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Religious group scrubs photos and mentions of SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett from website: report

An obscure religious group tied to President Donald Trump‘s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has scrubbed photos and mentions of her from its website ahead of her Senate confirmation hearings and interviews with lawmakers.

The New York Times reported last week that Barrett and her husband, who are the parents of seven children, are members of People of Praise, an obscure Christian sect which opposes abortion and teaches God has willed men to assume authority over their wives and family.

The Associated Press on Thursday reported that a search on the Internet Archive revealed that the group had removed content featuring Barrett and her family from its website in the summer of 2017, when she was on Trump’s short list for the seat later filled by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The deletions included back issues of the group’s magazine, “Vine & Branches,” which had birth and adoption announcements for some of the Barrett family’s seven children, as well as several articles involving the federal judge or members of her family.

The group deleted more photos, articles and blog entries last week when Barrett again appeared as a likely nominee. A group spokesman confirmed to the AP that the organization had indeed deleted content.

“Recent changes to our website were made in consultation with members and non-members from around the country who raised concerns about their and their families’ privacy due to heightened media attention,” he said.

According to The Times, People of Praise describes itself as a “charismatic Christian community” whose members swear “a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a ‘head’ for men and a ‘handmaid’ for women.”

The “heads and handmaids give direction on important decisions, including whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home and how to raise children,” The Times added.

The AP reported that former women members of the group said wives were taught to obey their husbands at all times – and must provide sex on demand.

One woman said she was barred from access to birth control, because wives were expected to have as many as children as God allowed.

Senators are currently reviewing Barrett’s background and qualifications ahead of confirmation hearings for her potential lifetime appointment to the country’s highest arbiter of law. Outside groups, including religious organizations and women’s rights advocates, have launched lobbying efforts, and the confirmation, regardless of outcome, will loom large over Election Day.

The Guardian on Thursday reported that Barrett had signed a letter in 2006 urging the courts to overrule the “barbaric” Roe v. Wade.

“The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion for any reason,” read the letter, which was published as an ad on behalf of an anti-choice religious group. “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the committee’s process was merely a pro forma matter.

“So, we’ll start on Oct. 12, and more than half of the Supreme Court justices who have had hearings were done within 16 days or less,” he said on Fox News. “We’ll have a day of introduction. We’ll have two days of questioning: Tuesday and Wednesday. And on the 15th, we’ll begin to markup. We’ll hold it over for a week, and we’ll report her nomination out of the committee on Oct. 22.”

“Then it will be up to (Senate Majority Leader Mitch) McConnell as to what to do with the nomination once it comes out of committee,” Graham said.

Barrett, who is meeting with lawmakers this week, did not mention People of Praise in either her 2017 or 2020 vetting questionnaires.

Craig Lent, one of the group’s leaders, told The Times that the group was neither “nefarious or controversial.”

“We don’t try to control people, and there’s never any guarantee that the leader is always right,” he said. “You have to discern and act in the Lord.”

“Our members are always free to follow their consciences, formed by reason and the teachings of their churches,” group spokesman Sean Connolly told the AP this week.

People of Praise has declined to say whether it counts Barrett, who currently serves as a federal appeals judge, as a member. After an AP reporter inquired Wednesday with the group’s spokesman about members of Jesse Barrett’s family, Barrett’s mother’s name was removed from the website as the primary contact for the chapter in South Bend, Ind., where the University of Notre Dame is located.  

Founded in 1971, the broadly Christian group comprises about 1,800 adult members, and its 22 branches operate outside the purview of the Roman Catholic Church, the AP reported. The majority of its membership remains Catholic.

Most group members enter a binding covenant after three to six years or leave, according to the AP. Thus, it would be unusual if Barrett had been involved with the group for so many years without having done so. 

“Borat 2” trailer: Sacha Baron Cohen returns to annihilate Donald Trump’s America

Ready or not, here comes Borat. Amazon has premiered the official trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen‘s comedy sequel, officially titled “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.” No, the rumored title of “Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan” was not true. The film picks up with Cohen’s Kazakh journalist Borat following the blockbuster success of the 2006 movie as he returns to America with his daughter hoping to “gift her to someone close to the throne” (aka someone in the orbit of Donald Trump’s White House).

Read more from IndieWire: David Byrne on voter suppression, self-improvement, and why the Talking Heads still won’t reunite

Cohen shot the “Borat” sequel in secret over the summer. Fans of the comedian started to wonder what he was up to after news broke in June that Cohen crashed a far-right rally in Olympia, Washington, and convinced the crowd to sing a racist song with him. Cohen appeared dressed in overalls and a fake beard and sang about injecting kids with the “Wuhan flu.” The event was for the Washington Three Percenters, a far-right militia group known for its gun advocacy.

Another Cohen prank leaked after New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani revealed in July that Cohen ambushed his interview at the Mark Hotel in New York City. During the middle of Giuliani’s interview, a man believed to be Cohen stormed in “wearing a crazy” outfit that included “a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top.” Giuliani called the prank “absurd.”

Read more from IndieWire: “Kindred” trailer: Fiona Shaw engages in some good, old-fashioned gaslighting

In addition to far-right groups and Giuliani, Cohen is also expected to take aim at Mike Pence, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein in “Borat 2.” Deadline reported in September that Cohen risked his life on multiple occasions to film the “Borat” sequel, including wearing a bulletproof vest on at least two full days of filming.

The original “Borat” was a box office winner in 2006, grossing over $260 million worldwide. Cohen won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, and the film went on to land an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 79th Academy Awards. The film is often referred to as one of the best comedy films of the 21st century.

Read more from IndieWire: Embracing the reality of Mark Burnett’s America

“Borat 2” will be released Oct. 23 on Amazon Prime. Watch the official trailer for the comedy sequel in the video below.

Trump’s plot to steal the election can be defeated: Here are five things you can do to help

During Tuesday night’s debate, Donald Trump, who has gone pure fascist, once again escalated his efforts to scare people out of voting. He encouraged his followers to engage in voter intimidation under the guise of “poll watching,” and told armed hate groups to “stand by.” Trump also floated a number of baseless conspiracy theories about “voter fraud” that are clearly designed to discourage voting and rationalize legal efforts to stop votes from being counted.  

Meanwhile, Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is still slowing down the mail in what looks like a bid to make sure that many mail-in ballots miss election deadlines. 

It’s also clear that Trump, with the assistance of his principal stooge, Attorney General Bill Barr, plans to challenge vote-counting after Election Day, knowing full well that it may take a week or more to count all the mail-in ballots. 

Trump can’t win a free and fair election, and he knows it. So he’s doing everything in his power to keep Americans from having one. As the New York Times reported on Thursday morning, Republicans, in their efforts to save Trump, are using every dirty trick in the book to stop people from voting. 

Times are scary. It’s understandable to feel demoralized, but it is more important than ever not to give into that feeling. Trump and Republicans want you to feel despair. Despair leads to inaction, which makes it a lot easier for Trump to pull this off. 

 

Instead, it’s time to get angry, and to use that anger to propel you into action. Trump may want to steal the election, but wanting isn’t having. He can be defeated. He will likely be defeated — as long as everyone does their part to stop him. 

With that in mind, here are five things you can do, starting today, to fight back and keep Trump from stealing this election. 

1. Don’t panic. Trump makes a lot of noise, but at heart, the man is a simpering coward and incompetent to boot, as his business record and pandemic management shows. While Trump has competent people working on his behalf, he is still the head of this effort and he is still an idiot who thought bleach injections sounded like a good idea. 

“A lot of people don’t have faith in the system for obvious reasons, but there is a constitutional process that will take place,” regardless of what bad actors may insinuate, Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, told Salon. 

Trump is engaging in penny-ante stuff like tinkering with the mail because he can’t do what the dictators he admires, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, do — which is simply fix to elections. His machinations may make voting more difficult, but he still won’t be able to stop most people, if they stay focused. 

As George Packer of The Atlantic notes, “For the election to succeed, we have to think and act as if it will succeed,” adding, “Stealing an election remains extremely difficult, and almost impossible if the vote isn’t close.” 

The good news is that Trump’s efforts to use the courts to stop mail-in voting have been “uniformly unsuccessful,” the Brennan Center explains.

Don’t let Trump’s chest-thumping discourage you. He isn’t as powerful as he pretends to be. He is so incompetent that, like a villain in a James Bond movie, he’s already revealed the details of his nefarious scheme to his opponents. Don’t be afraid to vote, and don’t allow other people in your life to be discouraged by fear. 

2. Vote! Early and in person, if possible.  “The most important thing voters can do right now is make a plan and make sure that their vote counts,” Albert said, explaining that voters need to check their registration now and not wait until it’s too late. 

Democrats encouraged voters to apply for mail-in ballots early in the cycle, due to the pandemic. Trump has exploited that by threatening legal challenges to those ballots and slowing down the mail. So folks should consider voting early and in person, if that’s an available option. If you wear a mask, voting early is relatively safe, since polling locations shouldn’t be overly crowded. 

For those who already applied for a mail-in ballot, this switch can feel fraught. The good news is that many states have what is called “in-person absentee voting,” where people can turn in their mail-in ballots at early voting locations. A group called The Early Vote has an Instagram page up explaining, state by state, how early voting and in-person absentee voting works. Check out their page and then follow up with your local election office to see how you can vote.

The sooner you get your vote in, the safer it is! 

3. Volunteer to get out the vote — and consider focusing your efforts on Florida. After voting, the most important thing you can do is help other people vote. Join a phone or text bank effort to get out the vote. If you live in a swing state, connect with local organizations that have voting turnout efforts. Or connect with a campaign you support — they all love phone bank volunteers, and it’s something you can do from home with a cell phone. 

One great way to help is to sign up through Vote Save America, which is run by the crew at the podcast Pod Save America. Their Adopt a State program connects volunteers to efforts in specific states to get out the vote, allowing people to focus on swing states in particular. 

But I’d like to specifically recommend that you adopt Florida. Unlike other swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Florida starts certifying mail-in ballots 22 days before the election, meaning there’s a strong chance that state’s results will be tabulated and announced on election night. If Trump loses Florida (and the state gets called early), that will gut his entire plan to pretend he won prematurely and fight to stop counting the vote in swing states. (Realistically, if Trump loses Florida it’s probably the harbinger of a Biden landslide and we can all go to bed.)

4. Volunteer to be an election protector. Volunteers are needed to make sure everyone who wants to vote gets to vote, without being intimidated. Common Cause has a nonpartisan election protection program and needs volunteers to man phone lines and work as poll watchers. Much of the work can be done from home. 

Another option is to sign up with the Frontline Election Defenders, a group set up by an alliance of progressive organizations, including the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project.

If you are a military veteran, have legal training or have professional skills in de-escalation, such as social work or psychological training, let these groups know. They might have special use for your skills in the coming weeks. 

5. Prepare yourself now for the post-election fight for all votes to be counted. It’s tough to say what the situation will look like after Election Day. Organizers for progressive or election integrity groups are planning for a broad spectrum of possibilities, and the situation is very fluid. It might be that Trump’s noise-making amounts to nothing and Joe Biden is certified the winner quickly. Or it might be that there’s a fight to count votes in the swing states. What exactly will happen, much less the when and where, is simply unknowable. 

With all that said, it’s good to start planning right now to be ready to spring into action if protesters or volunteers are needed to protect the vote-counting after Election Day. This is especially true if you live in or near a blue city in a swing state, such as Detroit, Miami, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, that could become the center of Republican efforts to interfere with vote-counting. Or if you live in a state like Pennsylvania, where Republicans are exploring the possibility of using false accusations of “fraud” to decertify the vote count, and might need to be overwhelmed with nonviolent protests to change their minds. 

The No. 1 thing you can do to prepare is connect with groups, through social media or emails lists, such as Color of Change, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, MoveOn, People’s Action or the Working Families Party. Look into local social justice organizations if you live in a swing state. Mobilization of protesters will likely happen through social media, and knowing who to turn to if things get hairy will be crucial for moving fast and putting bodies where they need to be to protect the vote. 

Whatever happens, the most important thing to understand is the power of nonviolent direct action. Trump and his minions want violence so they can blame the left, play the victim and, most importantly, declare that they’re ones who will maintain “law and order” and are therefore justified in their efforts to steal the election. The best way to defeat that strategy is offer the public a clear contrast between the peaceful supporters of democracy and the violent right-wing goons that Trump is encouraging. 

The good news is that experts believe it’s still unlikely that it will come to protests in the streets. The decentralized election system is simply too hard for Trump to control, especially since he’s so lazy and incompetent. His legal efforts to keep people from using mail-in ballots are failing. Mostly, what he has is a big microphone and a deep desire to scare people out of voting.

Donald Trump is trying to terrify Americans out of holding an election, and into allowing him to hold onto power by illegitimate means. But this is still a democracy — and we can keep it, as long as we stay resolved and refuse to let his ugly bluster scare us into letting it go. 

President Trump is the “single largest driver” of coronavirus misinformation in the world: study

President Donald Trump is responsible for nearly 38% of coronavirus misinformation in traditional media around the world, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University.

The study looked at what the World Health Organization has termed the “infodemic” of misinformation about the new coronavirus across 38 million traditional media articles published between Jan. 1 and May 26 in English-language media around the world.

“We found that media mentions of U.S. President Donald Trump within the context of COVID-19 misinformation made up by far the largest share of the infodemic,” the study said, noting that Trump mentions comprised 37.9% of the overall misinformation conversation.

“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around COVID,” Sarah Evnega, the study’s lead author and director of the Cornell Alliance for Science, told The New York Times. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”

The researchers looked at 11 topics of misinformation, including conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. But the most widespread topic was “miracle cures,” including Trump’s hype of hydroxychloroquine and his suggestion that disinfectant could be used as a coronavirus treatment, which accounted for more misinformation mentions than all of the other topics.

The number of articles about “miracle cures” skyrocketed from fewer than 10,000 to more than 30,000 after Trump suggested people inject themselves with disinfectant in April.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration who now serves as vice dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Times that misinformation was “one of the major reasons” that the United States had lagged behind other countries in containing the virus.

“There is a science of rumors. It’s when there is uncertainty and fear,” he said, adding that consistent public health messaging was key to any successful strategy.

“This is what we need to save lives,” he said. “If it’s not done well, you get far more infections and deaths.”

Overall, the findings were a mixed bag. The study found that less than 3% of traditional media articles included misinformation, but only 16.4% of the articles including fact-checking, “suggesting that the majority of COVID misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction.”

All conspiracy theories combined for 46% of misinformation mentions. Nearly 300,000 involved miracle cures, 49,000 mentioned conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” 40,000 mentioned Trump’s conspiracy theory that the virus was a Democratic hoax and 29,000 mentioned the Trump-hyped conspiracy theory that the virus had originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.

Conspiracy theories about Bill Gates’ involvement with vaccines and 5G contributing to the spread of the virus were mentioned in more than 23,000 articles. Another 17,000 mentioned Antisemitic conspiracy theories, and 14,000 mentioned conspiracy theories about population control.

More than 11,000 articles mentioned conspiracy theories alleging Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was exaggerating the threat of the pandemic or stood to benefit from pharmaceutical treatments.

“Misinformation about COVID-19 is a serious threat to global public health,” the study said. “If people are misled by unsubstantiated claims about the nature and treatment of the disease, they are less likely to observe official health advice and may thus contribute to the spread of the pandemic and pose a danger to themselves and others.”

Previous studies have found that people in counties which voted for Trump were less likely to social distance, and Republicans were far less likely to view the pandemic as a serious threat.

“It is especially notable that while misinformation and conspiracy theories promulgated by ostensibly grassroots sources, such as anti-vaccination groups, 5G opponents and political extremists, do appear in our analysis in several of the topics,” the Cornell researchers wrote. “They contributed far less to the overall volume of misinformation than more powerful actors, in particular the U.S. president.”

Trump admin. told officials to note Kyle Rittenhouse sought to “defend small business owners”: memo

The Trump administration directed federal law enforcement officials to note that Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teen charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., sought “to help defend small business owners,” according to a leaked memo obtained by NBC News.

The internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) talking points reportedly instructed law enforcement officials to make comments “sympathetic” to Rittenhouse, who was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, reckless endangerment and illegal possession of a dangerous weapon.

The leaked DHS talking points urged officials to make public comments noting that Rittenhouse “took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”

“Kyle was seen being chased and attacked by rioters before allegedly shooting three of them, killing two,” the memo said. “Subsequent video has emerged reportedly showing that there were ‘multiple gunmen’ involved, which would lend more credence to the self-defense claims.”

The document proceded to urge officials to say they would not comment on an ongoing probe. But it provided the following language: “What I will say is that Rittenhouse, just like everyone else in America, is innocent until proven guilty and deserves a fair trial based on all the facts, not just the ones that support a certain narrative. This is why we try the accused in the court of law, not the star chamber of public opinion.”

The memo also echoed talking points from the Trump campaign.

“This is also why we need to stop the violence in our cities. Chaotic and violent situations lead to chaotic, violent and tragic outcomes,” the memo says. “Everyone needs law and order.”

Another set of DHS talking points said the media was “incorrectly labeling the group Patriot Prayer as racists after clashes erupted between the group and protesters in Portland,” according to the report. It is unclear whether the talking points originated within DHS or the White House.

Former DHS officials, including those who worked in Republican administrations, told NBC News that it was “unusual” for department officials to publicly make comments regarding people and groups under ongoing investigations.

“It is as unprecedented as it is wrong,” Peter Boogaard, a former DHS spokesman under President Barack Obama, told the outlet.

Rittenhouse, who attended a Trump rally and posted social media messages praising the president and police, traveled to Kenosha from Illinois in August with an assault rifle. There is “immense” video footage of his interactions with protesters. Attorneys for the 17 year old claim that he acted in self-defense.

Trump defended Rittenhouse after the shooting, arguing that video showed “he was trying to get away” from protesters, who allegedly “very violently attacked him.”

“He probably would have been killed,” the president said.

But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that by the time of the moment in the video to which Trump was referring, “the teen had already shot and killed one protester.”

Trump’s Republican allies have likewise made “misleading” claims defending Rittenhouse. Fox News host Tucker Carlson openly praised Rittenhouse for deciding to “maintain order when no one else would.” A Christian fundraising site raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his legal defense.

Trump has repeatedly refused to denounce right-wing violence while hyping dubious claims about violence by antifa, which is not an organized group. On Tuesday, Trump was asked at his first presidential debate against Joe Biden to condemn white supremacists and far-right groups, like the Proud Boys, involved in violence at protests.

“The Proud Boys: Stand back, and stand by,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.”

“The fight of his political life”: Lindsey Graham dead even with Jaime Harrison in new Senate poll

A new Quinnipiac poll finds Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., locked in a 48-48 tie with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison, a showing which the underdog has sustained for two months, and given the depth of his financial support, appears poised to carry into the election.

The results match a Sept. 16 Quinnipiac survey, which also showed each candidate pulling 48%. A Quinnipiac poll from early August also found the two even at 44%, and the Harrison campaign’s internal surveys over the summer consistently showed a similar tight gap.

“There hasn’t been a Democrat elected to the Senate from South Carolina since 1998,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said in a news release. “Outspent and labeled by critics as an apologist for President Trump, Lindsey Graham is facing the fight of his political life.”

“The momentum is on the side of this grassroots movement, and Lindsey knows it,” Harrison campaign spokesperson Guy King told Salon. “This race is neck-and-neck, because as Lindsey Graham plays Washington political games. Jaime Harrison has kept this campaign laser-focused on South Carolina values and the issues facing folks here — like healthcare, broadband and fixing our crumbling roads. After 25 years in Washington, Lindsey Graham has changed and forgotten all about these problems.”

While the poll shows that more voters in the state want to see the GOP retain control of the Senate versus a Democratic flip, the candidates’ image ratings suggest that South Carolinians might be willing to draw a distinction when it comes to their own state. Forty-eight percent of voters view Harrison favorably, while 35% view him unfavorably. Graham polls in the reverse, with 43% holding a favorable view of the incumbent, and a majority of voters, 51%, viewing him unfavorably. Ninety-five percent of likely voters who chose a candidate say that they have made up their minds on the Senate race, while 4% say their preference could change before Election Day, according to the poll.

A spokesperson for the Graham campaign did not reply to Salon’s request for comment.

At the national level, President Donald Trump polled 48% among South Carolinians against Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s 47%. In the earlier Sept. 16 poll, Trump led Biden by a margin of 51% to 45%. However, Quinnipiac said the shift was not statistically significant.

Notably, a raft of research has found that the last two election cycles have challenged the conventional wisdom that voters tend to split tickets in hopes of striking an ideological balance, suggesting that if the South Carolina scales tip further towards Biden, it may not hurt Harrison’s chances.

The survey also found voters split on the Supreme Court, as Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary committee, has announced plans to quickly confirm Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Forty-nine percent of South Carolina voters told Quinnipiac that the winner of the presidential election should fill the vacancy, and 47% say the seat should be filled by Trump.

An individual close to the Harrison campaign told Salon that observers were still uncertain about whether or how confirmation proceedings would sway voters in the Palmetto State — an opinion shared by top election expert Larry Sabato, whose Crystal Ball project last week nudged the state closer towards Harrison, from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.” The Cook Political Report pushed the seat “lean Republican” last month.

Graham, for his part, has used recent media appearances about confirmation hearings to complain that he was “getting killed financially.” Harrison, the first Black chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, has consistently out-raised the three-term incumbent, suggesting the support of national resources and enthusiasm in addition to deep pockets.

In August alone, for instance, Harrison, a former longtime congressional staffer and Washington lobbyist, raised more than $10 million. Two weeks ago, his campaign claimed it raked in $2 million in two days. Additionally, the threat of a lasting ideological shift in the Supreme Court appears to have spurred left-leaning voters across the country, who have been pouring money into Democrat-backing groups, some of which will also help Harrison in his quest to unseat the man who oversaw the Kavanaugh hearings.

The trends have drawn comparisons to Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 run at Sen. Ted Cruz’s Republican seat in Texas. Sabato analysts point out that while South Carolina’s electorate has not seen the same massive shifts as Texas, some metrics appear to line up. As an example, Crystal Ball notes O’Rourke’s historically strong showing in the suburbs, a demographic which may offer Harrison a path to victory.

Should Harrison win, South Carolina — the state whose secession from the Union in 1860 kicked off the Civil War — would become the first state in U.S. history to send two Black senators to Capitol Hill at the same time. Harrison would join Sen. Tim Scott, who in 2013 was the only Black senator.

Let’s tell the truth about the pandemic: Donald Trump is guilty of mass murder

Two hundred and six thousand, six hundred and sixty-five people. That’s 206,665 mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents. As of this writing, that is the number of American lives lost in six months as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (The number will be larger by the time you read this.) A pandemic first described by the current United States president as a “Democrat hoax” and “like a flu” has now claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans — unnecessarily. 

We now know, thanks to the extensive interviews of Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, that Donald Trump knew of the danger and lethality of COVID-19 as early as February of this year. Time and time again, the president has publicly downplayed the scope and severity of this pandemic, while acknowledging the harsh reality in private.

Scores of mental health professionals have described President Trump as “unfit for office” in large part because of his personality pathology that plays out in his presidential decision-making and behavior. As seen this week with the New York Times exposé on the president’s taxes, Trump repeatedly acts as if he is above the law. But his cruelty has been front and center in several contexts, ranging from separating children at the border and putting them in cages to the daily deaths of Americans to the coronavirus. The mounting deaths due to COVID-19 are the scariest example of this president’s core sadism.

What was initially attributed to Trump’s incompetence, inexperience, lack of intellectual curiosity and overall ignorance and naiveté can now be more clearly identified as something far more sinister: mass murder. 

 

Several of Donald Trump’s actions (and inactions) provide the evidence needed to support such a chilling and startling claim, even by 2020 standards. Last week, in an ABC News town hall with George Stephanopoulos, Trump claimed that the virus would “go away without the vaccine” because people would develop “herd mentality.” Trump misspoke but was clearly referring to herd immunity – a strategy that, without a vaccine working in concert, would require rampant, unfettered spread of the disease to ensure that a large enough percentage of the populace developed antibodies to the virus. This is a strategy that would also require the deaths of millions of Americans, up to 3.8 million losses.

Not surprisingly, this strategy is also rife with Trumpian contradiction. When he was informed that an unchecked virus spreading throughout the spring and summer months could result in 2.2 million deaths, he immediately latched onto that number as a “Mendoza line” below which any degree of death was “acceptable” or a “victory.”

This is not a strategy as much as it is another example, albeit an exceptionally deadly one, of Trump’s penchant for taking positions that require the least amount of thought and effort and that are weak and passive (e.g., “we’ll see what happens”). Further, a “strategy” that allows for a massive loss of life is permissible within Trump’s psychopathy and, as a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence put it, Trump’s “flat-out disregard for human life.” It is also consistent with the Trumpian worldview that there are “winners (those that survive)” and “losers (those who allow themselves to be killed).”

We should also note that this is not a last-ditch, Hail Mary, impassioned plea by a leader to his people that some will have to sacrifice for the good of the many. Other countries with rational and competent leaders have gotten the virus under control. Our president is a weak and malicious leader who is choosing a strategy with the largest loss of life. As a prime example of his conscious decision-making, we recently learned that a plan by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver masks en masse to millions of Americans in April was nixed by the White House.

We believe that Trump’s conduct satisfies the legal elements of second-degree murder, demonstrating a conscious disregard for an extreme risk of death or serious bodily injury. Taken together, Trump’s ongoing lies, failure to warn of the virus’ transmissibility, failure to institute a national plan for mitigation, failure to follow public health experts, and continuing to disavow mitigation practices (e.g., holding “super-spreader” events with little mask wearing and no social distancing) comprise behaviors that meet the standard for second-degree murder.  

Trump’s lies and denials cannot hide the obvious truth: He is a mass murderer who does not care. At any point in the past six months, he could have changed course and followed the recommendations of public health experts. As such, nothing short of criminal culpability is acceptable. 

Whether Trump ever faces legal consequences for this massive loss of American lives or not, it is an important issue to consider as we enter the presidential debate season. This is not just an indictment of Trump’s enablers and followers as complicit in a crime of historic proportions. It is a national moment of sober reflection for all Americans.

A performance of “pure fascism”: Trump didn’t just tell his people what to do — he showed them how

The one good thing about Tuesday night’s presidential debate is that, as thriller writer Richard North Patterson noted for the Bulwark, Trump’s “nakedly unshackled sociopathy virtually obliterated conventional political analysis.”

You could see it happen in real time. Almost all the major news organizations I was watching started the evening with lame, both-sides headlines (“Sharp Personal Attacks and Name Calling in First Presidential Debate,” at the New York Times, for instance.) But after a few hours, the tone changed in most places.

Finally, Trump had gone too far for even timid, risk-averse editors to cover for him anymore, and the headlines began to reflect the dismal, one-sided reality of what had just happened.

For the Washington Post, that meant: “Trump incessantly interrupts and insults Biden as they spar in acrimonious first debate.”

For the New York Times, that meant: “With Cross Talk, Lies and Mockery, Trump Tramples Decorum in Debate With Biden.” And, on Wednesday — very significantly — “Tuesday’s Debate Made Clear the Gravest Threat to the Election: The President Himself.”

One notable exception was the Associated Press, which despite some blistering sidebars, maintained a gutless and shameless passive-voiced neutrality in its mainbar. (I really want to know who was in charge over there.)

But even the best coverage didn’t make a connection that I think is hugely important.

There was a lot written about Trump’s style: bellicose, hysterical, unstoppable, rule-breaking, trampling over anyone in his way.

And there was a lot written about the racist, anti-democratic substance: telling white supremacists to “stand by,” ordering his supporter to “go into the polls,” predicting a fraudulent election, screaming about “law and order.”

What the coverage failed to capture, however, was how the style and the substance relate.

Trump was both telling his base what to do and showing them how to act. He was telling them to be prepared to fight — and to break the rules. For him, and like him.

Seen together, there’s really only one word for what he was preaching: it’s fascism. It had nothing to do with winning an election, and everything to do with stealing it.

Let’s go to the transcript.

Consider when Chris Wallace asked Trump: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence?”

Trump eventually responded: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem this is a left wing.”

Wallace asked: “Will you urge your supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest? And will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?”

Trump replied:  “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it.” And, he said, “If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

Trump also claimed the loyalty of the military (inaccurately) and law enforcement (more accurately): “We just got the support of 250 military leaders and generals, total support. Law enforcement, almost every law enforcement group in the United States. I have Florida. I have Texas. I have Ohio. I have every … excuse me, Portland, the sheriff just came out today and he said, ‘I support President Trump.'” (The sheriff, as it happened, soon tweeted: “I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him.”)

Trump bragged about the extrajudicial execution of antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl in early September, who was shot without warning by a ragtag federal task force. “I sent in the U.S. Marshals to get the killer of a young man in the middle of the street and they shot him,” Trump said. “For three days Portland didn’t do anything. I sent in the U.S. Marshals — they took care of business.”

And of course, the whole time he was lying and interrupting, breaking the ground rules his campaign had agreed to.

Esquire politics blogger and veteran truth-teller Charles P. Pierce got it exactly right when he wrote that “the only story from Tuesday night” was “the great, looming, consistent threat emerging from whatever the hell that event became.” He explained:

It was pure fascism, right down to the set of his chin that he stole from Mussolini, but it was fascism at the behest of a career failure who was sending out a call for anyone else with a sense of failure and a long gun. …

He wants a race war. He wants a civil war. He wants to bring it all down and get rich selling off the wreckage… .

He wants his own private Belarus, with his own private militias at polling places, and in the streets if he loses, and he’s fixing things to get it, too.

I wrote last week that some leaders in our top newsrooms are finally openly acknowledging that Trump presents a grave danger to our democracy. The New York Times took another major step in that direction on Wednesday, unleashing a David E. Sanger analysis of the debate with this uncompromising declaration:

President Trump’s angry insistence in the last minutes of Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud amounted to an extraordinary declaration by a sitting American president that he would try to throw any outcome into the courts, Congress or the streets if he was not re-elected.

His comments came after four years of debate about the possibility of foreign interference in the 2020 election and how to counter such disruptions. But they were a stark reminder that the most direct threat to the electoral process now comes from the president of the United States himself.

But while Sanger noted that Trump importuning his supporters to go into the polls “seemed to be code words for a campaign of voter intimidation,” he gave short shrift to the lawlessness and violence Trump is so clearly calling for.

Political analysts, shocked to their bones, are calling this a debacle for Trump, pointing out that his hectoring, bullying and rule-breaking didn’t win over any converts, and muddied his message.

But what if the rule-breaking was the message? Then Trump may have made progress — not in winning the election, but in taking it by force.

It’s been 12 years since debate moderators last asked a question about climate change

“I’d like to talk about climate change,” Chris Wallace said in the last 10 minutes of the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday. “What do you believe about the science of climate change, sir?” he asked Trump. “Do you believe that human pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, contribute to climate change?”

The question was not on the list of six debate topics Wallace had released ahead of Tuesday night’s debate. By the time the debate hit the hour mark, no one expected climate to come up at all. The first two-thirds of the debate were less of a conversation and more of a hell pit of interruptions and crosstalk. At times, things turned legitimately mean — mostly on Trump’s end, although Biden snuck in a few attacks. “Will you shut up, man?” Biden said at one point. “Don’t ever say the word ‘smart’ to me, Joe,” Trump later said, insulting Biden’s performance in school.

But the roughly 10 minutes the candidates spent talking about climate change were not only surprisingly extensive, thoughtful, and civil, they represented one of the most substantive conversations President Trump has ever been forced to have about climate change on the fly and on such a big platform. Wallace did not hold back.

“Over your four years, you have pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. You have rolled back a number of Obama environmental records. What do you believe about the science of climate change, and what will you do over the next four years to confront it?” Wallace asked.

“I want crystal clean water and air, we now have the lowest carbon … if you look at our numbers now we are doing phenomenally,” Trump replied. He called the Paris Agreement a “disaster” and repeated over and over that the historic wildfires in the West in recent years are due to poor forest management. “The forest floor is loaded up with dead trees. You drop a cigarette in there the whole forest burns down,” he said.

But Wallace didn’t let him off that easy. “What do you believe about the science of climate change, sir?” he pressed.

“I believe we have to do everything we can to have immaculate air, immaculate water,” Trump replied, “and do whatever else we can that’s good.” It’s a familiar refrain. Trump has been trying to paint himself as an environmentalist for years, touting his administration’s limited efforts to protect America’s air and water resources while simultaneously rolling back regulations on air and water pollution.

Wallace homed in on Trump again, refusing to close the segment without a response from the president on the merits of climate science. “Do you believe human greenhouse gas emissions contribute to the global warming of this planet?” Wallace asked.

“I think to an extent, yes,” Trump admitted.

Wallace wasn’t done yet. “But sir, if you believe in the science of climate change, why have you rolled back the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited carbon emissions in power plants?” Wallace asked. “Because it was driving energy prices through the sky,” Trump replied. “Why have you relaxed fuel economy standards?” Wallace pressed. “You’re talking about a tiny difference,” Trump said.

When Biden got his chance to respond, he used the opportunity to talk about his $2 trillion green stimulus plan, which he released this summer. “Nobody’s gonna build another coal-fired plant in America. They’re gonna move to renewable energy,” he said, moving through the central points of his proposal. “He’s talking about the Green New Deal,” Trump said. “It’s $100 trillion dollars.” “Not true,” Biden replied. (A right-wing policy group came up with that number.) “What it’s going to do is create millions of good-paying jobs. We are going to be in a position where we can create hard, hard good jobs by making sure the environment is clean and we all are in better shape.”

We’ve heard Biden talk about climate many times before. But Trump fielding multiple questions about the climate crisis? Extremely rare. “For the first time, President Trump acknowledged that human activity has, at least in part, caused climate change,” the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environment group, said in a statement. You can watch the whole portion on climate change here:

Biden and Trump on climate change from Grist on Vimeo.

Why Chris Wallace blew it: Even at its best, Fox News is a right-wing noise machine

I hate to say, “I told you so,” so let me just say: Elizabeth Warren told you so. 

So did Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee. Both rejected offers from Fox News to host political events during the 2020 Democratic primary, a town hall in Warren’s case and a candidate debate for the DNC.

“A Fox News town hall adds money to the hate-for-profit machine. To which I say: hard pass,” Warren plainly stated. And while he claimed “Chris Wallace isn’t my concern,” Perez correctly identified that “at the highest levels of Fox News they” — meaning right-wing ideologues — “have infiltrated the news side.” Perez had to defend his decision to Democrats at the time, but Chris Wallace’s hapless performance as a presidential debate “moderator” on Tuesday evening may have finally made clear that Fox News is not an honest media broker. Not one host from the network can be trusted to present facts outside the requisite right-wing narrative. 

It’s easy to feel for Wallace. At no point during that rage-inducing national embarrassment did Donald Trump allow the first presidential debate of the 2020 campaign to play out as planned, at least according to what Wallace repeatedly reminded the president were the mutually agreed-upon rules. Wallace lost control in the first 90 seconds and Trump ran roughshod over him for the next 90 minutes. 

“I’m the moderator of this debate and I’d like to ask my question,” Wallace pleaded with Trump at one point. 

 

The host of “Fox News Sunday” told The New York Times earlier this week, “If I’ve done my job right, at the end of the night, people will say, ‘That was a great debate, who was the moderator?'” Wallace not only failed to meet his own low standard of uselessness, he actively aided Trump by peddling dangerous misinformation and pushing modulated versions of the same right-wing narrative deployed by Trump, creating a dangerous feedback loop. 

Despite Trump’s day-after complaints, for much of Tuesday’s debate it was clear that Wallace simply let the president moderate. “If you want to switch seats, we can do that,” Wallace offered Trump a little more than an hour into the debate. Wallace repeatedly interrupted Biden to ask Trump questions. He then permitted Trump to keep talking over Biden without cutting him off, and allowed lie after lie to go unchallenged. Much too late, Wallace tried to exert some control, but he rarely, if ever, succeeded. 

To be fair, no moderator deemed acceptable to the Trump campaign would conceivably have the chops to rein in the president. That would defeat his whole debate strategy. Indeed, I’d predict that Wallace will eventually be graded the highest of the three presidential debate moderators after CSPAN call-in host Steve Scully and NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker get their turn.

As Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote, the idea that either of them “can hope to control things any better is a dubious one unless the format changes substantially.” On Wednesday, the the Commission on Presidential Debates announced it may do just that: “Last night’s debate made clear additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues,” the commission said in a statement, adding that it is “considering the changes” and will “announce those measures shortly.”

But what was even more troublesome than Wallace impotently shouting “Mr. President!” in exactly the way I ask my 10-month-old to not put every single thing he picks up into his mouth was the frame and premise Wallace deployed for several of the night’s most serious topics. 

On police violence and the ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon, the Fox News host portrayed the issue as nightly riots by the protesters — rather than nightly violence by police. People have assembled in Portland to protest police violence every night and cops have responded by brutalizing them. Wallace didn’t mention the Trump supporters driving down the streets following a pro-Trump rally, shooting random people with paintball guns and pepper-spraying them. Wallace brought up antifa — all-purpose right-wing bugaboo of the moment — but made no mention of the men who traveled to a Walmart in El Paso and a synagogue in Pittsburgh to carry out what they interpreted as a mission of violent racial animus supported by the president.

Even if Wallace deserves plaudits for pressing Trump to denounce white supremacists, we wouldn’t even be in this situation if Fox News and the right-wing media hadn’t spent decades and billions of dollars promoting hate. Trump’s most rambling monologues on Tuesday night were hard to follow for anyone not completely immersed in the Fox News conspiracy universe. 

Right after his horrific call-out to the Proud Boys, Trump declined an invitation to call for restraint following the election, calling instead for his supporters to show up as an intimidating force at the polls. Wallace then just let him go on unabated, making groundless allegations about election integrity. 

When Wallace asked Trump why he insisted on holding campaign rallies in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump falsely said all of his rallies had been outdoors. Wallace simply replied: “You are right.” Wallace also tried to get Trump to shut up by promising him a softball: “You’ll like this next question.”

Give Wallace credit for asking a climate change question, the first in a presidential debate since 2008, and almost getting an answer. But he failed as a moderator because Fox News can’t be trusted when the network’s entire motive is propaganda. The network even ran Trump campaign propaganda after the debate. Wallace’s own colleagues won’t defend him from Trump, even in the next hour, because they rely on Trump and his viewers. 

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1311153253472636928

And no, Bernie Sanders, who famously held a Fox News town hall, would not have fared better. Although Sanders’ Fox appearance was widely perceived as successful (he got wild applause for mention of Medicare for All), the Fox News website posted no viral clip of Sanders explaining why health care is a human right. Instead, his answer to a gotcha question about why he didn’t personally cut a check to the IRS if he wanted higher taxes was weaponized for wide dissemination. Media’s fake commitment to “fair and balanced” goes beyond Fox News. It is killing people and our democracy.

Trump’s encouragement of GOP ballot watchers echoes an old tactic of voter intimidation

During the first presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he would “urge” his followers to remain calm during a prolonged vote-counting period after the election, if the winner were unclear.

“I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that is what has to happen, I am urging them to do it,” Trump said. “I hope it’s going to be a fair election, and if it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent on board, but if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump has said he wants to recruit poll watchers to monitor the vote. And to some, the image of thousands of Trump supporters crowding into polling places to monitor voters looks like voter intimidation, a practice long used in the U.S. by political parties to suppress one side’s vote and affect an election’s outcome.

In the history of voter suppression in the U.S. – including attempts to stop Black and Latino people from voting – Republican tactics in the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race are worth highlighting. That incident sparked a court order – a “consent decree” – forbidding the GOP from using a variety of voter intimidation methods, including armed poll watchers.

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years conducted without the protections afforded by that decree.

The National Ballot Security Task Force

In November 1981, voters in several cities saw posters at polling places printed in bright red letters. “WARNING,” they read. “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.”

And voters soon encountered the patrols themselves. About 200 were deployed statewide, many of them uniformed and carrying guns.

In Trenton, patrol members asked a Black voter for her registration card and turned her away when she didn’t produce it. Latino voters were similarly prevented from voting in Vineland, while in Newark some voters were physically chased from the polls by patrolmen, one of whom warned a poll worker not to stay at her post after dark. Similar scenes played out in at least two other cities, Camden and Atlantic City.

Weeks later, after a recount, Republican Thomas Kean won the election by fewer than 1,800 votes.

Democrats, however, soon won a significant victory. With local civil rights activists, they discovered that the “ballot security” operation was a joint project of the state and national Republican committees. They filed suit in December 1981, charging Republicans with “efforts to intimidate, threaten and coerce duly qualified black and Hispanic voters.”

In November 1982, the case was settled when the Republican committees signed a federal consent decree – a court order applicable to activities anywhere in the U.S. – agreeing not to use race in selecting targets for ballot security activities and to refrain from deploying armed poll watchers.

That order expired in 2018 after Democrats failed to convince a judge to renew it.

As a professor who teaches and writes about New Jersey history, I’m alarmed by the expiration because I know that Republicans in 1981 relied not only on armed poll watchers but also on a history of white vigilantism and intimidation in the Garden State. These issues resonate today in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and continued GOP attempts to suppress the 2020 vote in numerous states.

The Republican “ballot security” plan

Considered an early referendum on Ronald Reagan’s presidency, New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial race held special meaning for Republicans nationwide. Kean – with campaign manager Roger Stone at the helm – promised corporate tax cuts and relied heavily on Reagan’s endorsement.

To secure victory, state and national Republican party officials devised a project they claimed would prevent Democratic cheating at the polls.

In the summer of 1981, the Republican National Committee sent an operative named John A. Kelly to New Jersey to run the ballot security effort. Kelly had first been hired by the Republican National Committee in 1980 to work in the Reagan campaign, and he served as one of the RNC’s liaisons to the Reagan White House.

Later, after he was revealed as the organizer of the National Ballot Security Task Force – and after The New York Times discovered that he had lied about graduating from Notre Dame and had been arrested for impersonating a police officer – Republicans distanced themselves from him.

In August 1981, under the guise of the National Ballot Security Task Force, Kelly sent about 200,000 letters marked “return to sender” to voters in heavily Black and Latino districts. Those whose letters were returned had their names added to a list of voters to be challenged at the polls on Election Day, a tactic known as voter caging.

In the Newark area, Kelly produced a list of 20,000 voters whom he deemed potentially fraudulent. He then hired local operatives to organize patrols, ostensibly to keep such fraud at bay. To run the Newark operation, he hired Anthony Imperiale.

Newark’s white vigilante

Imperiale, in turn, hired off-duty police officers and employees of his private business, the Imperiale Security Police, to patrol voting sites in the city.

The gun-toting, barrel-chested former Marine had first adopted the security role during Newark’s 1967 uprising – five days of protests and a deadly occupation of the city by police and the National Guard following the police beating of a Black cab driver. During the uprising, Imperiale organized patrols of his predominantly white neighborhood to keep “the riots” out.

Soon, Imperiale became a hero of white backlash politics. His opposition to police reform earned him widespread support from law enforcement. And his fight against Black housing development in Newark’s North Ward delighted many of his neighbors. By the end of the 1970s, Hollywood was making a movie based on his activities.

After serving as an independent in both houses of the state legislature, Imperiale became a Republican in 1979. Two years later, he campaigned with Kean. Once in office, the new governor named Imperiale director of a new one-man state Office of Community Safety – an appointment often interpreted as reward for Imperiale’s leadership of the ballot efforts in Newark, but stymied when Democrats refused to fund the position.

Outcome and legacy

Despite Kean’s slim margin of victory, Democrats at the time were careful not to claim that Republican voter suppression efforts had decided the election. (In 2016, the former Democratic candidate claimed they did indeed make the difference.)

Rather, the state and national Democratic committees brought suit against the Republican National Committee to ensure it couldn’t again use such methods anywhere. For nearly 40 years – through amendments and challenges – the resulting consent decree helped curtail voter suppression tactics.

Since the decree’s expiration in 2018, Republicans have ramped up their recruitment of poll watchers for the 2020 presidential election. Last November, Trump campaign lawyer Justin Clark – calling the decree’s absence “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal” for the party – promised a larger, better-funded and “more aggressive” program of Election Day operations.

The Trump campaign is claiming, as Republicans did in 1981, that Democrats “will be up to their old dirty tricks” and has vowed to “cover every polling place in the country” with workers to ensure an honest election and reelect the president.

This November, Republican tactics in 1981 are worth remembering. They demonstrate that the safeguarding of polling places from supposedly fraudulent voters and of public places from Black bodies share not only a logic. They also share a history.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on August 10, 2020.

Mark Krasovic, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, Rutgers University Newark

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

Yale psychiatrist: Debate should never have happened due to Trump’s “mental health”

A Yale psychiatrist who has repeatedly raised questions about President Trump’s mental health argued that Tuesday’s debate against Joe Biden should never have been allowed to go forward.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine and the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, said in an interview with Salon that Trump lacked the basic “mental health” to participate in a presidential debate.

Trump derailed the debate throughout the entire 90 minutes, repeatedly refusing to comply with the rules his campaign had agreed to and incessantly heckling his opponent. The event was universally panned as a “sh*tshow” and “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.”

Lee, the author of the textbook “Violence” and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” has led an organization of mental health professionals calling for Trump to be removed from the White House and the 2020 ballot because of his “psychological dangerousness and mental unfitness.”  She told Salon that the media’s shock at Trump’s disastrous performance was the result of a years-long problem that has gone ignored far too long.

“The predicament that we are facing, of being unable to be certain even of a democratic election, is because we have done everything possible to avoid naming the problem,” she said. “We saw from Robert Mueller’s team and the Democratic House’s handling of impeachment that not taking psychological factors into consideration predetermined their poor outcome. This is because psychological issues need to be dealt with psychologically — and we are now gambling with our elections.”

Lee said she plans to publish a “Profile of the Nation” on her website to provide a “full psychological profile of Donald Trump in the context of his followers and the nation.”

“My ‘Profile of the Nation’ hopes to provide ‘the missing link’ that explains why the president does what he does, why he has so tragically mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, why he stokes racial tensions and national conflict, and ultimately how he is bringing about a near-destruction of democracy,” she said. “Knowledge is power, and we need to spread this knowledge.”

Lee spoke to Salon about the debate and the responsibility of mental health professionals to speak out about the president’s mental health ahead of the election.

Trump spent most of the debate heckling and interrupting, mixed with some blatant lying. How would you assess his debate performance?

The huge error was in allowing the debate to happen in the first place. “How was his debate performance?” is the wrong question to start. A debate presupposes mental health. We cannot pretend to have one when management of psychological impairment is what is warranted. The majority of the country may be horrified at what he is doing, but we continue to help the disorder in every way possible by treating his behavior as normal. It applies first to the politicians, then to the media and then to pundits who do not come out and honestly say: “This is beyond anything I have seen and beyond what I can understand — can we consult with experts?” And experts, for a psychological matter, would be mental health experts. Perhaps even specialists of personality disorders or sociopathy would be necessary, given the severity.

Instead, where mental health is concerned, everyone seems to believe one knows all there is to know and that expertise is unnecessary. We have seen what a disastrous difference it makes when we leave pandemic management to random persons’ whims, as opposed to pandemic experts — it makes the difference of hundreds of thousands of lives. Problems of the human mind are arguably far more complex than problems arising from a virus. We are not helpless, yet we continue to make the problem worse through the seeming notion that an expert’s lifetime accumulation of scientific knowledge and clinical experience do not count. This attitude leaves us in ignorance, and we cannot properly respond to the needs of the situation.

Is there anything Joe Biden could have done differently to counter Trump’s incessant attempts at bullying?

Again, we cannot expect non-professionals to handle a person who requires professional-level care. He did as well as anyone could possibly expect. However, because of a lack of knowledge about what exactly is happening outside the realm of rationality, and not having a systematic plan that accords with proven principles of management — which is again an area of specialized knowledge and practice — he could not do what was necessary. As far as Donald Trump’s followers are concerned, this was a winner for Trump, not Joe Biden.

What did you make of Chris Wallace’s attempts to rein in Trump? Is there anything future moderators can do?

It returns, for me, back to the need for an honest national debate. Ask yourself: How many times have you heard a mental health professional speak about the problems of the president’s mental health in the past week, month or year? Yet this is a matter that warrants discussion every day with experts, until it is brought under control. We are currently under enormous danger because of the platform that is provided the president, which he uses daily to fuel conspiracy theories, to bewitch his followers’ minds, to exhaust those who would oppose him, and now to subvert democracy itself. It is unreasonable and inapplicable to ask anchors to do the job that has now become a public health problem of such magnitude that all the different disciplines and sectors must step up and collaborate. Without a clear vision of what is happening, this is nearly impossible.

Treating a psychological issue as a purely political one is the first problem. This was the basic message when more than 800 mental health professionals signed a petition during impeachment, asking that the speaker of the House consult with us. We predicted that as long as the psychological factors were ignored, any procedure would fail. This was also the underlying message of over 300 pages of letters, petitions and conference transcripts which my organization has recently published in “Documents” — people can see how we predicted, almost with uncanny timing, what would happen if we failed to contain the psychological dangers of the president. It has now spread into social, cultural, civic and geopolitical dangers, just as we said. 

Of course, leading this trend was the American Psychiatric Association’s distortion of ethics. The reinterpretation of the “Goldwater rule,” as happened at the onset of this presidency, has been exceedingly harmful, in my view, for silence in the face of grave dangers facilitates conditions for atrocities. Last month, we created a blow-by-blow account of how we exactly foretold the president’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, based on his psychological makeup. We could not effectively convey this in advance, because the public was led to believe that the “Goldwater rule,” which is a guild rule applying only to 6% of practicing mental health professionals, was universal, or worse yet, some kind of law. But in truth, to change a guideline whose purpose is to protect public health to protect a public figure at the expense of public health violates all core tenets of medical ethics.

I predicted early on that this distortion to suit this administration would cause more harm than what the American Psychiatric Association’s counterpart, the American Psychological Association, did with its ethics guidelines to facilitate and design programs for torture. This is because any stifling of speech, let alone education, regarding such dangers to society was bound to cause far more devastating harm than 1,000 torture victims, as bad as that is. More than 200,000 deaths later, I think this will be hard to argue. There is a reason why thousands of mental health professionals have joined us at the World Mental Health Coalition to step up where the American Psychiatric Association has failed in leadership. We call on the APA to retract its “gag order” and to apologize for misleading the American people and the media.

Trump’s ability to impose his will on the debate allowed his lies to be aired to millions without any fact-checking or response. Are you worried that events like this could “normalize” the alternative reality Trump is trying to create?

Absolutely. What we see is a “bulldozing effect” of mental pathology. The drive for psychic survival ingeniously senses what it needs to get ahead, through illegitimate means. This primitive and destructive force is a form of disorder that has no place in politics.

A lot of people seemed to turn off the debate. It was almost traumatic. How does watching a debate, or three, like the one on Tuesday, affect the general electorate’s psychology heading into the election?

This has been one of the hardest things to watch as a mental health professional. Unprecedented rises in stress and anxiety, including retraumatization, have been well documented far before the disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic and the economic devastation that followed. The psychological toll on the population is immense, and we have not seen the tip of the iceberg of suicides, homicides and “deaths of despair” that will be a direct consequence of this presidency. We now have considerable research evidence to be able to make the links and to predict and prevent such harm, and yet we have not made use of any of that knowledge. It is time for this to change.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

The power behind Trump’s Proud Boys shout-out

Members of the Proud Boys are rejoicing after President Donald Trump gave the far-right organization a shout-out and marching orders during Tuesday night’s nationally televised debate, heightening fears that the president is deliberately rallying extremist groups and stirring up white supremacist violence as part of his frantic effort to remain in power.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday morning that one Proud Boys leader readily interpreted Trump’s comments as instructions to commit violence against the president’s political opponents. “Trump basically said to go fuck them up!” wrote Joey Biggs after the president told the Proud Boys, a group that openly embraces violence, to “stand back and stand by.”

“This makes me so happy,” Biggs added, a celebratory reaction that was echoed by members of the extremist organization on the social media and messaging apps they commonly use, such as Telegram and Parler. One Proud Boys member claimed Trump’s comments prompted a surge in “new recruits.”

Refusing to condemn white supremacists when given an opportunity to do so by debate moderator Chris Wallace, the president said, “I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

Shortly following Trump’s comments, which were widely condemned by civil rights organizations, one of the Proud Boys’ social media accounts incorporated the president’s words into a graphic with the far-right group’s logo:

Progressive advocacy group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action said in a statement late Tuesday that Trump’s remarks were the “words of a scared wannabe fascist , not a president—and Jewish Americans see right through him.”

“Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he considers violent white supremacists to be a valued part of his base, even after people are murdered,” the group added. “He doesn’t just enable white supremacy; it’s his platform. Trump’s open appeals to white supremacists and his dangerous rhetoric show that this president will do or say anything in his increasingly desperate bid to hold onto power.”

Pointing to another telling graphic that circulated among Proud Boys accounts on Twitter, youth-led Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow warned that “Trump is inciting violence from the debate stage.”

“During a time when Black people nationwide are exercising their rights to protest police violence and contending with rising levels of racial violence, President Donald Trump used his debate platform to embolden white supremacists by refusing to disavow their activity and by issuing a directive to Proud Boys to ‘stand by,'” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement.

“Even the FBI has identified white supremacy as one of the greatest domestic threats that we face today,” added Clarke. “The president’s silence and acquiescence present a clear and present danger to Black people, who are most frequently targeted by incidents of hate.”

As Ali Breland of Mother Jones wrote late Tuesday, “Trump’s decision to not clearly condemn white supremacy and the Proud Boys in particular could have dangerous consequences.”

Breland continued:

Proud Boys have already exhibited a pattern of violence by routinely assaulting protesters they see as not on their side, often without any physical provocation…

Adjacent extremist groups could also take Trump’s refusal to disavow white supremacists as a tacit endorsement. The investigative news site Bellingcat recently reported on a leaked trove of chat messages shared by right-wing activists in Oregon. It includes a message from a user named Paige discussing when would be an appropriate time to use violence: “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing.”

Democratic lawmakers joined civil rights groups in condemning Trump’s remarks and warning they could spark a wave of racist violence ahead of the November election.

“Donald Trump fans the flames of racism, embraces white supremacy, and employs state violence against Americans exercising their rights,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted late Tuesday. “That’s Donald Trump’s America.”

Rep. Rashia Tlaib (D-Mich.) said the president’s nod to the Proud Boys “again shows he is dangerous.”

Trump campaign removes all mention of former head Brad Pascale from its website after arrest

In the wake of reports surrounding the police arrest and apparent suicide attempt of former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign is quietly disappearing Parscale from its website, the Daily Beast reports.

“Since Tuesday, the campaign has removed a video of Parscale from the homepage of its ‘Army for Trump’ election monitoring operation,” the Beast’s Lachlan Markay writes. “It also deleted a page on the main campaign website featuring a video of Parscale and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and senior campaign adviser. The video of their discussion, billed as a Q&A on the state of the campaign, has also been removed from YouTube. Those deletions were first flagged on Twitter by the writer Jeryl Bier.”

Parscale was campaign manager for Trump until he was replaced by former White House political director Bill Stepien in July. Police say this Sunday Parscale’s wife called 9-11 to report that he was threatening to commit suicide and had loaded a firearm in front of her. She also claims he physically assaulted her.

A separate report claims Parscale is accused of “stealing” up to $40 million from President Trump’s campaign and $10 million from the Republican National Committee, but a spokesperson for the Trump campaign denies Parscale is facing an internal investigation.

Read the full report over at The Daily Beast.

“Unacceptable”: Republicans, including McConnell, criticize Trump for not condemning white supremacy

President Donald Trump faces backlash from fellow Republicans after refusing to condemn white supremacy during a contentious moment in the first debate of the 2020 cycle against Democratic rival Joe Biden. 

Though Trump told debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News that “sure” he would be willing to condemn white supremacist groups, he failed multiple times to do so. When asked if he would denounce the Proud Boys, which was labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the president told its members to “stand back, and stand by.”

“Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left,” Trump declared. 

In a rare rebuke of Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters on Wednesday that the president’s failure to denounce white supremacy was “unacceptable.” The GOP leader aligned himself with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the only Black Republican in the upper chamber, who had earlier called for Trump to “correct” his answer.

“With regard to the white supremacy issue, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Sen. Tim Scott,” McConnell said. “I think he said it exactly correctly, and that’s exactly how I would express myself on that issue.”

“[Scott] said it was unacceptable not to condemn white supremacists, and so I do so in the strongest possible way,” McConnell added.

Scott posited in his earlier remarks that Trump might not have spoken clearly, and the senator extended the president an opportunity to clarify his answer.

“I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it,”  the Palmetto State Republican said. “If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”

A number of Senate Republicans made similar requests on Wednesday.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La, said Trump “should unequivocally condemn white supremacy,” as did Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, a frequent critic of the president. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., added that he “was hoping for more clarity.”

Even the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite morning show which frequently showers him with the praise, expressed bafflement. Brian Kilmeade lamented that Trump “blew the biggest layup in the history of debates by saying – not condemning white supremacists.” He also requested clarification from the president. 

“I don’t know if he didn’t hear it, but he’s got to clarify that right away,” Kilmeade said of Trump. “That’s like, ‘Are you against evil?’ Why the president didn’t just knock that out of the park, I’m not sure.”

But White House communications director Alyssa Farah told Fox News’ Sandra Smith that the administration did not see a need to clear up the matter. 

“I don’t think that there’s anything to clarify,” Farah said. “He’s told them to ‘stand back.'”

Trump campaign chief strategist Jason Miller responded to questions from USA Today by pointing out that Trump had recently promised to designate the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist organization as part of what the president calls his “Platinum Plan” for Black voters. However, there is currently no legal process for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations.

Miller also said that Trump had been telling the Proud Boys to “knock it off,” even though the group’s own leaders publicly celebrated “stand back and stand by” as an activating order.

In a testy exchange with CNN’s John Berman, Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley falsely claimed that the president “did call them out.” When Gidley claimed that Trump had denounced white supremacists three times, Berman responded: “The president said, ‘Yes, I will’ . . . and then the president didn’t do it.”

Reporters gave Trump a chance to clarify his answer in a Wednesday afternoon press spray, during which he claimed to not “know who the Proud Boys are.”

“I can only say they have to stand down, and let law enforcement do their work,” Trump said. “And law enforcement will do their work more and more.”

“Whoever they are, they have to stand down,” the president added.

Asked again to condemn white supremacist groups, Trump again came up short of a declarative statement.

 “I’ve always denounced any form — any form, any form of any of that you have to denounce,” he claimed. 

Then the president then called on Biden to denounce antifa.

In 2017, the president responded to a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia — an event organized by former Proud Boys member Jason Kessler — by saying, “There’s blame on both sides.”

Scientists say social distancing is working — for a completely different disease than COVID-19

Even as the novel coronavirus pandemic ravages humanity — the death toll currently stands at more than 1 million deaths worldwide out of nearly 34 million confirmed cases — there is some surprising good news about a more common type of disease: Influenza. As Scientific American reported on Wednesday, flu season has been close to nonexistent in the Southern Hemisphere this year, though it would normally have taken off around March. That means thousands of lives or more have been spared by the flu virus, which normally kills 100,000 to 500,000 people a year. 

While further studies need to be conducted in order to confirm why the Southern Hemisphere dodged the influenza bullet, public health experts say the most obvious explanation is that the same measures being used to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have a salutary effect on containing influenza. These would include things like social distancing, wearing masks and washing hands.

“The belief is this was the result of wearing masks, more frequent hand washing, physical distancing and less large gatherings,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former secretary of health in Maryland, told Salon by email. “Influenza and the common cold are diseases spread person to person in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. So, efforts to reduce COVID-19 have the dual benefit of reducing colds and flu,” Benjamin noted that vaccinations for influenza took place as they normally do around the world, and stressed the importance of getting a flu vaccine.

“I think social distancing and masks will reduce cold/flu season and make it a really mild season,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California – San Francisco, wrote to Salon. After drawing attention to a recent study in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that argues influenza activity has decreased in the United States during the pandemic, Gandhi added that “it looks like the steps taken to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 have led to a global decline in influenza during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, there was a significant drop in the percentage of respiratory specimens that tested positive for influenza in the early days of the pandemic in the United States. Measures such as facial masks and social distancing have likely kept positive tests at ‘historically low interseasonal levels.'”

Dr. Russell Medford, chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, had similar observations when explaining the drop in influenza activity in both this country and throughout the world.

“Biologically, both influenza and the common cold are respiratory viruses that share the same airborne modes of transmission as SARS-CoV-2,” Medford told Salon. “The use of face masks, for example, would be expected to not only protect against the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by infected persons but also influenza and the common cold. Equally important is the growing evidence that supports the use of face-masks to protect the healthy wearer from acquiring respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV2, influenza and the common cold.”

Though COVID-19 has a higher mortality rate, influenza is not a disease to take lightly. As with COVID, mortality rates tend to increase with age. Likewise, the vaccine for flu already exists, and is widely available; getting one ensures that a COVID-19 diagnosis won’t be compounded by the flu, with potentially disastrous results. 

The CDC’s report is encouraging, but it is not a guarantee that the flu season will be mild, experts stressed.

“The severity and prevalence of flu varies from year to year; if the Southern Hemisphere had a very mild flu season, it is likely (but not guaranteed) that we will as well,” Dr. Alfred Sommer, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote to Salon. “It is usually the same virus.” Sommer also pointed out that “ANYTHING that reduces transmission of virus will reduce disease and death. This year, with COVID-19, those who do NOT follow standard hand washing (critical for flu and colds) and distancing/masks (critical for COVID) will be at higher risk of disease and death”

Dr. Justin Lessler, another associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon that while these developments are auspicious, that does not mean we aren’t going to see many deaths from other infectious diseases. He speculated that a decline in deaths is “likely, for flu in particular. Some others, like RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], it is less clear because they are so concentrated in very young children. However, we still don’t know if this reduction in mortality due to less transmission will be offset by additional mortality due to interactions between the COVID-19 and flu epidemics.”

President Donald Trump has been criticized for occasional remarks and actions that discouraged mask-wearing, including suggesting that some people wear facemasks as a conspiracy to hurt him politically. Former Vice President Joe Biden criticized Trump for this during their debate last night.

“He has been totally irresponsible in the way he has handled the social distancing, the people wearing masks – basically encouraging them not to. He’s a fool on this,” Biden told the audience. “He’s not worried about the people.”

“We’re ready”: White supremacist Proud Boys activated after President Trump tells them to “stand by”

The Proud Boys, who have been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), pledged allegiance to President Donald Trump on Tuesday night after he called on them to “stand back, and stand by” during the first presidential debate.

Supporters and members of the group echoed the president on social media, appearing to take Trump’s remarks as marching orders. The Proud Boys Telegram wrote, “standing down and standing by sir.” Another known account incorporated a version of the phrase — “Stand back. Stand by” — into a new group logo.

By Wednesday morning, the phrase had become part of a meme featuring a photo of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Trump supporter and law enforcement advocate charged with murder after allegedly killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisc., last month.

Trump made the remarks in response to questions from debate moderator Chris Wallace, who during a segment on race and violence in America asked the president whether he would disavow white supremacy and urge right-wing extremist groups stoking violence at racial justice protests to “stand down.”

When Trump asked Wallace to name a specific group, Democratic nominee Joe Biden singled out the Proud Boys.

“Proud Boys: Stand back, and stand by,” Trump said, before pivoting: “But I’ll tell you what — somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”

By shifting blame without condemning white supremacist groups, Trump echoed the very moment which had prompted Wallace’s question. In 2017, the president responded to a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia — an event organized by former Proud Boys member Jason Kessler — by saying, “There’s blame on both sides.” And his latest remarks did not go unheard by the Proud Boys. 

“President Trump told the proud boys to stand by because someone needs to deal with ANTIFA… well sir! we’re ready!!” group co-founder Joe Biggs posted on the Proud Boys Telegram account.

“Trump basically said to go f*ck them up!” Biggs later posted to Parler, an alternative social media platform with a conservative user base. “This makes me so happy.”

“This Portlander is ready to cleanse our city of these Antifa scum,” one supporter wrote in response. Others viewed it as a “call to arms,” and that the president “knows the ProudBoys of America are an Asset!”

“I think this ‘stand back, stand by’ thing will be another Proud Boy saying,” Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio told The Daily Beast. (The Beast pointed out that previous slogans were: “The West Is the Best,” and the warning “F*ck Around and Find Out.”)

The Proud Boys are self-described “Western chauvinists,” but they deny any connection to the racist alt-right. Members claim they are instead simply a men’s group that promotes an “anti-political correctness” and “anti-white guilt” ideology, according to the SPLC.

The group, which has been linked to right-wing instigator and Trump ally Roger Stone, prizes violence as a core element of masculinity. Its initiation process requires hopefuls to, among other things, denounce masturbation and recite five brands of cereal while fighting. The blur of violence and youthful cheek has led some to view the group as a troll, while others argue they pose a serious threat.

“Their disavowals of bigotry are belied by their actions,” the SPLC says. “Rank-and-file Proud Boys and leaders regularly spout white nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists. They are known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric.”

Proud Boys marched at the aforementioned 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virg., after which the group’s founder Gavin McInness sought to create distance from the white supremacist movement. In recent months, members have shown up to counter Black Lives Matter protests.

A group of Proud Boys launched a street brawl in Manhattan in 2018, which began with an attack on protesters outside of an event where McInness had given a speech. It morphed into a roving melee, which swept up bystanders. Members of the group claimed self-defense. A jury convicted two of the men the following year, who were both sentenced to four years in prison.

The group has also been open about its support for Trump, and last weekend held a rally in Portland where about 200 people attended, many of whom were armed.

“I mean their name — derived from a song from the Aladdin musical — and their demeanor — their clothes, those polo shirts — all of it suggests you not take them seriously right? But that’s troll tactics. It’s misdirection,” journalist and writer Talia Lavin, whose book on right-wing extremism titled “Culture Warlords,” comes out Oct. 13, told Salon. “Yes, I think a group that regularly crosses state lines to incite violence should be taken seriously, and they’re also metonymous for a lot of other groups.”

“This is a group that already deploys fists, bats and cockroach spray against their perceived enemies,” Lavin continued. “They routinely do violence. Their purpose is violence. We should avoid glamorizing them or making them seem like a giant bogeyman. But, yes, encouraging extrajudicial, paramilitary violence and a nationwide network of responsive paramilitary groups is a very serious situation.”

Public figures swiftly condemned Trumps’ remarks on social media.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted that Trump’s answer last night was “astonishing.”

“President Trump owes America an apology or an explanation,” he said. “Now.”

Anti-Trump conservative pundit David French tweeted that Trump’s comments were “a call to be ready” to a “violent vigilante militia.”

“In a nation wracked by unrest, that was one of the most irresponsible and reprehensible statements I’ve ever seen from a president,” he wrote.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat who Trump has routinely attacked in recent months, tweeted: “Let’s be clear: The Proud Boys are white supremacists. Racism and hate are not forms of patriotism.”

Biden also weighed in again after the debate. “This. This is Donald Trump’s America,” he tweeted, responding to a photo quoting group leaders on social media.

Trump campaign chief strategist Jason Miller told USA Today that the president was telling the group to “knock it off.”

But South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a Trump ally and the only Black Republican in the Senate, said the president needed to walk his comments back himself.

“I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it,” Scott said. “If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”

Joe Biden talking openly about his son Hunter’s addiction could save lives

Last night during the presidential debate, I watched Joe Biden tell the world he was proud of his son conquering addiction. It might have meant nothing to most. But for the millions in recovery it was a breakthrough moment in the national conversation, a moment of admitting we exist. That addiction is a family disease. 

“My son, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it,” Biden said. “And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

My dad never knew I got sober.

He passed away on May 23, 2011. At the time I was struggling. But if I’m honest, I had been absent for years leading up to that too.

On October 12, 2011, I attempted to take my own life. In a moment of clarity, I called my mother, who was, unbeknownst to me, celebrating one year of sobriety. Though we didn’t have a good relationship, she talked me through it, and I haven’t had a drink since. Now we joke that neither of us can back out of our sobriety or we won’t share the same date anymore. 

In a few days, she’ll have 10 years.

My dad doesn’t know any of that.

Throughout my years of sobriety and advocacy, a thread I’ve encountered over and over is shame. How shame keeps so many of us quiet; how shame kills so many of us. Addiction has been known for decades to be a disease, but let’s be real: most Americans wonder why we can’t just pull ourselves together. Even inside the recovery community, we don’t always take advantage of all of the science available to us. Because even with years of sobriety under our belts, we fear what our friends and employers will say if they know. Aren’t we just weak?

After I stopped drinking, so many people in my industry — theatre — came to me and said, “I’m so glad you got sober.” Then they’d whisper something like, “I’ve been sober for three years.” I was always thrilled to hear it, but I’d want to say, “where the F were you when I was struggling?” At the time I had felt so alone, like I was the only guy in the business who couldn’t hold his liquor. But of course they were keeping their own issues quiet. They have careers and families, too.

Once you learn you’re an alcoholic, the next word you learn is anonymous. We bake in shame from the beginning. We tell you, essentially, that we’re so glad you’re getting help, but be smart — you shouldn’t tell anybody. 

If I had cancer, people would run marathons for me. If I had diabetes, I could tell everyone and they’d share health tips. But I have a chemical reaction where my dopamine receptors take over my brain when alcohol enters my system, so instead I have to tell nobody and hope there’s an open church basement near me in any town I visit. I don’t get second medical opinions. I don’t get the community to rally around me. I just quietly hope a system with no national organization or medical professionals is going to be there for me. And if I can go to rehab — if I can afford it or if my insurance covers it — regulation and licensing standards differ from state to state, and not all centers participate in national accreditation, so let’s hope I picked a good one!

And why? Because it’s a sickness where we think the people who get it should feel bad.

And then Joe Biden, a dad himself, went on national television and said his son had a problem and he was proud of him for conquering it. 

It’s not the same thing, but I’m reminded of the end of “Angels In America,” where Tony Kushner writes of AIDS, “we won’t die secret deaths anymore.” What if we said that nationally, when it comes to addiction, we would accept no more secret deaths? 

How many other sons and daughters will now consider telling their dads about their issues because they saw this? This isn’t hyperbole: how many lives might be saved?

I didn’t tell my dad when I was struggling and it almost cost me my life. I wish I had seen someone like Joe Biden on TV saying he was proud of his son. 

I’m sitting next to my two-year-old daughter, another part of my life I wish Dad could know. She’s watching “Sesame Street” so I can write. We know from science that she likely has a predisposition for addiction. If that happens, I want to be there for her, like Joe.

He’s proud of his son. His son is alive. Pass it on. No more secret deaths.

Can California’s wine country survive the climate crisis?

Most American wine-lovers feel a connection to California wines, widely considered to be on par with the esteemed vineyards of France and Italy in terms of quality. So the wildfire destruction of much of California’s wine country may feel particularly personal: earlier this week, the Glass Fire in Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma Counties led to tens of thousands of people being evacuated as it demolished vineyards and spewed ash on grape crops. The scale of the devastation raises questions about the ongoing viability of a vital California industry that has previously weathered droughts, earthquakes, floods, and the higher temperatures that emerged from climate change. 

“The impact of the smoke from the fires is huge,” Molly Hodgins, Vineyard Coordinator and Instructor at Napa Valley College, told Salon by email. One of the major problems, Hodgins said, was “smoke taint” — which occurs when volatile phenol compounds from smoke bind to sugars in grape skins. Hodgins said they have an effect on taste.

“When juice is fermented on the skins, as it is in red wines. . . . some of these bonds are broken and the smoky compounds become free, at which point most people can smell and taste them,” Hodgins explained. “They are unpleasant at relatively low levels, like a wool sweater that you wore to a bonfire or the contents of an ashtray in your wineglass.” Hodgins says white wines were slightly less affected by wildfire smoke “because they are not fermented on the skins, but they are not necessarily in the clear either.”

She added, “There has been so much smoke exposure in wine regions up and down the west coast this year that most of the 2020 red wines will have some smoke taint. Napa has been getting socked in with smoke from local fires and from fires a couple hundred miles away. Many wineries are refusing to even pick smoke-tainted grapes, which makes them an insurance claim for the grower if they have crop insurance. So growers are taking a hit and wineries are looking at a missing or very light vintage for many wines.”

Dr. S. Kaan Kurtural, a specialist in viticulture at the University of California – Davis, said that the environmental calculus had shifted with climate change.

“The ecological challenges have been known for a while and we have initially benefited from it,” Kurtural wrote to Salon. “As our climate got warmer (growing season mean temperature) we were able to make more fruit for wine, and grow a lot of it. Now it has passed a tipping point.”

Kurtural said that by the middle of the century, the climate conditions will drastically change how they grow wine in California, and how much they’re able to grow. 

“The incidence of extreme events, such as heat waves, is increasing with an associated risk for crops,” he added. 

Kurtural said climate change was expected to affect rainfall patterns, too. “Higher temperatures are associated with greater rates evaporation of water and therefore, higher global precipitation. However, these are unevenly distributed. In fact, most regions where grapevines are grown are forecasted to experience a reduction in cloud coverage and rainfall and an increase in solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. As much as we would like to believe we are special, we are on the same planet and these changes have impacted this industry.”

Anita Oberholster, associate specialist in cooperative extension of viticulture and enology at the University of California – Davis, told Salon that while the future of the industry is “very difficult to predict,” she felt that “we can safely say this has been the most devastating [wildfires] in recent history. The fact that we have now had several major fires in all our major wine grape growing regions and the fact that fires started when only about 10% of the grapes have been harvested. How much fruit will not be harvested is difficult to estimate.”

She added, “Not all vineyards that saw smoke will be impacted. The highest risk are those that were exposed to fresh dense smoke (less then 24 hours old). But this combined with COVID-19, probably makes this the most challenging year for the grape and wine industry in the last couple of decades.”

Sally Murdoch, communications manager at Oregon Wine Board, told Salon that the industry is trying to come up with management strategies for both wildfires and climate change going forward.

“This season’s series of wildfires is bigger than the Oregon wine industry, as the issues are similarly affecting a wide range of farm crops up and down the west coast; the fire impact cuts across all agricultural sectors and business and people,” Murdoch explained. “While it’s too early to tell the damage to crops or grapes specifically, people are being evacuated and safety is the priority to the wine industry.”

She noted that researchers from the three continental west coast states are outlining a “comprehensive, three-state smoke impact research project which will be submitted soon to USDA for Specialty Crop Research Initiative funding.” 

Oberholster also said that wine producers will need to account for climate change going forward.

“For the next few years there are ways to combat climate change — in the sense of higher temperatures and limited water — by conserving water, re-using wastewater, protecting grapes against heat and working longer term on rootstocks and varieties with higher heat tolerance and more drought tolerance,” Oberholster explained. “As far as fires go, better management of fuel sources, looking at barrier sprays to protect grapes against smoke, improved treatment options for wines that are impacted, better insurance options, better risk assessment.” 

“We are applying for grants to try and link atmospheric data to smoke exposure risk data in vineyards,” she added. 

From the Beatles influence to personal strife, revisiting Tears for Fears’ complex “Seeds of Love”

Tears for Fears is one of the most fascinating bands to have emerged from England during the 1980s. Co-founders Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have always focused on quality over quantity — the band’s total output is six studio albums across nearly 40 years — and resist easy sonic pigeonholing.

On their 1983 debut, “The Hurting,” Tears for Fears were moody synth-pop sculptors crafting claustrophobic and anxious songs such as “Mad World.” Two years later, the band became global superstars upon the release of the dense and emotionally probing “Songs From the Big Chair,” which featured subtle social commentary (the industrial-prog smash “Shout,” tranquil “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”), and one of their best songs: “Head Over Heels,” a yearning single propelled by glistening, cascading piano. 

Tears for Fears’ eight-track 1989 album “The Seeds of Love,” meanwhile, was even denser: Only two songs are under five minutes, and the other songs sprawled, with arrangements that hopscotch between jazz, soul, psychedelia, and artsy rock. If anything, surveying the band’s ’80s catalog now feels like viewing a slowly unfolding sunrise — the music is dusky at first, and then gradually brightens into a cosmic sky full of brilliant hues. 

A forthcoming deluxe, remastered reissue of “The Seeds of Love” (out Oct. 9) complicates Tears for Fears’ legacy — in all the best ways. Across 50 tracks encompassing b-sides, alternate mixes, and studio demos, the album’s sonic intricacies come to life. (The reissue is also available in a double-CD format and on LP.) “It was a very different sound for Tears for Fears, that was the most important thing,” Orzabal says in the liner notes to the reissue. “It was crucial that we didn’t come back with the typical ’80s pop. At the time, Radio One was changing, it was the Stock Aitken Waterman years. I was getting older and I’d stopped listening to Radio One.” 

The spark for the album’s genesis was Oleta Adams — and, specifically, a powerful 1985 set of hers that Orzabal caught in a Kansas City hotel bar. “It wasn’t like a normal bar, there were families there, people in suits,” he told Q in 1989. “You didn’t feel you could talk, you had to listen. And it was incredible. I was in tears. Phenomenal atmosphere. And I thought, “I’m doing something wrong. I’ve got to get back to basics.'” 

Two years later, he ended up calling Adams and asking her to collaborate on the album. She ended up contributing to several songs, with the highlight being her empathetic, velvety lead vocal lines on the gorgeous midtempo ballad “Woman in Chains.” Orzabal wrote the anguished song about his parents’ tumultuous relationship, and how it’s a microcosm of patriarchal society. His meditation is incisive: Oceanic keyboards, flute-esque sonic flourishes and mid-song drumming parts from Phil Collins exude equal parts frustration and resignation. (Collins later said they “spent a long time trying to get [his drum part]” right; in fact, the band wanted him to do an “In the Air Tonight”-esque drum fill instead.) 

“It was a very personal song Roland had written, inspired by the memory of his mother and things that she had gone through,” Adams says in the deluxe reissue’s liner notes. “Not only that, but women in general who are mistreated and held back by male figures and a very strong personality. I guess it could have been therapeutic for him. As we say over here ‘he put his foot in it’ — a lot of heart and soul in that music.” 

“The Seeds of Love” overall is very personal, in no small part because Orzabal had been going to therapy, and his emotions were on the surface. Several songs reference the personal and emotional ramifications of political strife, while “Famous Last Words” uses apocalyptic imagery as a backdrop for praising the importance of personal connection. “Badman’s Song,” meanwhile, finds Orzabal grappling with internalized self-doubt; the lyrics were inspired by a true story of him overhearing people talking bad about him on an early Tears for Fears tour.

The reissue contains multiple versions of the latter song, offering a fascinating glimpse into the band’s creative process. Take “Badman’s Song,” which clocks in at eight-and-a-half minutes. Co-written with keyboardist Nicky Holland — whose songwriting imprint is all over the record — the tune starts with frantic, jazzy piano before evolving into a bluesy jam with scorched guitars, lush organ and Adams’ gospel-tinged vocals. 

An excellent instrumental take culled from earlier, discarded sessions with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley places surging bass parts, synthesized horns, bustling drums and melancholy piano higher in the mix; it’s akin to a tranquil, sculpted electronic music composition. And still another version recorded during an epic jam session at London’s Townhouse studio is a funky, exaggerated take that collapses into a shambling goof on the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.” 

The latter moment in particular offers levity that’s not often associated with Tears for Fears, especially in the studio. For years, narratives surrounding “The Seeds of Love” focused on the album’s lengthy gestation — it came together over the course of several years and with several producers — and Beatles influence. Echoes of the Fab Four are certainly there, most obviously on “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” which peaked at No. 2 on the U.S. pop charts. The six-minute song has stacked harmonies, a blooming psychedelic edge, and an irreverent melodic edge.

But “The Seeds of Love” wears its Beatles influence like a pastiche; the song is more what the Beatles might have sounded like had they stayed together and started absorbing influence from prog rock and dapper art rock. The rest of the album is just as expansive and full of delightful contrasts: The sophisto-pop gem “Advice for the Young at Heart” is a good riposte for anyone surprised Tears for Fears toured with Hall & Oates in recent years, while gnarled, roaring guitars soar and dive through “Swords & Knives.” 

When all is said and done, “The Seeds of Love” reissue makes a good case that Tears for Fears deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Talk Talk. The latter U.K. band also started out as a brooding synth-pop act —”It’s My Life” and “Talk Talk” are new wave classics — but, over time, embraced nuanced, challenging music. Today, Talk Talk’s final two albums, 1988’s “Spirit of Eden” and 1991’s “Laughing Stock,” are considered avant masterpieces. Tears For Fears’ commercial success can sometimes overshadow the complex nature of the band’s work — but the act’s prog-meets-pop tendencies still feel like a meticulous revelation.

“The Seeds of Love” reissue will be available for purchase on Oct. 9 and for pre-order.

“Benadryl Challenge” claims the life of one teen as TikTok claims to have already banned the videos

Social media’s relentless celebration of virality encourages users to broadcast their novel stunts in exchange for a moment of online fame. Many of these stunts lead to minor moral panics. While the more fatal ones are often hoaxes — as in the case of “Tide Pod Challenge” videos in which participants (sometimes) pretended to consume the detergent packets — this genre of social media “challenge” video can set a bad example for naïve viewers who may not understand the difference between what is real and what is a publicity stunt. The latest so-called challenge, in which users are encouraged to consume the antihistamine Benadryl in order to hallucinate, has allegedly killed at least one teenager, prompting the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speak out.

On September 24, the FDA warned against taking higher than recommended doses of over-the-counter Benadryl because it can lead to “serious heart problems, seizures, coma, or even death.” 

“We are aware of news reports of teenagers ending up in emergency rooms or dying after participating in the ‘Benadryl Challenge’ encouraged in videos posted on the social media application TikTok,” the statement read. “We are investigating these reports and conducting a review to determine if additional cases have been reported.”

Meanwhile, the “Benadryl Challenge” videos themselves appear to have already been expunged from online platforms: most traces of Benadryl Challenge videos have disappeared, and hashtag searches yield little in the way of video evidence.

According to a press release from the Cook Children’s Medical Center, which is a not-for-profit pediatric hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, three teens were treated at the medical center in May for overdosing on Benadryl. One teen, a 14-year-old named Rebekah, took 14 Benadryl pills in the middle of the night on Memorial Day.

“It was scary. She had fractured sentences, hallucinations. Her resting heart rate was 199,” Rebekahs’s mom said in the release. “We rushed her to the local ER and they decided to transport her to Cook Children’s.”

Each of these three patients, the release says, got the idea from videos on TikTok that claimed they could get high if they took a dozen or more of Benadryl pills. Fortunately, they all survived. 

What these youths didn’t know was that a Benadryl overdose can be deadly. Benadryl is a brand name, over-the-counter version of the generic drug diphenhydramine. As a sedating antihistamine, it works to block histamines which are released as part of the human body’s response to an allergy. Taking too much can cause a slew of negative health effects, such as blurred vision, vomiting, seizures, brain damage, heart attack and death. Each of these patients, the hospital said, got the idea from videos on TikTok that claimed users could get high and hallucinate if they took a dozen or more of the allergy pills.

“What struck me was that we had three teens come in for the same thing in one week,” said Amber Jewison, a hospitalist nurse practitioner at Cook Children’s Medical Center. “None of these patients were trying to harm themselves. They all said they saw videos on TikTok and were curious to try it.”

In a separate report from Oklahoma, a 15-year-old allegedly died from the challenge in August. According to the local television station KFOR, the teen was described as “an otherwise happy and faith-driven teen” who was “not someone to experiment with drugs.” The news outlet said the teen “fell victim to what’s been called the Benadryl Challenge on TikTok.” In a separate report, a local news outlet said that some teens in Georgia have participated in the challenge, too.

A search on TikTok for #benadrylchallenge doesn’t yield any results. In an emailed statement to Salon, a TikTok spokesperson said the social media company first learned of this “challenge” in May, and quickly removed the “very small amount of content that we found.”

“We’ve been keeping an eye on this topic since and removing any new content – which again has been in extremely small numbers – to prevent any spread on our platform,” the spokesperson said. “To help keep our platform safe, we provide a number of safety controls in the app and educational resources on our Safety Center.”

The spokesperson emphasized that the content hasn’t “gone viral” or trended on TikTok.

As Snopes reported, while the story is true that there have been reported cases of this challenge, it doesn’t appear to be a widespread epidemic. Hopefully it stays that way.

Presidential debate organizers vow changes after Trump constantly interrupts Biden in first showdown

The Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday put out a highly unusual notice about making changes to debate formats just hours after President Donald Trump spent a good chunk of Tuesday night’s 90-minute debate interrupting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

“Last night’s debate made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues,” the commission said. “The CPD will be carefully considering the changes it will adopt and will announce those measures shortly.”

The commission also thanked Fox News’ Chris Wallace for showing “professionalism and skill” and promised that future debate moderators would have “additional tools to maintain order” at the remaining debates.

Trump’s performance was widely panned, even by some Fox News hosts, after he spent much of the evening refusing to let his opponent finish making his points.

Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump broke venue rules by not wearing face masks during dad’s debate

Although the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 1 million people worldwide and over 206,000 in the United States — according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — not wearing a protective face mask continues to be a badge of honor for President Donald Trump and many other Republicans. Trump, in fact, criticized former Vice President Joe Biden during the presidential debate on Tuesday night, September 29 for wearing a mask too often. And according to Business Insider reporter Sinéad Baker, masks were few and far between among members of Trump’s family during the debate.

“Four of Trump’s children — Ivanka, Donald Jr., Eric and Tiffany — sat in the front row and did not wear masks,” Baker reports. “First lady Melania Trump was pictured wearing one while sitting with them. But Tyler Pager, a Bloomberg News political reporter at the event, said she removed her mask after she sat down.”

According to Baker, Trump’s family members were in violation of the debate’s social distancing guidelines by not wearing masks throughout the event. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. were seen wearing masks while walking to their seats but removed them after sitting down.

“Guests were told to wear masks throughout the debate, held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio,” Baker explains. “NBC News reported that a Cleveland Clinic doctor tried to approach the Trump children to ask them to wear masks as they entered the venue, but that she ultimately couldn’t get to them.”

Baker also points out that at the debate, “The seats were set far apart to adhere to social distancing guidelines.”

Unlike Melania Trump, Biden’s wife, Jill Biden was seen wearing a mask when she greeted her husband on stage after the debate.

The coronavirus pandemic was a prominent topic during the debate, and Biden slammed the president repeatedly for publicly downplaying the severity of the crisis.

Judge initiates contempt proceedings after Trump’s commerce secretary allegedly defies census order

Wilbur Ross, secretary of commerce in the Trump administration, recently ordered the U.S. Census Bureau to end its field operations for the 2020 U.S. Census on Oct. 5. But U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, in San José, Calif., had issued a preliminary injunction ordering the census count to continue until the end of October. And according to Bloomberg News reporter Joel Rosenblatt, Koh has “initiated contempt of court proceedings” against Ross for violating her injunction.

Rosenblatt reports that Koh “said, during a hearing Tuesday, that Monday’s announcement that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is targeting Oct. 5 to wrap up the once-a-decade population count ‘is doing exactly’ what she ordered the agency not to do last week. The judge said the proceeding could be identified by a more formal name but made clear she believes Ross violated the order.”

According to Rosenblatt, “Ross’ Monday announcement took Koh by surprise. It came days after she ordered Census data collection operations to continue through Oct. 31 to get an accurate population count.”

Axios Reporter Rebecca Falconer notes, “Koh’s injunction suspended the Census Bureau’s deadline for ending the once-in-a-decade count on Sept. 30, reimposing an older Census Bureau proposal to end operations on Oct. 31.”

Koh set a Friday, Oct. 2 date for a hearing on possible contempt charges for Ross. The judge said, “You don’t have to call it contempt. You can call it something else.”

Democrats have been stressing that the 2020 U.S. Census count needs to be as thorough and as accurate as possible because it affects the number of seats that states will have in the U.S. House of Representatives.