exude confidence or awkwardness, charisma or anxiety. In recent years, it has also become the subject of a small cottage industry premised on the idea that nonverbal cues can reveal important truths about people in high-stakes situations. News outlets like The Washington Post and Politico interview consultants and bring them on as columnists to analyze speakers’ body language after debates and diplomatic meetings between world leaders. On YouTube, self-appointed experts claiming to read public figures’ expressions sometimes garner millions of views.

Some of this analysis explores how body language can influence audiences. Other times, pundits try to explain what public figures are thinking or feeling based on subtle cues. After Trump and Biden’s first debate, for example, one analyst told The Independent, a British newspaper, that when Biden looked down at his lectern as Trump spoke, it “could be interpreted as submission to the attack” or a sign of self-control.

This work has a more consequential side: Many police departments and federal agencies use body language analysis as a forensics technique, claiming that these tools can help assess people’s intentions or truthfulness. Body language consultants, an Intercept investigation reported in August, have trained federal and local “law enforcement across the country.”

Psychologists and other researchers agree that body language can convey certain emotional states. But many bold claims haven’t been backed by scientific evidence. For instance, claims that a single gesture reliably indicates what a person thinks or desires — that maintaining eye contact for too long means a person is lying, that a smile without crinkles around the eyes isn’t a genuine one, or that a pointed finger with a closed hand is a display of dominance.

“Nonverbal communication in politics is extremely important because it creates impressions among the public, and this can influence whether people trust a politician,” said Vincent Denault, a communication researcher at the University of Montreal.

But when it comes to pundits commenting about body language in the media, “what you see is often more entertainment than science,” he said. “It can contribute to misinformation.”

* * *

Modern research on body language — often called nonverbal behavior — began in the 1960s and ’70s with studies that aimed to demonstrate the universality of facial expressions of emotion. That work was inspired, in part, by Charles Darwin’s neglected study from a century earlier, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,” according to David Matsumoto, a San Francisco State University psychologist and director of Humintell, a company that provides body language trainings and does research for companies and government agencies.

Since then, researchers have examined how parts of the brain seemingly react to particular facial expressions, and how infants begin to imitate facial and hand gestures. But scientists have also mapped the complexities and subtleties of body language, which can sometimes be challenging to decipher despite its ubiquity.

For researchers like Denault, the scope of nonverbal communication has expanded to include anything beyond a person’s spoken words. A speaker might make an impression by shrugging their shoulders, scratching their nose, tapping their foot, rolling their eyes, or wiping sweat off their face, as Richard Nixon famously did in one of his 1960 presidential election debates against John F. Kennedy. A person’s clothes, their Zoom background, and their tone, pauses, and “uhs” and “ums” while speaking all count as nonverbal cues that can shape a viewer’s perceptions.

While many experts caution that body language is complex and context-dependent, for years a small class of consultants and specialists have been applying body language research in myriad scenarios, including career coaching, work presentations, and airport screenings.

“I help people influence and persuade others around how trustworthy and credible their message is by helping them with their specific nonverbal communication,” said Mark Bowden, a body language consultant and author of the book “Winning Body Language,” a guide for corporate and political clients. He focuses on where a person faces their body and how much space they take up, as well as their gestures.

Some analysts also claim to be able to use those signals to interpret hidden motivations and emotions. For example, some news stories feature analysts explaining that the positioning of Donald Trump’s hands during speeches indicates that he believes in what he’s saying, or that when people touch their faces it’s a clear sign of nervousness.

But, Denault said, “associating ‘states of mind’ to specific gestures, or concluding that this gesture will have this effect on the public, without any nuance, is dubious.”

Still, analysts like Bowden and Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent and the author of “What Every Body is Saying,” a book about interpreting nonverbal behavior, have made careers in part out of those kinds of insights.

Navarro, who has analyzed politicians’ body language for Politico and written for CNBC about how to read the body language of someone wearing a protective mask during the Covid-19 pandemic, says that he has a particular method for assessing speakers like the presidential candidates. “I record it and then watch it with the sound off,” he said. “I look for behavior that stands out: these discomfort displays, the furrowing of the forehead and the glabella, the area between the eyes, or the pursing of the lips or the ventilating by pulling their shirt collar.” As an example, he argues that it’s easy to spot Donald Trump’s lip movements when he reacts to a question he apparently doesn’t like.

* * *

While the work of Navarro and other analysts can attract large audiences, many experts are unsure whether their methods are as reliable as claimed.

“Our facial expressions convey certain types of emotional states,” Matsumoto said. So do some motions, like a shrug. “But there’s a lot of noise, too,” he said. “People do all kinds of things with their bodies.” For example, a person’s raised eyebrow could be express disbelief — but it might also signal discomfort or surprise. The same hand gesture could mean different things in different cultures.

Denault and Matsumoto are both skeptical of those making strong conclusions based on body language observations. Because of all the ambiguities, even perceptive observers can’t infer a person’s thoughts or intentions based on their nonverbal behavior alone, Denault argues.

Dawn Sweet, a University of Idaho communication researcher, agrees. “There’s not likely to be a single behavior diagnostic ever to be found” for someone lying or acting aggressively, she said.

Sweet and her fellow researchers often look at a person’s body language and spoken words together, since they’re usually communicating the same things. The researchers also examine the context of a person’s behavior and learn more about the speaker, since it matters if the behavior is typical for them or a deviation.

Sweet cites an earlier analysis of dozens of studies involving more than 1,300 estimates of 158 possible signs of deception. These studies focused on body language cues that people sometimes associate with lying, like fidgeting or avoiding eye contact. The studies found that cues like these have either no links or only weak links to lying. No one has a giveaway like Pinocchio and his nose.

For that reason, some researchers, like California State University, Fullerton psychologist Iris Blandón-Gitlin, simply avoid looking at such nonverbal cues altogether. “My research is focused mostly on understanding what people are saying,” she says. In general, she finds that lying takes effort, and liars tend to tell more simplistic stories, with fewer details.

Asked about these kinds of concerns, Navarro defended his methods. “Nonverbals are quicker to observe, and they’re authentic and very accurate,” he said. He pointed to the role of body language in understanding what a baby is feeling before it’s able to talk, and in whether one feels safe in the presence of potentially threatening behavior. People even pick mates based on nonverbal cues, he said. But he agreed that some kinds of behavior can be more reliably interpreted than others and that nonverbal behavior is not effective for conclusively detecting deception.

* * *

Despite these expert reservations, body language analysis has also been used in criminal cases, with police, federal agents, and prosecutors using the techniques to try to determine whether a suspect is telling the truth, or whether someone convicted of a crime feels remorse.

But, like many other kinds of forensic science, body language analysis has been shown to be unreliable. The technique could unjustly sway judges and jurors in trials, said Denault, who describes some of these judgments as pseudoscience. Unsupported claims about body language, he said, may seem to offer simple solutions to the complex challenge of evaluating testimony, but evidence-based research doesn’t really provide easy answers.

That said, if security and justice professionals and other officials focus on vetted findings that have scientific consensus, Denault argues that research on nonverbal behavior could still benefit them, for example, by helping police officers behave in a way that puts suspects at ease and helps build rapport.

Whether assessing the behavior of a politician or a suspect, Sweet cautions that people easily jump to conclusions that merely confirm their preconceptions. A person might look uncomfortable, nervous, or fearful at a given moment, but observers rarely know why. An observer might think they’re noticing a telling gesture that reveals information about what another person is thinking, when they’re really just finding a reason to justify an initial belief that the person is lying or aggressive.

Matsumoto warns people not to trust every media analyst they see or read who invokes body language. “There’s a lot of great information a person can get from nonverbals,” he said. “But you have to be careful.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.