Honoring the Challenger’s “Final Flight”: Docuseries creators on putting the shuttle’s people first

“Challenger: The Final Flight,” a new four-part docuseries currently streaming on Netflix, examines a tragedy that defined a generation and had a lasting impact on the future of science and space travel. In 1986, the Challenger space shuttle tragically broke apart 73 seconds after launch as millions of Americans — many of them schoolchildren — watched live on television.

This series, which is executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Glen Zipper, offers an in-depth look at one of the most diverse crews NASA assembled, including high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was selected to be the first private citizen in space.

“Astronauts, I always saw them walking with their helmets on and I didn’t necessarily know what was behind the visor,” director Steven Leckart told Salon. “So when we started, we asked ourselves, ‘Who were all seven of these people?'”

To find out, Leckart and his co-director Daniel Junge spoke with the crew’s surviving family members to help create a poignant and relatable portrait of the astronauts. They also examine the “fatally flawed decision process” and mechanical failures that led to the disaster, interviewing former NASA officials and engineers who worked on the failed booster engine and had repeated concerns about its safety.

Zipper and Leckart spoke with Salon about what inspired them to create this series, what the Challenger represented, and the ways in which the decisions that led to the tragedy are reminiscent of the “systemic dysfunction” that has underscored the pandemic.

Do you remember where you were the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster? If so, how did that impact you?

Steven Leckart: The genesis of the project was in 2015 when Glen and I were both talking about what we wanted to work on next together, because we’ve been working together pretty much since 2012. I remember us agreeing that it should be something very personal to both of us. You know, documentary filmmakers — sometimes you find subjects that you then become curious and excited about rather than starting with a place of genuine curiosity on a subject and then getting into it.

So Glen was the one who first said the Challenger and instantly I said yes, because I do have a memory. I’m just old enough to remember watching it in elementary school, but the teacher ran in and turned the television off and told us to go outside. When I got home, I don’t remember talking about it with my family or watching it on the news. I just remember being confused and sad. I just didn’t understand what had happened; it was really my first experience with death. I had not lost a loved one or even a pet at that point.

Glen Zipper: I’m a bit older than Steven. I think I was in seventh or eighth grade, and we weren’t watching it live. I was in algebra class, and another teacher came running into the room and whispered in my teacher’s ear. Then my teacher turned to the class and said, ‘Something terrible happened. We’re all going to go into the cafeteria and it’s going to be hard to watch, but we’re going to bring in the TV and you need to watch it because it’s history unfolding and you need to participate in that.’

And similar to the opening scene of episode one of “Final Flight,” a big old TV got wheeled in on a cart and the entire school watched it. It was perhaps the most dramatic thing I had experienced in my life up to that point in time. Exactly like Steven said. And it left an indelible mark on me for the rest of my life. It was a 30-year journey from there to tell this story.

In preparing for this interview, I came across another interview that you had done, Steven, and there’s this quote that really stood out to me. You said, “From the beginning, we said that we only wanted to interview people who lived the history personally and had a first-hand experience.” How did that guide the filming of the series?

Leckart: I started my career as a journalist in magazines — and I still consider myself a journalist — and, as you know, first-hand accounts and first-hand information, versus second- or third-hand, you can count on that, right? I think from a storytelling sense, we felt it would just make the series more personal and that every person we put in the chair, their opinion and emotional response would feel like it belonged, versus interviewing people who had nothing to do with the story, per se.

I think most documentaries, oftentimes, you see a talking head, as they’re called, or an expert. That person has a lot of great information and they may be great storytellers, but they lack that personal connection to the material. In the case of the Challenger, a lot of the ‘experts’ who know the science weren’t really anywhere around the story on a deep level, and we wanted to explore the people and the humans and the crew. The best way to do that would be to talk to the people that knew them, not just the people who have studied them.

Zipper: And it gave the series a reason for being. There’s been plenty of Challenger documentaries in the past and some narrative attempts in storytelling. We’ve seen the revelations at the heart of how the tragedy happened. But one thing that occurred to both Steven and I, and also [co-director] Daniel Junge was that, despite the image of the Challenger disintegrating in the sky being so iconic, and having lived with it for so long, we’ve become desensitized to it. We’d ask people if that was all they remembered, and they’d say, “No, of course we remember more than that.” Then we’d ask if they remembered the astronauts [and they’d say] “Of course we do.”

And we’d politely ask them to tell us who the astronauts were, and they would say “No problem, there is Christa McAuliffe…” and they would trail off. They didn’t know the names of any of the other astronauts, and if they don’t know their names, they certainly don’t know their stories. That really gave us a reason telling this story. It’s not so much that we were going to uncover some new revelations as to how it happened, but what we were going to do was provide audiences with the revelation as to who these people were, and the next time they look at that horrible image — that horrible iconic image of the Challenger disintegrating — they’re going to be able to associate it with seven human beings who had lives and families and dreams and people who love them.

I really appreciate the incredibly personal nature of the series. But I was also drawn to how, on a macro-level, you laid out how NASA had selected this group of astronauts from a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and how this was going to be a defining moment for diversity in science and space travel. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Leckart: From the beginning, I don’t think we knew that was a part of the story. I was too young at the time to know about the Class of ’78 being a big deal. By the time I became aware enough of the shuttle, I was just captivated by the thing itself. Astronauts, I always saw them walking with their helmets on and I didn’t necessarily know what was behind the visor. So when we started, we asked ourselves, who were all seven of these people?

Judith Resnik, one of the first women and the first Jewish person to go to space. Then Ronald McNair, who was one of the first African Americans to go to space. Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian American to go to space.

I don’t know if it was intentional that they wound up on the crew of the Challenger with Christa; NASA is not known for really putting out much information about why astronauts are selected and assigned to different missions. But it enabled us to make the Challenger about something bigger, and the shuttle program about something bigger.

And to Glen’s point about our decision not to show the explosion until you knew who the people were, that also tracks to what they represented and what the crew represented. So when that shuttle explodes and we see that horrible moment, it’s not just the death of seven Americans, it’s not just the death of seven astronauts, it’s the death, in a way, of hope and optimism for the future.

We also saw the relevance today. You know, we finished the series before the summer unfolded the way it did, but as we were developing the series there was plenty of unrest in the country, as well as a movement towards multiculturalism. So we knew we were not making the series in a vacuum, even though we don’t specifically draw a clear line. In our interviews, we wanted to keep you in the past, but also look at it through the lens of today.

You also speak with some folks who were actually in the control room the day of the disaster. I was curious — from a documentary filmmaking perspective — if there was any difficulty in getting them to open up in front of the camera?

Not once people were in the room and in the chair. By the time you see that person in the chair, we’ve spent hours with them. So the more difficult process, at first, was getting a hold of these people and getting them on the phone. They were all over the country, so just getting some people on the phone took weeks. Then once they would get on the phone, it would take hours and multiple calls, in some cases, to get them to participate.

But effectively, once we got a person on the phone, we got them to agree to sit down. And I think part of the reason they agreed was that we had expressed the very, very clear sincerity of our vision — to not just explore the tragedy and the mistakes that were made, but we wanted to endeavor to show how NASA picked itself back up, and show that those astronauts didn’t die in vain.

We also talked at length with everyone about what our hope for the first episode would be, that we would spend a lot of time building up what the shuttle was and just how amazing it was. I think that allowed people to buy into the idea that it would be different. We were going to approach this story from a very sincere and very real place, as opposed to finger-pointing.

I was not surprised by how intimate our interviews wound up being, but I think in totality, it is overwhelming to see just how intimate they feel.

Glen, anything you’d like to add to that?

Zipper: Nothing other than to compliment Steven and Daniel. They’re incredibly disarming filmmakers and I wasn’t surprised that they were able to get that level of intimacy, honesty and connection. It really does play through in the interviews and some of the choices they made for their interviews was quite interesting.

One specific one was Peter Billingsley, who we noticed in going through some of the archival material. I think we first noticed in a photo, looking at the observation stands, ‘That kid really looks like the kid from ‘A Christmas Story.”

Peter Billingsley, it turns out, was the child ambassador for NASA. Steven and Daniel reached out to him and can speak to this better than I can. I think he was initially hesitant, but once he came in and agreed to the interview, it was one of the most powerful conversations I’ve ever been witness to. In addition to his personal connection and being an eyewitness to it, he’s sort of a proxy for Generation X, because he was us and he was there. To see the story from an outsider from someone that wasn’t an engineer or an astronaut or a family member, but was someone we all know and identify with, was really a remarkable choice.

Leckart: Yeah, that conversation was a good example of [a source] being skeptical at first, but willing to listen. He asked a couple of questions and ultimately landed on, ‘OK, listen. I’ve never talked about this publicly.’ It’s not something he had been eager to do because, you know, going back into the sort of halls of your memory to something so tragic and painful is not exactly a great thing to do.

But he said that he trusted our vision and us. Then the next thing he asked was how much time we needed. You know, he’s a director and a producer and very busy, and we initially suggested a half hour. And he said, “Oh, we’re going to need at least two hours because I’ve never talked about this and I suspect that when we get into it, a lot of things will come out of me that I’m not expecting and I just want to know that if we do this, we’ll have enough time to really properly get through it.”

It was a very emotional interview.

It’s worth noting all the interviews were incredibly emotional, especially the family members of the crew who we’ve maintained relationships with. You know, to sit with them and get to know them and sort of feel their pain — but also to feel the love they still feel for their family members. It weighed on us. There were a lot of tears on the crew as well.

I just remember traveling through 2019 — going motel to hotel and crying in my room alone. Crying on the airplane, crying in the car. Not necessarily bad cries, but just the emotion of what we were trying to achieve and how close we were getting to the story.

Related to the emotional heft of the story — I feel like this would have been deeply poignant even pre-pandemic, but watching it in the middle of everything happening right now, I feel like it takes on additional resonance. Has it made you think about it differently, or do you think people are responding to it differently, given the current reality?

Leckart: Absolutely, I mean, I look back to a kind of funny moment in the edit, which is we were making a scene about Mike Smith sneaking out of quarantine and we had a very long discussion about whether people would know what quarantine was. Do we need a character to explain what quarantine is?

I’ve seen people remarking about it on Twitter. One commenter also spotted a scene with Christa where she’s riding her bicycle in Florida next to Greg Jarvis and she says, “Stay away from me, I’m in quarantine.” And she specifically states six feet. So that is taking on new meaning now that we are all doing social distancing. Beyond those specifics — and Glen can speak to this as well —I think we’re living through a moment in time where systemic dysfunctions and the difficulties of being in a big bureaucratic system are apparent.

With what happened with the Challenger, this big organization had a big, big, difficult challenge ahead of them, and they unfortunately mismanaged how to communicate all these issues and run the risk. So, we’re seeing that play out today as well.

Zipper: I could add a slightly optimistic view to that, which is to overstate the obvious. In addition to this systemic dysfunction we’re suffering through, we’re also at an incredibly divisive moment in our history. When you look back to the Challenger launch, before the tragedy, and you look back to the moon landing and our collective fascination and imagination for space, it’s something that has brought us together like nothing else. It’s in our DNA, the desire to explore, to go further and deeper. And if there’s some part of this documentary that can remind people of that, remind people of what we share, what we have in common, what inspires us collectively as a nation — that would be a remarkably pleasing result, because we’re at a time right now when we need to be reminded of the things that we share and hold in common.

“Challenger: Final Flight” is now streaming on Netflix.

“Female entrepreneurship is key”: “Underplayed” unpacks the massive gender inequity for EDM deejays

EDM music festivals and nightclubs may be on pause during the global pandemic, but in the top 150 clubs, the annual percentage of female DJs is a mere 6%. In 2019, Billboard and DJ magazines released their list of top 100 DJs, and only five—five!—were female. (The highest ranking was Alison Wonderland #36; REZZ followed at #39; Nervo came in at #82; and Tokimonsta was #98). According to a study done by the Annenberg Institute, women make up less than 3% of production and technical roles in the music industry, and women of color hold less than 0.3% of those jobs.

Stacy Lee’s fabulous, energetic documentary, “Underplayed,” which is having its World Premiere at the Toronto Film Festival Sept. 19, gives a voice to women DJs, providing reasons why a necessary corrective is needed as fast as 120 bpm.

Lee’s film profiles a dozen women including REZZ, Tygapaw, Alison Wonderland, Tokimonsta, Nightwing, Sherelle, and Nervo, who have all felt unwelcome in the EDM music scene. They must deal with everything from trolls on Twitter who suggest they used sex to get their gig, to making 29% less money than their male counterparts. Moreover, the sexism, disrespect, and the lack of opportunities to perform diminish their self-confidence. When women DJs do get the rare chance to headline a festival, they have to work much harder than men to prove themselves.

These are not new messages. Women in STEM face similar issues, as do women in other industries from government to big business to Hollywood. Lee’s film shows how women, who have been in the electronic music scene for decades, have been rendered invisible. She spoke with Salon about why this is the case, and how it can change.

What prompted you to chronicle women in the EDM scene? Was it that you discovered the staggering statistics and explored the scene, or that you knew the EDM world and learned about the gender disparity?

I hadn’t been into the EDM scene until I made the film. I did a short film four years ago, “Discwoman” on the gender disparity issue in the EDM scene in the pre-#MeToo era. When I was asked to make this, I thought, “Surely it must be better!” But when I looked at it, I realized little had changed, so I thought there was a story here. Gender disparity is imbalanced in every industry and there are many inequalities. I did three months on the phone with DJs, producers, as well as A&R, bookers, etc. I realized there are commonalities across different women’s experiences in the scene, but also issues that come up pertaining to individuals. From there I also felt that 2019 was an important time with strides being made with awareness of gender equity across many different industries, so I thought it was good to do a deep dive.

Can you talk about how you assembled the film and found the footage?

We shot over four months during the 2019 festival season, when every day and every weekend has a festival or performance. It was a wonderful time to do it — there was so much creative output. But the challenge was that Alison Wonderland was playing two shows in one night in different countries, so it was a huge logistical puzzle. There is talk on these issues, but it’s often relegated to sound bites, and it is so much more complex than that. And it’s not the women’s responsibility to solve it. So, as we chose each subject, we wanted to spend time with them and get to know their craft. Each had a unique and hands-on creative process. Being able to see them perform, but also see the humanity of each subject. A lot of the talent selection was time and access. We did not want just a side stage sound bite, but to be in the room as things happened, like Alison Wonderland during a practice session. That was an important aspect — to visualize and experience this stuff.

Let’s start with REZZ, who is one of the few successful female DJs. She is self-taught but also full of self-doubt. Can you discuss why she is so popular and yet so vulnerable?

The self-doubt came in over time. A large part of it has to do with the fact that there are so few women headlining, and there is no real strong community. They are often pitted against each other. There is no camaraderie; there’s so much isolation sitting on your own in a room. She’s young. There’s a lot of pressure. They just want to be in the studio making music, but to be successful is being out on the road and having stage time. She was first in her basement by herself producing and then thrown in this weird world of being on stage. Because there are no examples preceding her, as Tokimonsta says in the film — If you’re popular, this might your one chance at success. Which can mean touring until you’re completely burned out.

Tygapaw, a queer Jamaican DJ, is a shining example of DIY, which raises the question of why women in general, and women of color in particular, must create her own opportunities and have full control if they want to participate?

That’s 100% accurate, particularly as it pertains to someone like Tygapaw, where there wasn’t a club night, so she created one, and there wasn’t a label, so she created one. Female entrepreneurship is key. It’s an additional hurdle that women have to come up against. We spent a lot of time with her, and the layers of complexity and depth and challenges to her story. The underground scene is her passion, and her passion helps her overcome extreme odds. She’s running club nights and on magazine covers so she looks successful, but sustainability is much more challenging. When we interviewed her, she had $3 in her bank account. There is a lack of financial stability and [female DJs] need other jobs. It’s incredible what they have to overcome to do what they love. She uses a lot of collage from her own life in her music. She played MOMA PS1 last year. She doesn’t want to play Coachella. She has this artistic element. PS1 is making it in New York artistic scene. It was a huge marker in her career.

Tokimonsta was so moving and heartfelt talking about not receiving credit for her work and feeling the Grammy nomination she received was out of sympathy, not talent. What observations do you have about why women are not taken more seriously in the industry?

Tokimonsta doesn’t want to be your third-favorite female producer, she wants to be your 20th-favorite producer. She battled the term “female” throughout her career. She came up in Los Angeles, around dudes, and was the only female producer and DJ. As she became more successful, she has become a role model and an example — women can do this. There was no one visible for her. That whole, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” She wrestled with the complexity of gender definition, knowing it must exist, and is exhausted from being categorized.

Nightwing has the most painful story in that she was harassed online after her Boiler Room gig, and that caused her to face depression and anxiety, and step away from music for a spell. All the women DJs have experienced some aspect of sexism and harassment, and most internalize it, but for Nightwing it was more acute. Can you talk about that facet of the business?

Trolling in general, and Tom from Boiler Room talked about it in the film, has become more extreme. In Nightwing’s instance, the way it went down, she became the poster child for trolling. She had technical difficulties and it was shocking all the backlash and reactions that were posted. It escalated and become extreme and got more personal and out of control. She was defined by that, and that was hard for her. It made her more depressed. She just wants to make music and perform, but because she’s a woman, it was amplified. She started to believe it because everyone thinks this about you. It’s overwhelming. You can’t sort reality from noise. She is the example of turning it around. A lot of women would be averse to go into the industry. Nightwing needed to teach women confidence and how to protect themselves, and she does these workshops. Creating spaces for women to be vulnerable is a huge turning point in how the industry can create a pipeline to come to the main stage or underground.

Sherelle makes the point that she downplays her femininity and plays up her androgyny, something several DJs in “Underplayed” echo. The point is that these women must deflect their sexuality. What are your thoughts on this?

The EDM industry didn’t do any favors with posters of women in bikinis on a DJ deck; it was a prevailing, hypersexualized image. That creates this precedent. Tokimonsta’s point is if I want to be taken seriously, you take the sexuality out of the equation. Sherelle puts her persona out there, and people mistake her for a boy, and she questions if that has made her path easier than it would for someone who wears a skirt. The fluidity of gender and sexuality is incredibly beautiful, and that may be a way of breaking through. Sherelle is an interesting case for that. Everyone we spoke to has a thought about their physical appearance and what they look like on stage. Alison wears oversized t-shirts as a persona to deflect attention from sexuality. Instagram is a huge part of your brand in this industry. But as one interviewee in the documentary notes, people book based on her Instagram posts, not her Soundcloud.

Nervo and their babies were adorable. These DJs are the rare example of women choosing to be mothers and work a grueling tour. But surely this is the exception, not the rule?

They said it in the film, if they didn’t have each other, it would be a challenge to be mothers. Their job starts at 2 a.m., when you should be nursing your baby. Motherhood and EDM lifestyle do not go hand in hand. They love their lives and touring, and they are good at what they do, so it was interesting to see how they did that and toured together.

I love that Nervo makes the point that men are not dealing with this issue, and are therefore, unsympathetic to it. Men aren’t told to “shut up and play music,” or judged by their looks, or have assumptions made about them. Men don’t face these additional pressures. What can you say about male privilege in the scene?

I didn’t want this film to be women complaining about how hard they have got it. It won’t change things and it’s not the truth of how women feel. But it will take both sides of the population to change things, so how can I include male perspective and male allies to make this feel like something that can be change together? I don’t want male voices to validate the females. It was hard to find those voices, because we are going through an extreme time calling people out and making them feel accountable, but Mark Ronson speaks to it in the film. He noticed [sexism] again and again.

What is astonishing is that these women have to risk being who they are in the industry. How viable is a gender balance in the industry?

It is going to take a century to close the gender pay gap. A big part of telling the story is the reckoning. It’s like the Black Lives Matter movement. It is constant work and vigilance until it becomes organic.

Mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but don’t give in to despair — it’s time to fight like hell instead

Friday night, when the news of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hit, I was struck by the same wave of hopeless despair that anyone who cares about the future of this country felt. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the weight of the world rested on the shoulders of this diminutive 87-year-old woman who had been battling cancer for many years. With her death, Donald Trump and the Senate Republicans, led by the depraved liar and hypocrite Mitch McConnell, have the power to fill her seat on the Supreme Court with another right wing extremist. With a comfortable 6-3 conservative majority on the court, the Republican mission to dismantle the already battered remains of our democracy will be protected from the occasional bout of conscience from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Things are bad. Really, really bad. It would be foolish to deny it. We have a reality TV fascist in the Oval Office who has been lawsuit-happy when it comes to his efforts to steal himself a second term against the strong will of the American people, and now he’s going to get himself a third Supreme Court justice to grease the wheels. Plus, the uncorking of right wing assaults on human rights — a situation which seemed dire after Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced the at-times-reluctant supporter of equal rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy — are going to spin wildly out of control.

Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, religious freedom, health care access: These are all on the chopping block now, in ways that will likely make previous assaults seem like a game of tiddlywinks.

So I forgive you (and myself) if you need to sit in the corner for a little with a bottle of whiskey, or a good red wine, as Ginsburg would have done. But once we’re done with that, it’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, get back into it and fight like hell.

It is, after all, what Ginsburg would have done.

Ginsburg earned a reputation for being so tough and accomplished that the hagiography started while she was still alive and able to enjoy it. So tough, in fact, when I told my friends over Zoom that she had died, they refused to believe me and demanded to know my source. (Phone alert from NPR.) Being known for such a ferocious tenacity that people can’t even believe you could die, even when you’ve been hospitalized on and off for months from cancer, is quite the quality.

It is this strength that we must channel for what is shaping up to be a fight for democracy itself.

It’s tempting to look at the situation, throw your hands up, and start looking into immigration laws for other countries. But when that urge strikes, I recommend diving into one of the many lengthy obituaries written about Ginsburg, instead of just skimming the first couple of paragraphs. Or watch one of movies about her life, if you prefer. Or read “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” the book that kicked off all the hosannas for the still-living Ginsburg in the past few years.

What you’ll find is the story of a woman who looked at a world that seemingly had no space for her or her ideas, shrugged, and forged ahead anyway. She was one of only nine women in her class at Harvard Law. When she graduated, law firms weren’t interested in hiring women, especially if they were married mothers or Jewish, and Ginsburg was both. And yet she ended up on the Supreme Court.

But even more importantly, she won a series of victories as a feminist lawyer that frankly would seem impossible, if we didn’t live in the world she had created by doing so. In the 1970s, Ginsburg argued six — six! — cases in front of the Supreme Court, winning five.

As Ian Millhiser of Vox notes, this required arguing in front of a bunch of male judges who sprung from “a society that was so sexist that many of them had never had a female colleague.” These were men whose power and privilege rested, in large part, upon centuries of oppression of women, and like most men of the time, they were aware on some level that women’s equality meant giving up some of that power and privilege.

Convincing such men to literally vote to dismantle, bit by bit, a power structure geared to benefit them at the expense of women was a task so enormous that it’s genuinely hard to imagine, especially in the real world, where people are stubborn and blinkered and selfish, so much unlike the glossy Hollywood world where justice always prevails in the end.

But damn it, Ginsburg got her Hollywood ending in those cases. It was, as her biographer and friend Irin Carmon writes, because she embraced a worldview that “was as bold as it was optimistic.” It was not just because Ginsburg had the moral clarity to see what was wrong about sexism, but because she had the imagination to picture a better world, one where men and women are partners and friends, and everyone is more free to be themselves and not circumscribed by absurd gender roles.

It’s arguable that Ginsburg was, if anything, too tenacious. She was too stubborn to retire from the court when there was a chance Barack Obama could nominate her replacement, a decision that no one should bother to defend. But, as with most strong-willed people, her flaws flowed from the same traits that made her great. And we should embrace that pig-headed unwillingness to give up, even when it seems like giving up is the only option.

The fights ahead of us are onerous, starting with the fight to prevent Trump and McConnell from putting whatever troglodyte they have in mind on the court. These fights may seem impossible, in fact. (But nothing is impossible, including convincing Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to save her seat by doing the right thing for once in her miserable career.) Giving into despair might seem like the only option.

But however hard it seems, it’s probably not as hard as it was for Ginsburg to stand up — all 5’1″ of her — and argue to all-male panels of judges about why the very system that gave them their power was wrong. She was forever humble about her courage, often describing herself as “lucky.” But she wasn’t lucky. She was smart, strategic and tenacious. And we have to be those things if we are to protect the legacy that she and other civil rights activists and leaders have built.

If it seems too difficult at times, just remember to ask yourself what RBG would have done. You know the answer is “keep fighting.” So that is what we will do.

The opioid crisis — and now the pandemic — show how Americans don’t believe in the social contract

In the Beforetimes, I travelled from where I live in Ohio to Vancouver, British Columbia, to report on how some Canadians were addressing the overdose crisis through effective community-centered harm reduction programs.

In the city’s Downtown East Side neighborhood I visited peer-led overdose-prevention sites with ready-access to naloxone and oxygen and trained assistants on site. I spoke with workers at Insite, North America’s first safe injection site, where people who use drugs can inject in a safe, secure environment without risk of overdose. And my community guide introduced me to his doctor at a clinic where he receives heroin-assisted treatment. Since he started the program his life has stabilized, he is no longer committing petty crimes to get his next fix, and he is gainfully employed. The experience was transformative for me. In that small community, one of the poorest in Canada, people were doing the things that researchers have said will actually slow the rate of overdoses.

And it’s mostly working: at Insite they’ve never had someone die of an overdose. But, as in the United States, an influx in the powerful drug fentanyl has led to a spike in overdoses and people who use drugs and their allies are calling for access to safer drugs. Indeed, research shows that the increase in overdose deaths is directly related to the war on drugs, to prohibition, to tired policies that have never worked. For someone who regularly reads comments from Ohioans lambasting health departments for simply distributing naloxone, the activism, the harm reduction efforts, fostered and supported by people who use drugs, well, it was eye-opening and refreshing to witness.

And yet, activists in Vancouver know it could be even better, that more lives could be saved. At a conference taking place while I was there, I saw this idealism, really this basic human decency, in action. Judy Darcy, a member of British Columbia’s legislature and the province’s first-ever minister for mental health and addiction was giving an opening address to over six hundred conference attendees. She was explaining the government’s role in addressing the overdose crisis when a tall man with a shock of white hair stood up and shouted, “It’s not good enough, Minister.”

Darcy got quiet.

The man continued, “This is an emergency health situation without an emergency health response. Please to the government—stop gaslighting us. Meet with drug users. Give us a proper seat at the table. This is not working. It’s feeling so grim right now. We met with you last year, and one of the people in that meeting is now dead . . . We are not on an emergency response footing. We are on a status quo footing. And I beg you to please change that.”

The room exploded with applause.

That man was Garth Mullins, a journalist and activist from Vancouver. “Crackdown”, the groundbreaking podcast he hosts, centers the experiences of people who use drugs who also serve as correspondents on the front lines of a war. The podcast also centers on a healthy dose of righteous, justified anger. Anger may not always win you friends, and sometimes it will not help build alliances, but the reality is that sometimes anger comes from a place of truth.

As I listened to Mullins, my mind turned to Ohio, where I live and where people were and are dying from unintentional drug overdoses, from languishing in prisons and jails, from the repercussions of being incarcerated, from living in a country that pays lip service to health care for all people.

These things can be fixed. Sometimes anger is justified. And in Canada, it seemed to me, some people were angry. Which is an appropriate response. But it’s not a response I’ve seen often enough in the United States.

After witnessing Garth Mullins speak out so eloquently and with such force, I texted my wife: “37 million people live in Canada. 4k overdose deaths in 2017. 12 million people in Ohio. 5,111 overdose deaths in 2017. Why are we not freaking out?”

She responded: “Because we don’t believe in the social contract anymore.” A few minutes pass and she texts again: “I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds smart.”

* * *

She was right, though. As European Enlightenment thinkers John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hugo Grotius described it, the theory of the social contract says that we give up some of our individual freedoms in order to be protected by a government that is, essentially, us. Locke wrote in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that in order to live in a society we give up “natural liberty” for the “civil liberty” of the community and, in doing so, we should expect our government to always act with the “public” good in mind. It is a sacrifice, of course. And so in order to preserve ourselves, we must preserve everyone. It would follow then that we are obliged to promote greater social justice and protect the human dignity for all human beings.

But we’re not protecting each other—if we ever have. Locke himself served as a secretary for the Lord’s proprietors, the white men who invested in the colony of Carolina and seeded chattel slavery in the United States.

The problem is not the over 70,000 overdose deaths that happened in the United States in 2019. The problem is that there is a rupture in our social contract, a rupture made more obvious by the COVID-19 pandemic. Turns out her text message was prescient.

A year later, and I’m again angry and disappointed by the collective American response to a health crisis, a response guided by a willfully ignorant president and bathed in selfishness, political divisiveness, and a blatant disregard for science and education. In the same way that people have for years believed nonsense and lies about drug use and overdose, this president believes nonsense and lies about COVID-19—and he shares them far and wide.

But it is more than a failure of his leadership, this rupture is not new.

In this precarious moment, our democracy hinges not on individual rights but on our commitment to each other—and that means reimagining the social contract.

* * *

For over 20 years now I have taught American literature at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. If anything, American literature is a testament to our troubled and hopeful history, written by women and men who have been suppressed and oppressed and despite it all still have some faith in the American project.

Always present is a tension between the needs and rights of the individual and the needs and rights of the community. On the deck of the ship the Arabella, John Winthrop gave voice to the myth American exceptionalism when he proclaimed his desire to create a beacon for the world, city on a hill. In that very sermon, though, Winthrop also talks about “charity,” a concept straight out of Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount—the idea that we must love each other as we love ourselves. Winthrop claims that his new community must be a body that is connected by “love.” He then offers a line that writer Sarah Vowell proclaims to be “one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language”:

We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

Of course, we have never been this wonderful community. Indeed, the Puritans weren’t even close to living up to his ideals in that moment as they were about to commence their project of murdering native people.

That tension between what we want to be and what we truly are, persists. I’m constantly disappointed in America, and yet, I love this place to an illogical degree. Claude McKay writes in “America,” that “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,/ And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,/ Stealing my breath of life, I will confess/ I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.”

Time and again, as a nation, we have failed, but time and again, people, usually the most marginalized, demonized, and criticized among us, have stood up and fought for the ideals penned by a slaver in the Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass wrote that the 4th of July was not for him and yet he insisted on the possibilities of the American project. He called the Declaration of Independence “the ring-bolt to the chain” of America’s destiny. “The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles,” he wrote. “Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” Activists like Douglass and Ida B. Wells, as well as the enslaved people who revolted from 1619 onward, were the true authors of our social contract. And yet, the paradoxes of the American experiment were present in his very existence. Despite it all Douglass still believed in the possibility of a nation we all were treated equal—a faith and idealism, as a white male, I can hardly fathom.

This past summer, we all were reminded of this faith when people, most of them much younger than me, went out into the streets to demand that police stop killing black people, just weeks after armed mostly white people bullied their way into the state house in Michigan to demand their “natural liberty” to do whatever the hell they want to do during a pandemic.

Community over self. Cooperation over individualism. Those young people in the streets get it.

There are moments when this ethos emerges and we can all see the best of our country—an ability to demand justice, an ability to harness mutual aid and support. Nowhere is this more evident than in how we deal with our troubled healthcare system. Americans spend significantly more than other countries on healthcare—out of pocket and through private spending. Healthcare costs are high in the US, in part, because healthcare is big business. But centering the care of the human body in capitalism has not worked out well for us. We have a low life expectancy including some of the highest rates of obesity, suicide, and unintentional drug overdose. Indeed, the very thing that helped spark America’s recent infatuation with opioids was, in part, lack of access to adequate and preventive healthcare. If you injure your back, it’s much easier to take a pill than to take time off time from work to visit a physical therapist (if one is available). It’s much easier to search for a pill to stop addiction (an effort a recent Newsweek story lauded) than to address the social determinants of health, to figure out the underlying issues that are causing a health crisis—things like economic disparities or mental health.

But how could we do that work? We don’t fund public health adequately. Over the past decade, the CDC’s budget fell by 10 percent.

So we have packed emergency rooms, shuttered rural hospitals, astronomical medical debt, and our over-reliance on police officers to respond to mental health crises or to reverse unintentional overdoses. What if we spent more on social services, addressing the social determinants of health rather than on police?

In Ohio, the advocacy organization Harm Reduction Ohio estimates, based on preliminary data, that unintentional overdose deaths increased about 23% in the first six months of 2020 versus the same period the year before. 1,964 lives lost. And last year, for the first time since the 1980s, black people in Ohio had a higher overdose death rate than white Ohioans. This preliminary data indicates that that trend continues. And we know, too, that Black people in America are twice as likely than white people do from COVID-19.

If we truly believed that all humans are equal, then we would not treat the very basic thing human beings must do, take care of their bodies, as a privilege or as another scheme for making money. We would respect scientific research. We would be horrified by GoFundMe appeals to pay down medical debt or pancake breakfasts to help pay for a neighbor’s cancer treatment. (I shared that concept with a colleague in Denmark once and she was horrified. She was right to be.) These things have become a necessity in a country enamored with free market capitalism and where the invisible hand is more likely to punch you than to lift you up.

And yet, some Americans are inventive and scrappy, and they figure out how to support each other. In the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, black and brown and queer people led the way in providing a public health approach to addressing the disease by offering clean needles to slow its spread—in many cases breaking the law to care for their communities. More recently in my own county, the mother of a young man who has struggled with substance use disorder for many years, began a similar underground program—at great risk to herself. Her rationale, she told me, was that she is going to help others because at some point she hopes that others will help her son.

Elsewhere in the United States people who use drugs and their allies have started underground safe injection sites and are distributing naloxone and drug testing strips, in places where they are not authorized to do so. And in Vancouver, all of the gains, all of the creative ways for addressing the overdose crisis have been led and developed by people who use drugs, many of them people of color. In other words, the most marginalized people—the very people who should be supported by our social contract and who are not—are the ones teaching this country what it means to live in community. They are leading by example.

These activists are on the front lines of a new America, just like those people protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in cities and small towns around the country. These are people who are pressing our public institutions to do better, to become more democratic. They are reminding all of us that we are not consumers but, in fact, are creators, that we are our government, that we are the ones who can sign the contract.

But our culture teaches that there are easy answers to our enormous problems. Once we have a vaccine for COVID-19, then what? Once we have redistributed the wealth of Big Pharma to the communities they plundered, then what?

Politicians and lawyers are committed to addressing Big Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis—and they should be—but really, those companies were capitalizing on poverty, on a lack of legitimate public healthcare. They were doing what capitalists do—making lots of money.

No doubt the communities most affected could use the money that will come from the lawsuits, but it’s a band aid. The solution is much bigger. We need to provide healthcare for all. We must treat substance use disorder as a health crisis. And we must listen to the experts.

Free market capitalism does not care about marginalized people. Elderly people are stuffed into often-abominable long-term care facilities. Delivery drivers become frontline workers and are thanked with bottles of water and granola bars left on doorsteps and must pay outrageous co-pays and figure out how to raise a family on the low wages that their non-unionized job provides.

Living in a country that actually appreciates and tries to re-establish a social contract will not always be pretty—people will get angry. But public decorum and a “be patient” attitude was exactly what Martin Luther King, Jr. decried in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” after some liberal white ministers questioned the timing of his protest in that city. King, Jr., wanted those in the “beloved community” to act immediately at the sight of injustice. Now. Right now. When people are dying, we’re supposed to try to save them. Now. We are supposed to do the work of caring for our neighbors.

At the heart of this work must be a belief that all of the people in our communities matter and should be treated as humans—the unhoused, the people who use drugs, the people with mental health struggles, the elderly, all of them. And we can show that care by providing ample healthcare for everyone. No questions asked.

If the nation is to persist, then we have to resolve to give up a fraction of our own comfort for the good of others. We wear masks. If the nation is to persist, then we have to recognize that if we are doing something that bothers, that harms, others, then we have to stop doing it. We take down statues of slavers; we end the war on drugs; we commit to actually treating health issues for what they are.

There’s another narrative for America, one that we’ve seen in fits and starts over the centuries. It’s out there. I saw it on the streets of big cities and small towns of Ohio this past summer. And I’ve seen it in the county where I live over the past few years, as people struggle against the monster of overdose death.

On one of the first nights after George Floyd’s murder, my wife broke out in a terrible rash and was having trouble breathing. After we called a friend to come sit in our home, the first non-family member to enter it since March, we raced to the hospital. Because of COVID-19, I wasn’t allowed inside and so sat on a bench just outside the ER waiting room.

Minutes after I sat down, a woman raced up and stood outside the door near me. Then an older couple showed up. The first woman was crying and explaining what had happened. Her two neighbors overdosed—one the daughter of the couple. She called 911. And here they all were. Waiting. Hoping for the best.

I pulled out my phone and began watching livestreams from the protests in Columbus, in Brooklyn, in Chicago. I watched and waited, occasionally adjusting my face mask, moving from one city to another, watching the young people of this country rise up. They are not waiting. Neither should we.

Bill Barr goes full-in right-wing looney

Are you kidding me? Sedition? From 1798?

Just in case someone is not persuaded that this Trump Administration is falling off its rocker, the advice from Atty. Gen. William P. Barr to federal prosecutors to use a two-century-old law to stop people — no, specifically “violent” leftist protests outside federal courthouses — from seeking to overthrow the government should make us stop and scratch our collective heads.

For openers, protesting disproportionate police brutality against Black citizens is not calling for the overthrow of the government.

Secondly, there is actual evidence that groups other than Black Lives Matter or the oft-cited, if unorganized “antifa” are not the only ones in street. You heard nothing from Barr about using sedition laws against actual, organized, gun-toting, right-wing, white supremacist nationals who seem actually to want to overthrow the government — as well as to mix it up with lefties in the streets.

Thirdly, sedition laws have not been used over two centuries for good reason: Their Constitutionality runs very close to the edge of First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly that have protected leftists, neo-Nazis, right-wingers, flag-burners and vocal bayers-at-the-moon.

Looking for a definitive reason to deny the Trump team four more years? How about using the law to declare a virtual shutdown of civil liberties and free speech. Barr’s remarks this week were so outrageous that comparing state orders mandating masks and shutdowns for public health to slavery were not even the top line head-slap.

Aggressive tactics

This has nothing to do with people who break rules about trespass or fire-setting or bottle-throwing,

No, this is the baring of raw power to shut down dissent. And it is a blatant attempt to use the Justice Department to underscore a Donald Trump campaign promise for Law & Order prompted by several localized protests that turn violent only in the middle of the night — a continuation of absolute reinterpretations of law and procedure to promote Trump’s politics.

The wording of the federal sedition statute says it is a crime for two or more people to conspire to use force to oppose federal authority, hinder the government’s ability to enforce any federal law or unlawfully seize any federal property — elements that might conceivably be made to fit a plot to, say, break into and set fire to a federal courthouse, despite evidence that more than 93% of nearly 8,000 Black Lives Matter protests between May and August this year have been peaceful.

Maybe Barr should be looking at those organized Western ranchers, right-wingers all, when they held off enforcement of federal water law enforcement at gunpoint. Or at organized, armed Trump supporters who entered statehouses to threaten the lives of legislators considering laws to require coronavirus masks.

Or he could be looking at Trump administration officials and Republican supporters calling on people to arm themselves for insurrection in the event that Joe Biden wins the election. Or maybe even at the continued use of federal law enforcement and the Justice Department itself as political instruments to advance the partisan cause of a single sitting president seeking reelection, clearly throwing out any separations of power as constitutionally required to get his way in a wide variety of cases ranging from the misuse of U.S. intelligence to the matters of impeachment.

Just who here is seeking the overthrow of government as we have known it for 200 years? FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee it is right-wing white militias. Where’s Barr?

I get that Barr wants prosecutors to be aggressive in the case of Portland’s protests, which have involved the setting of small fires at the federal courthouse. Pursue shooters who have emerged aggressively, please. But moving to sedition and its 20-year sentences in the name of liberty and Law & Order? Are we Belarus or Hong Kong?

Overkill

Actually, coincidental to the disclosures about using sedition laws, came news that federal officials had been stockpiling ammunition and devices that could emit deafening sounds or singe anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire to clear Lafayette Square in Washington for that Donald Trump Bible photo op. The disclosures came in The Washington Postfrom D.C. National Guard Maj. Adam D. DeMarco, who led the brigade there, and filed them as a whistleblower.

Are we nuts all of a sudden as a nation or can we see this as the excess of a bad political campaign? Does Barr think we are idiots? He actually compared his own prosecutors to pre-schoolers and asserted that he and Trump are in charge, not those career prosecutors who make daily decisions in individual cases.

Barr was wrong in citing “a dozen cases” each year in which Black citizens are mistreated; there are 250 deaths at the hands of police this last year. He and Trump are wrong to deny that there are systemic elements to racism in this country and to our policing practices.

The federal sedition law is rarely invoked, and something that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the unrest in places like Portland in response to police killings of Black men. So, too, would be ordering the arrest of the Seattle mayor for allowing a protest to cool itself in that city.

Promoting sedition laws to stop protests is an extremist Justice Department policy. Barr has no business being attorney general.

Think American democracy is ending? You’re not alone

Pessimism looms large in America today. It’s not just because of Donald Trump, the vicar of fear and violence. It’s COVID-19, a faltering economy, the growing power of Russia and China, fires and climate change — you name it.

Journalists and analysts have launched warnings: American democracy is about to end; the American century is about to end; the American era is about to end. If Trump loses, there’s no certainty that the U.S. will make it to the other side of potential political chaos.

That’s no delusion. The bleak scenarios are a possibility, although the probability is that the United States will not descend, any time soon, into a second Civil War. The presidential election could well be contested — although the nation will probably survive intact.

This is not the first time in American history that journalists, writers and intellectuals in general have cast a gloomy light about the future. American leaders as well have often yielded to despair — which is especially notable given that political leaders are expected to be the most optimistic of the herd.

“We are not a chosen people”

During the early stages of national life, the mood was no different. Actually, it was even worse.

When Thomas Jefferson realized the implications of grounding a nation upon slavery, his pessimism reached metaphysical, theological heights:

“I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

John Adams, the second president, was similarly prone to frequent bouts of pessimism.

“Our country will do like all others,” he wrote a few years before entering office, “play their affairs into the hands of a few cunning fellows.”

Then he went through his painful presidency, a single term only, which made him even more bitter: “There is no special Providence for us. We are not a chosen people that I know of.”

Fending off ruin

Back then, France and Great Britain acted like the global superpowers. The “American experiment,” on the other hand, was puny, defenseless, hazardous. Consequently, many leaders believed that only a constitution, plus a stronger central government, could forestall ruin.

When Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay set off to write the famous 85 papers to persuade Americans to adopt the new national charter, pessimism was one of their favorite vocabularies. It was more than just a rhetorical expedient. These men were convinced that society was actually teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Americans would soon behold “plunder and devastation,” Hamilton wrote. Madison echoed his colleague and conjured a “gloomy and perilous scene into which the advocates for disunion would conduct us.”

The “advocates for disunion” — the antagonist political party led by James Winthrop from Massachusetts, Melancton Smith from New York and Patrick Henry and George Mason from Virginia — would sap America of all its good energy. “Poverty and disgrace,” Hamilton wrote again, “would overspread a country which with wisdom might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.”

At the end of the 18th century, negative campaigning was already widespread. Political candidates and their acolytes criticized their competitors and conjured images of destruction if their rivals prevailed.

If Jefferson were to be elected, one Connecticut newspaper announced, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest, will openly be taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries and distress, the soil soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Political campaigning and statements bordering on exaggeration should not be taken at face value. But it’s also true that today, like yesterday, a genuine pessimism about America’s future exists.

A patriotic feat

As a historian of the early republic, I dare say that pessimism is to America what salt is to french fries: without, it wouldn’t be the same.

However, there are two types of pessimism in America, absolute and conditional — a distinction that political scientist Francis G. Wilson laid out long ago.

Absolute pessimism is the belief that the nation is a big lie, a fraud, a trick that cunning white males have been playing on women, native populations, African Americans, working classes, immigrants. As such, this nation deserves to be cursed, canceled, sunk, forgotten.

Most leaders, journalists, analysts and historians do not endorse this kind of pessimism. They are conditional pessimists, as Wilson would label them.

They are like Jeremiah, the weeping prophet of the Bible. They deliver a prophecy of disaster because they want to provide a new hopeful solution. They speak to Americans’ sense of pride, exhort them, incite them, mobilize them, increase the level of commitment to a common cause and enact a ritual whose upshot should be a deeper awareness.

To repeat: The worst can happen — is happening — today, just as it did 200-something years ago. That’s why these contemporary prophets are not delusional conspiracy theorists, or simply paranoids.

Their pessimism is fact based. At the same time, it’s a patriotic feat. Conditional pessimists evoke images of turbulence and peril. But they call on America to be its best self.

Pessimism, in this case, is optimism by another name.

Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino

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

Consider, if you will, Donald Trump’s hair: 200,000 are dead — but it’s perfect

That hair is the star of the Trump show. Other than the ubiquitous billowing blue suit, Trump’s hair is the most consistent thing about him. I mean, look at that snowdrift atop Mount Trump: It looks like someone dumped a tequila sunrise on his head and then swooped and sprayed and blow-dried the resulting glop into a kind of double-reverse cantilever combover. You have to wonder how long it takes to construct the thing in the morning, how the hell it’s actually done, how many times a day it has to be re-sprayed and tediously teased into shape, with its gleaming duck-tails and prideful collar-brushing flip in the back. An elaborate confection of ego and insecurity and hormonal loss and want and need — you almost have to conclude it’s the thing he really cares about.

Certainly he pays more attention to his hair than he does to his family. His wife Melania? He hauls her out for photo-ops, but have you ever seen him look happy about it? Like he loves her, or even cares about her a little? Please.

Barron Trump, his youngest child, the only progeny of his marriage to Melania? Has the president even talked to him since taking office? If so, I haven’t seen it. I don’t think he’s ever been caught looking at him, at least not in public.

The rest of them — Doofus Eric and Barbie Ivanka and Sniffles Don Jr. and Invisible Tiffany — seem less like sons and daughters than moons, spinning in orbit around Planet Donald, illuminated by his magnificence, visible only because they reflect light from him. He doesn’t care about them. He displays them.

How about Trump’s vaunted “base?” We learned this week how much he cares about them, when he was revealed by a former aide to have said at a meeting of his own coronavirus task force, “Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.”

Does Trump really care about veterans? About the soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and women who have fought and died for their country, many of them on his watch as president, under his leadership as commander in chief? “Losers.” and “suckers,” according to a report by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. “His” generals? “A bunch of pussies” and “stupid” for their defense of NATO and alliances with foreign allies, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage.” He called the entire military leadership of the Pentagon “a bunch of dopes” and ‘losers,” according to “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” the book published earlier this year by Washington Post reporters, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Trump went to Paris in 2018 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, in which more than 115,000 Americans died. But he couldn’t take the good time out of his day to spend 30 minutes attending a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery located near Belleau Wood. Instead, he was reported to have spent the day inside at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris, watching Fox News. But you and I know the real reason Trump didn’t go to the cemetery that day. It wasn’t because the cemetery was full of “losers” and “suckers” he had no respect for. It was because it was raining, raining hard. The White House tried to make it about how Trump’s helicopter couldn’t fly because the weather was so bad. But his helicopter didn’t keep him inside that day. His hair did. Trump’s hair can live with being ruffled by a slight breeze. It can even endure occasional gusts of wind. But the Trump coif can’t survive getting plastered by heavy rain.

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? What Trump really cares about. Trump had to know that if he skipped the ceremony at the World War I cemetery, he would take a hit in the media. Everybody else went. He didn’t. But he didn’t care what they’d say about him. He cared about his hair.

We got another reminder this week about what Trump cares about as we approach the 200,000 mark in American deaths from COVID. Trump has been out there defending his response to the pandemic. “I think we did a very good job,” Trump told a questioner during the ABC town hall event held last Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. That was the famous appearance where Trump claimed we are “rounding the corner” in the fight against the coronavirus. “The virus is going to disappear,” he told host George Stephanopoulos. “You’ll develop, you’ll develop herd, like a herd mentality,” he claimed. “It’s going to be, it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.”

News broke this week that Michael Caputo, the top spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, would take at least a 60-day leave of absence to recover from “mental health issues” after his unhinged rant on Facebook Live last weekend. Then memos from the Centers for Disease Control to the states of Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, all of which are experiencing steep increases in COVID cases, were leaked, revealing that the states were being counseled to drop state and local requirements for the wearing of masks. Those three states, and perhaps others, are being encouraged not to try to control the spread of the virus, but just to let it go.

“Herd mentality,” as Trump put it, is for real. Faced with the deaths of 200,000 Americans on his watch, Trump is doubling down. He has stopped holding outdoor rallies and is now holding them indoors, with no mask requirements and no social distancing. States in the Midwest with high rates of COVID infections are opening bars, holding in-person classes in all grades of school, getting ready to play college football. Trump is cool with all of it.

He won’t be attending the football games. At his rallies, his crowds are kept back from the stage at a distance that is safe for Trump — but not for them, as they crowd together, trying to get closer to the man who’s telling them it’s OK if they get sick, because the virus that is infecting their children, their brothers and sisters, their parents, their co-workers and their neighbors — the virus that’s killing them at a rate of nearly 1,000 Americans a day, day after day, week after week — is going to “just go away, you’ll see.”

I know you’re probably avoiding watching the news at this point, and if you are, you’re not seeing coverage of Trump’s rallies or his White House “press conferences” that are actually events meant to show the base he’s still “owning the libs.” But if you happen to accidentally catch sight of him coming down the ramp from Air Force One, or taking the stage at one of his super-spreader get-togethers out there in the hinterland, check him out. Somebody standing on the tarmac around his plane, or jammed cheek-to-jowl with other MAGA hat wearers, is going to get sick and die between now and Nov. 3.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about them, but the man they came to see will have perfect hair, a swoop of blondish-pinkish-goldish-whiteish cotton candy on his head that never varies, because Donald Trump wants it that way. His hair is the one thing in his life he really cares about, other than cheating at golf and stealing other people’s money and putting his hands all over women who are not his wife.

McConnell vows to be “firewall” against progress in Senate as Democrats mull eliminating filibuster

Hoping to allow for the passage of progressive legislation, advocacy groups renewed calls to end the filibuster this week as Republican lawmakers joined Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in warning against the idea.

“This threat to permanently disfigure, to disfigure the Senate, has been the latest growing drumbeat in the modern Democratic Party’s war against our governing institutions,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor Monday.

Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have ramped up calls to abolish the filibuster—a tactic used by both parties to thwart minority party opposition to legislation in the U.S. Senate—going so far as to set up a “war room” to, according to reporting by NBC News, “wage an all-out war on the Senate filibuster in bullish anticipation of sweeping the 2020 election and passing an ambitious progressive agenda.”

Following McConnell’s comments, Stand Up America, a grassroots advocacy group in favor of eliminating the filibuster, pointed to the urgent need for aggressive policies to combat the climate crisis as an argument for more Democrats to endorse getting rid of the process:

Mitch McConnell has shamelessly declared that GOP senators will use the filibuster as a “firewall” against any effort to pass a progressive agenda, including legislation to address the increasing frequency of man-made climate disasters like the fires raging across the country. That is disgraceful.

More areas than just the West will face wildfires, hurricanes, and other crises unless Congress is able to pass comprehensive legislation to address climate change. If Republicans are allowed to filibuster any meaningful progress, that won’t be possible.

The science is real, and the threat is increasingly deadly. When Democrats flip the Senate, they cannot waste time on meaningless negotiations. If there is any hope of ending Republicans’ senseless blockade on climate action legislation, it starts with abolishing the filibuster.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have used the filibuster to counter majority-party legislative proposals, but in recent decades Democrats have moved toward supporting its elimination.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution about a filibuster,” former presidential candidate Andrew Yang told Ezra Klein in an interview published at Vox last week. “It is just some weird, arcane, esoteric Senate rule that took on a life of its own. And so if you’re willing to put that rule above getting stuff done, then what are you doing?”

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), also former White House hopefuls, support eliminating the filibuster.

President Obama is absolutely right. It is an outrage that modern-day poll taxes, gerrymandering, I.D. requirements, and other forms of voter suppression still exist today. If expanding the Voting Rights Act requires us to eliminate the filibuster, then that is what we must do. https://t.co/4pLb1rZCSj

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 30, 2020

We know what's broken in this country and we know how to fix it. But widely popular policies are stuck—and Republican obstruction in the Senate is only getting worse.

We won't make progress unless we face this head on: It’s past time to get rid of the filibuster.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 1, 2020

In August, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he is open to the idea, but stopped short of fully supporting it. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on Republicans to do away with the filibuster when Democrats have used it to block GOP-led legislation during his tenure, calling it “stupid” and “ridiculous.” But, like Democratic lawmakers who now wish to abolish the proceeding and had previously admired the use of the filibuster to block opposing party legislation, Trump has also flip-flopped on his position.

Still, progressive Democrats and advocates say the filibuster is outdated and needs to be retired.

“Rhetoric alone simply won’t get it all done,” Christina Harvey, managing director for Stand Up America, said in a statement earlier this month. “It’s time for action—and it’s time for Biden and Schumer to pledge their support for abolishing the filibuster.”

Call for investigation: Companies linked to six Trump Cabinet members got PPP loans

A watchdog group called for an investigation into Paycheck Protection Program loans to companies with connections to members of President Trump’s cabinet.

The PPP was part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress this spring in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The program, which distributed forgivable loans to small businesses to cover payroll and other expenses, helped countless businesses stay afloat and saved millions of jobs. It has also drawn criticism after business owners alleged that banks prioritized large existing clients over struggling small firms, creating difficulty for small business owners in accessing aid while many firms with ties to Trump and his administration received extensive funding.

Companies linked to at least six members of Trump’s cabinet received PPP loans, prompting calls for an investigation.

“These sweetheart loans to companies with inside access to the administration should be investigated to ensure the people’s money is spent responsibly,” Chris Saeger, a spokesperson for the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US., said in a statement to Salon.

Among the cabinet members linked to companies that received PPP loans is Jovita Carranza, the head of the Small Business Administration — who is overseeing the program.

Carranza previously served on the board of trustees at Alverno College in Milwaukee and chaired the college’s School of Business Council. The school received a PPP loan worth between $2 million and $5 million in April, as small business struggled to access funds before the first round of funding quickly dried up. The Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit that previously gave Carranza a leadership award, also received a PPP loan between $150,000 and $350,000.

The Foremost Group, the family company of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao — who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — received a PPP loan between $350,000 and $1 million in April.

Perdue Inc., the company founded by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, received a PPP loan between $150,000 and $350,000 in April.

Comstat Inc., a former client of Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, received a PPP loan between $5 million and $10 million in April.

Former clients of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a longtime energy lobbyist, also received big loans. Nuclear Fuels Working Group, a former client, received a PPP loan worth more than $890,000 in April. Samson Resources, another former client, received a PPP loan worth between $1 million and $2 million.

Martin Farms, a former client of longtime lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, who now heads the Environmental Protection Agency, received a PPP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000 in April.

Clients of Wheeler’s former firm, Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting, also received numerous loans. The Immune Deficiency Foundation, which was a client until January, received a PPP loan between $350,000 and $1,000,000 in April. The COPD Foundation, which was also a client of the firm until January, received a PPP loan between $150,000 and $350,000 in May. The American Telemedicine Association, a client of the firm, received a PPP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000 in June.

Along with the six cabinet members with links to companies that received PPP loans, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf previously lobbied on behalf of American Airlines, which received $4 billion in grants and $1.7 billion in loans as part of the Payroll Support Program, which bailed out the airline industry.

Several clients of Wolf’s former firm, Wexler & Walker, also received PPP loans worth up to $1 million, including the National Federation of State High School Associations and United Technologies.

Many Trump associates have received PPP loans as well.

Salon’s Roger Sollenberger reported earlier this week that a mysterious payroll company owned by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani may have committed fraud when it received a PPP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000.

ProPublica reported in July that Trump’s family and associates stand to receive up to $21 million in coronavirus aid, including companies linked to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“This appears to be yet another example,” Saeger told Salon, “of the administration further flooding the swamp they promised to drain.”

Democrats are overlooking a big opportunity to increase voter turnout and take on the Trump machine

The anxiety over changes and irregularities with the United States Postal Service (USPS) in August finally spilled over. A functioning postal service undergirds many of our society’s most basic functions, so there was no shortage of reasons to be alarmed. However, one concern—the threat to November’s election—overwhelmingly rose to the top. And the public outcry over that threat pushed a normally lethargic House majority into action, winning some mild but incomplete reversals from USPS.

USPS is not, however, the only agency where the potent combination of maladministration and outright sabotage may be disenfranchising people, swaying election results, and imposing other hardships. At U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a complete failure, or perhaps unwillingness, to adapt to changing conditions during the pandemic slowed new naturalizations such that hundreds of thousands who may have otherwise been able to vote this year will not be able to exercise that long-awaited right. The relative lack of attention to this crisis is a troubling sign that while House Democrats may be willing to ride waves of public anger to modest action, they are still not willing to whip up rage over under-scrutinized but salient abuses of power.

The onset of the global pandemic in March understandably led to upheaval and delays as people and organizations adjusted to a new, tenuous normal. USCIS, however, simply shut down its services for a period of over two months. For more than 70 days, it did not offer naturalization ceremonies or visa and asylum interviews. Despite being pressed by many advocates who were alarmed at these delays, USCIS refused to transition to virtual platforms to continue operations, citing vague supposed legal limitations. The immigration-services company Boundless estimated that each day without naturalization ceremonies translated into “2,100 potential new voters” being disenfranchised.

Since restarting naturalization ceremonies in June, USCIS has cleared the backlog of soon-to-be-citizens who had their ceremonies delayed this spring, but at the expense of hundreds of thousands more who are waiting for theirs to be scheduled. Meanwhile, backlogs in other areas, including new naturalization applications, background checks, and interviews, all remain. As Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute told FiveThirtyEight, there’s “no way” USCIS could naturalize as many people as it normally would ahead of the election unless it also expedites the processing of other applications. But thanks to budget shortfalls stemming from reduced fee collection, the agency is having to reduce rather than expedite service offerings.

Unfortunately, time to even marginally rectify this widespread disenfranchisement is running out. There is less than two months remaining before the election, leaving scant time for applications to be processed, ceremonies to be held, and voter registrations to be submitted.

It should not be overlooked that this outcome—the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants—fits pretty neatly into Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. These extreme delays due to the pandemic are also coming on the tail end of several years of rising wait times at Trump’s USCIS. So while it’s possible that this unfortunate series of events is the result of incompetence, it hardly seems probable.

You might think that Democratic lawmakers would take note of these opportunistic attacks—especially in light of immense outpourings of energy over the last several years in response to anti-immigrant assaults like the Muslim ban and family separation. Yet, House Democrats’ response can only be described as muted. Yes, the House Judiciary Committee held some hearings with USCIS leadership (which is more than what can be said for many committees), but at no point was it clear that this was a top priority around which they were organizing a serious opposition effort. And it is likely that it is Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with whom House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has been fighting unsuccessfully in pursuit of an oversight mandate, who is restraining the Judiciary Committee.

What might a more energetic effort have entailed? First and foremost, lawmakers needed to raise the profile of this issue outside of the hearing room. This is not to suggest that congressional hearings do not have value—we have regularly argued exactly the opposite—but to say that they are but one of many potential tools. By, for example, leaning on celebrities, lawmakers could have increased national attention to the delays and generated more interest in their efforts to combat them. Similarly, by reaching out to community, religious, and labor leaders, Democrats might have been able to offer assurances that grassroots opposition would be met with encouragement and action from those in power.

Additionally, by signaling a willingness to open impeachment proceedings for those willfully blocking new naturalizations, lawmakers could have simultaneously underlined their seriousness to recalcitrant government officials and the public. By ratcheting up the stakes, lawmakers could have captured public attention in this period of information overload.

Of course, some will argue that impeachment is too severe a response for this manner of transgression. And to those people I say, why stop with the scandal at USCIS? Whether it’s Trump or his army of loyal appointees, there is no shortage of solid ground from which to launch impeachment proceedings. Congress could threaten to impeach Trump and his appointees for undermining independent journalism at Voice of America and other government-funded media.

Or they could impeach him for denying congressional leaders access to intelligence on Trump’s illegal electioneering support from international authoritarians. Or for the glittery, firework-heavy Hatch Act violation that took place when the Republican National Convention event was held on the White House lawn in August.

Following the Trump administration’s attacks on the postal service, public pressure roused Democratic lawmakers into action. Their tentative first steps on USPS oversight have been encouraging, but the relative lack of resistance to the problems at USCIS points to where they can still improve. People’s attention at the moment is understandably scattered between public health crises, natural disasters, police brutality and the protests against it, and the administration’s horrific response to it all. But lawmakers are not helpless in the face of this overload. It is the job of our leaders to connect disparate, ephemeral scandals into a single, interconnected narrative: Trump is severely mismanaging the components of government needed to keep ordinary people safe while focusing his efforts on seizing control of components that can help him hold onto power.

Pursuing these inquiries is not just a matter of good messaging; understanding the extent of damage to these institutions will be a prerequisite to fixing them under a Biden administration. By carefully assessing the deficits in resources and personnel that have stemmed from Trumpian mismanagement and meticulously cataloging the policies and changes that will need to be reversed, Congress can ease a transition process and make way for effective executive branch governance from day one. In order to do so, however, Congress can’t merely wait for the public to take interest in the infrastructural minutiae of executive branch governance; it must proactively lead the way.

It is long past time that the House majority recognizes that it has a tremendous platform from which it can not only respond to people’s demands but guide attention and opposition to problems that are otherwise being subsumed amid the chaos.

Fox News’ Brit Hume begs Trump to not push through Ginsberg replacement before the election

Fox News contributor Brit Hume reacted to the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by cautioning Republican leaders against replacing the liberal icon before the November election.

Hume made the remarks on Fox News after noting that both President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have previously vowed to hypothetically have a nominee approved before the election.

“Lindsey Graham back in 2018… said that even if were were just into the primary season, he would not want to see a nominee advance in the election year,” Hume explained. “I think the circumstances may have changed since [McConnell] outlined that.”

“Our American institutions and political system are undergoing a stress test as difficult and intense as I have every seen,” he continued. “And I think the leaders have to consider what the effect would be a brutal and divisive confirmation battle into the into the middle of this.”

According to Hume, “the threshold question is whether to even make a nomination.”

“Trump’s instinct undoubtedly will be to go forward,” he observed. “But whether Mitch McConnell will feel that way as the majority leader of the Senate is unclear.”

“I really think that the threshold question is whether to put the country through this,” Hume said.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, defender of women’s rights and social justice, dies at 87

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneering advocate for gender equality who became a cultural icon among liberals, died on Friday, the Supreme Court announced.

She was 87 years old.

“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tried and resolute champion of justice.”

Ginsburg, who had battled cancer over the last several years, died of “complications of metastatic pancreas cancer” at her home, the court said. She was surrounded by her family.

Ginsburg served 27 years on the court, and was widely seen as a diminutive firebrand with a brilliant mind, whose legal acumen was revered across the political spectrum. One of her closest friends was the late Justice Antonin Scalia, although they were ideologically opposed on many issues.

In her final years Ginsburg became the leader of the court’s liberal wing, a partisan figure and cultural totem whose fans dubbed her “Notorious RBG” after rapper and fellow Brooklynite Notorious BIG. She accrued a cult following thanks to her physical and mental endurance, her commitment to equality and her frequent rebukes of President Donald Trump, whose candidacy she publicly criticized, breaking with long-held court norms.

Her death will have profound political implications amid a volatile campaign season, and presumably gives Trump the chance to name a replacement, an option he has so far reserved for himself even at such a late point in his first term.

Just hours after news of Ginsburg’s passing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — who took the unprecedented step in 2016 of blocking President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for Scalia’s former seat, which Trump filled with Justice Neil Gorsuch in the first months of his term — confirmed that he intended to hold a vote on a replacement before the election. That is likely to launch a firestorm, with activists on both the right and left highly engaged.

Confirmation hearings held this late in an election cycle already riven with vitriol and social unrest are certain to be explosive, and the vacancy is certain to play a central role the presidential campaign. The court is just weeks away from starting its next term, and Ginsburg’s passing means that Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative who has sided with liberals on multiple landmark decisions, will no longer wield the controlling vote in tight cases — rendering outcomes uncertain until the seat is filled.

Several major cases loom. The week after the election, the court will once again hear a Republican challenge to the Affordable Care Act, a law it upheld in 2012 by a 5-4 vote, with Roberts writing the majority opinion.

Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. She attended Cornell, where she met her future husband, Marty, moving to Oklahoma, where she gave birth to their first child. The family returned to the East Coast, where Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School — one of nine women in a class of over 500. The dean at the time, Ginsburg recounted later, asked her why she’d taken a slot that “should go to a man.”

Her husband then took a job in New York and she transferred to law school at Columbia, where she received her degree.

In the 1970s Ginsburg became the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing and winning precedent-setting gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court.

In an NPR interview, she explained the theory behind those arguments.

“The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause: ‘Nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.’ Well that word, ‘any person,’ covers women as well as men,” Ginsburg said. “And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971.”

President Jimmy Carter named her to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980. In a statement upon her death, he called her “a powerful legal mind” and “a beacon of justice.”

President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg for the Supreme Court in 1993, when she was 60. She was the second woman named to the court after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

During Obama’s administration, some liberals called on Ginsburg to retire so a Democratic president could name her successor. She declined, out of dedication to her life’s work, as well as a wariness that the Republican-controlled Senate might not hold hearings for a successor — a hunch that eventually played out after Scalia’s death.

Ginsburg publicly criticized Trump ahead of the 2016 election, and in response he tweeted that “her mind is shot” and demanded that she resign. Ginsburg later acknowledged she had made a mistake by weighing in on a presidential campaign.

Days before she died, Ginsburg reportedly dictated a statement to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

Trump blasted for “McCarthy-like” call for “patriotic education” and attack on 1619 Project

Progressive educators and historians fired back on Friday a day after President Donald Trump took aim at the late historian Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project, and vowed to “restore patriotic education” in American schools he accused of teaching “hateful lies about this country.”

Speaking on stolen Nacotchtank land just steps away from where Black slaves were bought and sold on the National Mall, Trump delivered an extraordinary Constitution Day address at the National Archives Museum full of patriotic platitudes and praise for the nation’s “glorious” history.

The president—who lives in an executive mansion built by slaves—attacked U.S. education, claiming that teaching the “toxic” and “horrible doctrine” of critical race theory is “a form of child abuse in the truest sense of the word.”

“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” the president said. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

To that end, Trump said he would soon sign an executive order “establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education” and “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.”

During his speech, Trump attacked both the 1619 Project—a New York Times Magazineinitiative created by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones focusing on slavery and the key role of Black people in building the country—and Howard Zinn, the iconic historian and author of the seminal best-selling 1980 book A People’s History of the United States.

Trump said the 1619 Project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

“The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” Trump said of recent racial justice protests. “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”

Zinn believed just the opposite—that teaching the truth about U.S. history is the best way to fight propaganda.

“We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them,” he toldDemocracy Now! a year before he died at age 87 in 2010. “We should be honest about the history of our country.”

Critics accused the president of whitewashing history in his speech. Trump discussed the “legacy of America’s founding” without mentioning the critical fact that the nation was largely established and maintained through genocidal “extermination”—Thomas Jefferson’s word—of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black people, and enduring white supremacy.

The president also lauded the Founding Fathers without noting that many of them owned slaves and called for—and perpetrated—genocide against Native Americans. He lionized the nation’s founding documents without acknowledging the hypocrisy inherent in proclaiming that “all men are created equal” while denying equality to the majority of the nation’s people. He uplifted police as “the universal symbol of the rule of law” while ignoring policing’s slave-hunting roots.

Also speaking at Thursday’s event was Wilfred M. McClay, whose book, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, will form the basis for Trump’s taxpayer-funded “patriotic” curriculum. According to Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin, the book “ignores most social movements” and gives “the silent treatment to the long struggle for Black freedom.”

McClay bashed A People’s History, claiming it and other material from the Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a free resource for educators to teach history from a people’s perspective—are “snuck under the door of unsuspecting teachers.”

ZEP and numerous educators fired back a series of tweets defending the project and accusing the president of spreading “McCarthy-like” and “fascist” ideas.

We don't have to sneak @ZinnEdProject lessons under the doors of teachers, because a growing number of educators–now over 100,000 that have downloaded lessons–want to teach a people's history and teach for Black lives. https://t.co/RLHRmUIjga

— Jesse Hagopian (@JessedHagopian) September 18, 2020

"Zinn's book is full of ideas inciting riots this year." — White House conference today.

So what explains the rebellions in 1676, 1680, 1786, 1831, 1859, & more by Native Americans, enslaved Africans, coal miners, & more? #HowardZinn wasn't alive then. https://t.co/XAR6ZO5L3k

— Zinn Ed Project (@ZinnEdProject) September 17, 2020

The writing of Howard Zinn makes history come alive. The droning, highly medicated fascism of Donald Trump is deadening. It’s history for people who prefer steel toed boots to books.

— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) September 18, 2020

Education historian Diane Ravitch excoriated Trump in a Friday blog post, noting his impotency to actually institute his patriotic education plan and doubting whether the president has ever even read either of the nation’s founding documents.

“Remember that he repeatedly claimed that Article II of the Constitution allows the president to do whatever he wants. Clearly he has never read Article II,” wrote Ravitch.

“Do you think he knows that federal law prohibits any federal official from interfering with curriculum or instruction in the schools? Obviously not, but if he knew, he wouldn’t care since he is convinced that he is above the law,” she added.

Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the University of San Francisco School of Education, told Common Dreams in an email that Trump’s remarks were but the latest attempt by conservatives to paint critical learning as “divisive, un-American, biased, and inflammatory.”

“Not surprisingly, it is this whitewashed curriculum that often gets framed as objective and neutral, whereas efforts to raise awareness about the discomforting realities of race and racism get framed as, in Trump’s words, ‘toxic propaganda,'” he said, also noting the administration’s recent directive banning federal funding of diversity and anti-discrimination training.

Responding to Trump’s attacks, Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project said that “the efforts by the president of the United States to use his powers to censor a work of American journalism by dictating what schools can and cannot teach and what American children should and should not learn should be deeply alarming to all Americans who value free speech.”

Hannah-Jones also took to Twitter to respond to Trump’s attacks, noting that there wasn’t a single Black historian at his American history conference.

Kushner rejected federal action to help states, calling pandemic shortages “their problem”: report

A new exposé suggests that Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser and son-in-law of President Donald Trump, pushed back against taking federal action to address medical supply shortages and help the Democratic-led state of New York as the coronavirus pandemic accelerated over a belief that free markets should “solve” the problem.

Kushner enlisted a former roommate to lead what Vanity Fair described as a “Consultant State” — a countervailing force to the fugazi “Deep State” — while simultaneously dismissing proposals from corporate and industrial leaders in the early days of the pandemic response.

A bipartisan group of government and private sector officials came together at the White House on March 20, according to the report. Nearly 20,000 Americans had been diagnosed with COVID-19 at the time, and at least 260 had died.

Dozens of major companies, including General Motors, committed to manufacturing ventilators, distributing supplies, creating a contact tracing system and more. They only needed the administration to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA).

Kushner, who had taken the reigns of a shadow coronavirus task force, was not present. Senior administration officials “implored” the group to consult him. An observant Jew, Kushner normally does not work during Shabbat, which is when this meeting occurred. (He reportedly gets a “rabbinic dispensation” to exempt him from key public work.)

The next day, Kushner joined. He “stunned” many attendees, according to the report. Here is how they described the meeting to Vanity Fair:

Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”

The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state . . . His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

“That’s when I was like, ‘We’re screwed,'” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.

The group pressed Kushner to invoke the DPA. “We were all saying, ‘Mr. Kushner, if you want to fix this problem for PPE and ventilators, there’s a path to do it,'” one attendee told Vanity Fair. “But you have to make a policy change.”

Kushner, who allegedly grew “very aggressive,” told the group that it “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.” An attendee told Vanity Fair that the arguments “made no sense.”

“It felt like Kushner was the president,” the attendee told the outlet. “He sat in the chair, and he was clearly making the decisions.”

Though Trump nominally invoked the DPA the following week, he did not apply the act to any supplies. He attacked GM’s CEO in a tweet saying, “Always a mess with Mary B.” The government announced its first order of GM ventilators on April 8.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Vanity Fair that the story was “another inaccurate and disgusting partisan hit job.”

“President Trump has consistently put the health of all Americans first,” she said.

However, audio tapes surfaced last week of Trump’s on-the-record conversations with veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward. The president acknowledged on tape Feb. 7 that the coronavirus was “more deadly” than “even your strenuous flus.”

Trump later admitted to downplaying the threat to the American public in order to prevent “panic.” That admission came March 19 — two days before Kushner met with the private sector coalition.

The same Vanity Fair reporter revealed in July that Kushner had commissioned a federal testing plan, which was soon aborted. A public health expert close to the White House coronavirus task force told the outlet that the reason for dropping the plan was “the political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors and that would be an effective political strategy.”

The U.S. appears poised to easily pass 200,000 official COVID-19 deaths by the end of the month. The country comprises 4% of the world’s population but 20% of global coronavirus deaths.

In August, with COVID-19 deaths topping 170,000, Kushner described the government response as a “success story,” a phrase which he had also deployed to describe his performance in an interview four months and 110,000 deaths earlier.

A person who attended the March 21 meeting told Vanity Fair that the group of private sector representatives had even built out a proposal for contact tracing.

“We had a real system for contact tracing, the world’s best mobile engineers on standby,” the person said. “There was a real opportunity to have a coordinated response.”

“We had so much potential to commandeer against this.”

Lessons from the gig economy for transforming public services

Even before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, major upheavals were taking place in the UK labour market. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of people working for online platforms such as Deliveroo and TaskRabbit doubled from 4.7% of the adult population to 9.6% — the equivalent of 5.5 million people. Lockdown caused these trends to escalate still more sharply as a housebound population switched en masse to ordering goods online.

For many, the growth of the platform economy is cause for concern. But I believe the principles of platform technology could be used by governments to transform the way public services are delivered, taking advantage of the way that they efficiently connect users with the services that they want. Under municipal control, or through public-private partnerships, platforms could transform service delivery to citizens.

Colleagues and I surveyed 28,000 people across Europe in our research on the platform economy. In the UK, we measured changes between 2016 and 2019 not just among those working for platforms but also their customers. During that period those using online apps for taxi services rose from 15.6% to 30.6%, while those using online platforms for household services (such as cleaning, gardening or household repairs) went up from 23.8% to 31.4%.

One big surprise was the profile of these customers. Expecting to find a picture of the better-off having their needs supplied by poorer people, we actually found a much more universal distribution across income brackets. Although 44% of the richest quarter of the population used platforms, so did 30% of people with middling incomes and even 22% of the poorest quarter.

Furthermore, people working for online platforms were also very likely to be customers for them too. In 2019, while 31% of the population used app-based taxi services and 5.2% worked to provide these taxi services, no less than 4.8% of the population were both taxi users and drivers. Similarly, while 31% bought online household services and 5.5% worked to provide them, 4.9% were doing both.

Vicious cycle

What seems to be happening is that people are turning to apps to obtain services they have no time to carry out for themselves: ordering a meal from Deliveroo or Uber Eats because they are too tired to cook, or paying for household chores they have no time to do for themselves.

But that leaves them even more short of cash, giving them an incentive to look for extra work, which they may well find with an online platform — work that is generally both precarious and poorly paid, leaving them with even less free time. Online platforms are part of a vicious cycle in which time poverty chases money poverty. This has been exacerbated by the effects of austerity, which has deprived people of many services they relied on in the past, ranging from respite care to meals-on-wheels, creating even more demands for housework.

Online platforms are often seen as villains: depriving workers of basic employment rights and security while giving little back to local communities. Expert tax avoiders, they leave it to others to pay for infrastructure, training and health. Very little of the 20-25% cut of the value of each transaction they typically take ends up in the local economy. Instead, complex international tax avoidance schemes result in most of the profits disappearing overseas.

Reinventing the welfare state

But what if platform technologies could be used to reverse this vicious cycle? Might they help to build new kinds of digitally-managed services in a 21st century version of the welfare state that has become so battered in recent years? Could they be the key to developing new models that promote better work-life balance and improve working conditions for gig workers while also contributing to the reduction of waste and addressing the climate emergency?

I discuss ways that locally-controlled online platforms might be able to do just that in my new book, Reinventing the Welfare State. For example, the kinds of algorithms that connect workers with customers at short notice could be used to supply social care in response to the real needs of clients rather than the existing rushed and rigid predetermined 15-minute care slots. Or they could be used to provide transport to get patients to hospital appointments or children to school and give people fresh nutritious meals at home, combining free services to those who are eligible with paid-for ones, using voucher systems.

Platform technology could also help make a reality of sustainable food strategies, like this one in Bristol. Local producers could use the platform to supply food to hospitals and schools, leftover perishable food could be delivered to food banks and new food businesses could be encouraged. You could even use them to share surplus produce from your allotment.

Democratically controlled and responsive to local residents, platforms could provide a way to give workers decent jobs and citizens the services they actually want, when they want them.

Ursula Huws, Professor of Labour and Globalisation, University of Hertfordshire

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

“PEN15” returns for another swim into the messiness of seventh grade

Maya and Anna, the two best friends at the center of “PEN15,” each wear half of a broken heart around their necks, the classic “best friends forever” pendant recognized by women of all ages. Of course, that pendant is also a representation of what “PEN15” is all about. In a very real way, the girls are as close as sisters, making their relationships beautiful and perilous. In the first season, when a fight temporarily fractured their relationship, Anna took her family troubles to an unfriendly listener, the most popular girl in class. But Maya keeps secrets from Anna too, including the fact that she’s started menstruating.

Living through middle school means surviving what feels like eons of awkwardness and confusion imprinting themselves on your body and soul. Time graduates us from those grades, but a part of us never leaves its psychological hellhole. And this nagging, sometimes crippling feeling is precisely what Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle and Sam Zvibleman tap into uproariously with “PEN15.”

But for Erskine’s and Konkle’s barely adolescent alter-egos Maya and Anna, seventh grade is about to get a whole lot tougher to navigate. Anna’s and Maya’s developing sexual awareness continues to be at odds with their lingering innocence; Maya still wears Care Bears t-shirts unironically, and treats her body as if it were a hopper ball whenever she secretly and enthusiastically masturbates.

Anna harbors a crush on the coolest boy in the grade, and she’s invisible to him. Actually, it’s crueler than that: there are times that the girls take chances by being painfully vulnerable and open, only to be crushed or told in so many words, some terrible, that they’re undesirable. Rejection is a true bruiser to the most emotionally stalwart adults, but to a teenage girl it’s shattering.

That means Maya and Anna’s struggles to navigate this discordant space between childhood and adolescence grow more acute, as the protective bubble of mutual validation they’ve created around each other is popped time and again by outside forces.

For all the lighthearted, nostalgia-steeped fun “PEN15” plays with, it sows a lot of its laughter in the fertile soil of vicarious horror and embarrassment we’ve all felt at some time or another, regardless of whether we entered our teenage years in the early ‘aughts, when the series is set. In that regard, the series uses era-specific details evocatively without piling on the references like so many cheap triggers.

A passage that kicks off with the girls trying to watch an episode of the Nickelodeon series “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” transitions into the pair’s innocuous foray into witchcraft. Girls of all ages engage in this harmless fantasy — some for the sheer fun of it, some to seize some sense of power in the face of situations over which they feel powerless. Anna and Maya stumble upon their makeshift approximation of Wicca when their after-school TV viewing is interrupted by a loud, crashing argument between Anna’s parents. But “PEN15” never keeps things serious for too long, and soon enough their madcap spellcasting gets out of control and has Maya speaking in tongues, eyes rolling back in her head.

Middle school can be hell for a lot of reasons, but the way Season 2 digs into its saddest side — by tuning in to the background noise previously overpowered by the loud love song of friendship — brings out new shading in a show that was already unique. Anna’s rupturing home life intrudes on her angst over schoolyard crushes and a rumor mill powered by slut-shaming, but those problems still share a front seat because that’s the way the teen brain works.

But it also touches off a rebellious streak in Maya that cracks open the door to the stage of life when children begin to detach from and even reject their parents. This is one of the ways that “PEN15” broadens its point of view beyond those of its two gawky heroines to grant a richly developed empathetic look at their parents and peers.

Maya’s parents may be married, but with her musician father on the road most of the time, her mother Yuki (Mutosuko Erskine, the star’s actual mom) is left to raise her and her brother Shuji (Dallas Liu) on her own. And Yuki often struggles to be patient with her loud, rambunctious daughter, which Maya interprets as her mother loving her less than her brother.

Elsewhere, Maya and Anna’s male classmates are just as perplexed about this stage of life as they are, particularly Maya’s bandmate Sam (Taj Cross), whom she rejected after he confessed his feelings to her at a school dance; and Gabe (Dylan Gage), who isn’t clear on his feelings for anyone — possibly even his own close friends.

Attention from the opposite sex can be validating, befuddling, or deeply cruel, and platonic relationships at that age are no less complicated. Lingering around Maya and Anna is an ever-present despair in their shared realization that they won’t always be equals – and in very real ways, they’ve already begun the process of growing in different directions but not necessarily apart. The first season brushes upon this at a seventh-grade dance, with the second season resuming that interlude by way of a school play.

Erskine and Konkle confidently evince the tortured middle school state of mind along with their characters’ ungainly immaturity through the mere act of shoving their 30-something bodies into 13-year-old characters.

Skillful costuming certainly helps here, along with the fact that Erskine and Konkle physically pull off this age well enough for newcomers to the series to be shocked at the fact that its stars are actually 33. That’s not to say they look like school-aged kids; you can tell they’re adults acting like the actual young teenagers surrounding them. They’re also playing their roles with complete sincerity, so it works.

Slap some braces on Konkle and flatten out her hair, and she transforms into that gawky wallflower many of us were, or sort of remember – Anna is that girl whose growth spurt kicked in before everyone else’s, the one the boys aren’t sure how to contend with. Erskine’s Maya is an explosion of unrestrained feelings and flailing, rubbery limbs capped by an embarrassing homegrown bowl cut.

For all their insecurities, Maya and Anna insistently see the world with them at the center of it, painting “PEN15” with a level of confidence that makes the laugh land squarely and the pain hit with equal force. Zvibleman, who directs the seven Season 2 episodes currently streaming (the second half is due next year), has a way of capturing the impact of a careless comment as it hits the characters squarely across the jaw; while the stars excel at telegraphing each wallop through their expressions so as to make the audience hurt right alongside them.

No development bring this out more often than Maya and Anna’s too-sudden friendship with a classmate named Maura (Ashlee Grubbs) who drops into their lives out of nowhere and mounts a campaign to insinuate herself into the duo as their third best friend. Really, though, she’s trying to unseat Maya from the throne Anna’s affections, even to the point of othering her by making racist comments about Maya’s Japanese mother.

But Maura has all the right clothes and tosses around cool kid slang the girls incorporate into their vocabulary, along with other terms they shouldn’t be saying, and her assault of kindness and Maya and Anna’s desperation to be liked draws them into her web. Of course, Maura’s life isn’t anywhere near perfection, and is certainly no closer to that undefinable ideal than Maya’s or Anna’s; being 12 or 13, none of them know what to do about that or whether to trust their feelings.

And this, I suppose, is the singular hook of this show . . . along with the spontaneous choreography, its gleeful treatment of bodily functions, and the girls’ celebration of sugar and glitter. If a side effect of our modern age is the nostalgic yearning to return to an imagined innocence of a romanticized past, then “PEN15” is a kindly reminder to thank our lucky stars that there’s no going back.

The show’s enduring sweetness always rested in Maya and Anna’s glorious gawkiness, and the way it cements their devotion to one another. Now, it confirms that notion that not even the supposedly cool kids had great lives. They were simply better at masking their pain, or they had better accessories. Appearing cool is a lot easier if you have stuff that other kids desire or want access to.

And in this way, the show helps us feel better about those cringeworthy memories we wish weren’t embossed on our consciousness. Challenging as adulthood can be in 2020, at least we don’t have to go back to our teens.

The first half of Season 2 of “PEN15,” and all of Season 1, are currently streaming on Hulu. The back half of the second season is set to debut in 2021.

Is Halloween cancelled? Experts debate if kids can trick-or-treat safely

Trick-or-treating is a Halloween rite of passage for American children, and an event that kids (and some teens) look forward to for months. Now, with no signs of the pandemic slowing, parents and kids are wondering whether trick-or-treating can be done in a safe manner that prevents transmission of the novel coronavirus.

“Quite frankly, it will not be the same situation all across the country. In other words there will be different states that are in different positions, as far as COVID-19,” Howard Beige, board member of the Halloween & Costume Association and executive vice president of Rubie’s Costume Company, told Salon.

In response to this, the Halloween & Costume Association collaborated with the Harvard Global Health Institute to create an interactive website that allows Americans to figure out the COVID-19 risk level in their county so they can decide whether they feel safe allowing their children to trick-or-treat and how to go about it if they do.

“We have the map, so people can kind of assess their risk level,” Aneisha McMillan, marketing director of the Halloween & Costume Association, told Salon. “And then from that, there’s a bunch of suggestions based on what color zone a person falls in. And then that way they can kind of make their own educated decisions on how they best want to celebrate.”

Of course, if parents do let their children trick or treat, the next big question is how that can happen safely. Experts say that it is possible — meaning Halloween isn’t cancelled just yet.

“I think the first step in that is at a minimum, no matter what the final decision is, you have to adhere to the CDC guidelines,” Dr. Russell Medford, chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon. “Children have to be supervised when they’re out. Large crowds is not a good idea. They need to wear masks and maintain distance and avoid contact with other people as they’re going from house to house.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, expressed similar views.

“For one thing, kids should definitely go trick or treating this year,” Gandhi wrote to Salon. “We know how to protect kids and adults; it is by facial masking. There were no convincing increases in cases from places which can mask. So, since we have already taken so much away from kids this year, they should go trick or treating.”

She added, though, that “we do not know the ability of rubber or plastic to block viral particles. To be safe, I would recommend a simple two-ply cotton or surgical mask underneath the rubber or plastic costume mask to cover the nose and mouth when trick or treating. Or you can cover the outside of the rubber/plastic mask with fabric but that may hurt the look! A costume mask will NOT interfere with a cotton mask covering.”

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, felt that in-person trick or treating is a bad idea in 2020.

“I would suggest families plan for virtual Halloween this year,” Benjamin wrote to Salon. “Kids can dress up a do FaceTime, zoom or other virtual events with families and friends.” He recommended that they have “healthy snack and food options, fun foods and events like pumpkin carving contests, etc.” For parents who do decide to send their children out, “they need to wear masks and use hand sanitizer frequently. Contactless snack handouts is difficult. But I don’t recommend going door to door this year or [having] face to face parties.”

Regardless of whether you follow Gandhi’s or Benjamin’s approach, one thing is clear: Trick or treating, like so many other things we took for granted before 2020, will have to be reevaluated.

“I think in this COVID-19 environment that we live in, and I think for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to make decisions based on science and public health recommendations not only to maintain safety, but also to conduct our lives,” Medford told Salon. “It’s the balance between society functioning and the protections that we need from a health and safety standpoint to conduct our activities in society.”

He added, “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a zero risk scenario for any of us, except for complete social isolation, never come in contact with anyone else. However, if we’re going to live in the world, we say we have to make decisions that are conservative but are based on risk.”

Rainn Wilson opens up about life, death, “Blackbird” and being “#blessed”

Rainn Wilson is one of only a handful of performers to have created a television character so iconic it’s a Halloween costume. It’s also a bobble head, and about a thousand memes. In real life, Wilson, who says he “lucked into” the role of Dwight Schrute in NBC’s “The Office” (2005-2013), is a three-time Emmy nominee, a director, an entrepreneur and an author.

For his latest project, Wilson costars with Academy Award winners Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet in “Blackbird,” a new film about a family reunion weekend with a twist. Wilson spoke to Salon recently about what drew him to director Roger Mitchell’s assisted suicide drama, why young people love “The Office” and where in the celebrity Venn diagram he and Leonardo DiCaprio overlap.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s talk about the “Blackbird” story. It’s about a very controversial issue, a very divisive one and a very personal one — the right to die, told from the perspective of one family, one woman. You’re a very philosophical guy. Is this something that you’ve been involved with or curious about before?

No. I simply was sent a script and they said, “They’d like to make you an offer. And in this movie you are going to be married to Kate Winslet and you are going to have a sex scene with her.” I was like, “Sign me up. I don’t even care what the hell this movie is about. It could be about the invention of gravy and it wouldn’t even matter to me.”

But in all seriousness, when I read the script, it was about this issue, assisted suicide, and it approached it with such deftness and nuance and sensitivity and humor and love that I couldn’t help but be moved by it. I just teared up like crazy and laughed like crazy reading the script. I just wanted to be a part of it.

Your character, Michael, is so interesting because he’s the in-law, he’s the outsider to a degree. And yet in many ways watching it, I felt like he was very parallel with Susan Sarandon’s character, Lily. There’s a part in particular where the type of person who does this is described as very methodical and controlling, and in many ways that’s also your character.

Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in that way, but yeah, that could be. Susan Sarandon plays the matriarch, gathering the family around her for this time when she knows she’s going to take her own life after battling ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. [There are] her daughters, played by Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska, and her husband, Sam Neill. We bring our kid, and there’s a couple other partners that come to visit.

My character I loved because of his journey. Michael is a lawyer. He’s pretty preppy. He’s like a Volvo-driving, kind of uptight Manhattan lawyer, and kind of a doofus. But over the course of the film, he really finds himself. He finds his voice. He kind of gets to the root of his marriage with Kate Winslet’s character and finds how to be a better father and is more emotionally kind of grounded.

And that’s really what death does, isn’t it? It provides a lens for people to grow. It allows a perspective on our lives and allows for transformation, and that’s what this film does so beautifully. This isn’t a film about death. This is a film about life, and this death that’s at the center of the film really just highlights the amount of humor and love and connection and family that is in the story.

You used the word love, and I was thinking as you were talking about a moment near the end of the film when Susan Sarandon’s character, Lily, says, “Love is all there is.” In the same way that death transforms you, love transforms you.

That’s why we need a film like this and stories like this more than ever in a world that’s so divided, where love has kind of absented itself. This gets to the heart of that. It’s not just a family loving each other. It’s like life is so incredibly precious.

My father passed away in early August, not that long ago, and it was heartbreaking and grief-filled and tragic. It has gotten me thinking every day about how precious life is, how precious my family is, how precious all of humanity is and our gorgeous, glorious, troubled planet at the same time.

Again, it’s a lens into our humanity. Like the Native American saying, “Today’s a good day to die.” Both the Native Americans used to say that and the stoic Romans used to say that. It frames life. It shows us what’s important.

I’m so sorry for your loss. My condolences to you and your family. It’s very meaningful to see a film like this right now at this particular moment because we are such a death-denying culture. It is still very taboo.

What did you do to prepare? Did you research the topic so you thought, “I want to have my own decisive opinion about the right to die movement”?

Susan Sarandon certainly did a great deal of research. She met people who were suffering with ALS, and learned a lot about the symptoms of it and the trajectory of the experience of heading towards death from that particular disease. We met with nurses and hospice care workers, and we saw some very interesting videos and read some interesting articles.

But at the end of the day, it’s not so much about the research on whatever it is that you do, it’s about the character and it’s the journey you’re going on the character. How does Michael start and how does Michael end, and what does he do along the way? That’s where the real research has to be done by an actor: it’s in the heart, it’s in the psychology, it’s in the guts. I’m not saying this to sound fancy or anything like that, but that’s what every actor has to do when they’re doing a movie, even if it’s a lighter comedy or a really heavy drama. But especially in a drama like this, a drama that has comedy, you want to see where you’re going and where you’re headed.

This wasn’t a movie where my character was that involved in euthanasia or assisted suicide or anything like that, so it really was about who am I and what’s my relationship to my wife, to my in-laws, to my son, and what needs to be explored over the storytelling, over the arc of these 100 minutes or so of the movie.

Your character really bookends this story. You bring us into this story and you bring us out of it. We see that over the course of just the span of a few days you have become someone else and you have shown yourself to be someone else to your family.

The film begins with our family driving up to the house. You see one part of our characters in one way. And then at the very end of the movie, we’re driving away from the house and you see our characters in a very different way. And you’re like, “Wow, there’s a real transformation that was made here.” There was something turned inside. There was some internal event in these characters that caused them to mature and see the world in a slightly different way.

Can we talk about “Utopia“? This story is disturbingly of our moment right now. I’m curious what it feels like for you watching the last several months in our world unfold, having been part of this story.

“Utopia” is a conspiracy theory thriller with some science fiction elements and some dark humor. It’s about these comic book nerds who are obsessed with this graphic novel that contains the secrets to the possible destruction of the Earth. And part of that destruction has to do with viruses being released into the population. My character is a virologist. I’m a doctor. I don’t appear [until] a little bit later as you go along in the series.

It mirrors what’s happening in the real world in an uncanny fashion. It’s just crazy when this stuff started happening. We wrapped that in September, and then in Wuhan, the virus was starting to manifest itself in December just a couple months after we had wrapped. They were just starting the editing process when the virus was off.

By March, the world had shut down and I was texting Gillian Flynn, the showrunner, like, “Can you believe this?” This is insane that we’ve just shot this show about a global pandemic, about viruses, about vaccines being rushed to market. Who’s the bad guy? Who’s behind it? Conspiracies echoing out from in every which way. It’s absolutely remarkable how this show has mirrored real life.

Having just gone through a fictional pandemic, what must it have been like for you to then experience a real one?

It was really trippy. It was really trippy to be shooting scenes with the hazmat suits and with body bags and people in tents, and then similar stuff happening around the globe. It was jaw-dropping. It was chilling.

That being said, our show is entertaining. It’s fun, it’s light, it’s zany, it’s crazy. It’s different enough from the real world that I don’t think anyone is going to watch it and have some kind of PTSD trauma response.

You are also tapped for “The Power, ” another very strange, dystopian, futuristic but funny story. It seems like you are making choices that explore these big picture, life and death issues, ethical issues, moral issues, but through the prism of deep humor. What is happening now, that it feels like this path is really opening up for you?

I wish that I could say that I had some control over this, as if I met with my agents and was like, “I only want to do exciting science fiction projects that have to do with life’s biggest questions and issues. Let’s just go down that path, shall we?” I just lucked out and I happened into some really cool projects, including “Utopia” and “The Power,” which they had shot about a third of [before] I was getting ready to jump on a plane to go shoot it and they had to pull the plug because of the pandemic. That should be picking up this winter in London. It’s a terrific script and project.

I’m lucky the way that my path has gone as an actor. Any actor will tell you this: it’s just such a roll of the dice. Yeah, we work hard, and you try and develop your skills, and you try and be as good an actor as possible. But there’s plenty of actors just as skilled as me that didn’t get a chance to play Dwight Schrute and haven’t gotten a chance to do great projects like “Utopia” and “Blackbird.”

I started in the theater. When you’re in the theater, you play all kinds of different roles. You’re not typecast. You don’t only play this one thing, like, “This guy only does Molière comedies with giant shoes.” You play different things as needed: drama, comedy, classics, heightened language, contemporary, experimental. I did ten years of theater in New York before I did any TV or film and then lucked into “The Office.” And so I’ll just continue to play character roles, continue to play drama or comedy or Shakespeare or whatever they need me to do to help tell fantastic stories.

You’re also doing other projects as well, talking about climate change, writing a book. Are you planning any more of those kinds of things?

I did this show, “An Idiot’s Guide to Climate Change,” that’s on the SoulPancake YouTube channel. You can see that about my little trip to Greenland and my trip to and trek to meet Greta Thunberg. That’s a lot of fun and it’s a fun introduction to climate change issues, and I still work with the groups there. Arctic Basecamp is the nonprofit that I’m on the advisory board of, and I help them fundraise and awareness-raise. We’re hosting a big press conference, some virtual events this winter. It’s a topic that I’m extremely passionate about.

And I’m continuing to write stuff, some screenplays and some comedy and also some spirituality. I have wide-ranging interests. I’m just #blessed — I’m telling you, #blessed — that I get to do all of this crazy stuff. Truly, truly lucky.

You mentioned Dwight, and of course he is an iconic figure. It feels like the last few months that show has meant even more to people, because maybe for the first time we actually miss our offices.

Although the people that watch the show have never even been in an office. Most of the people that watch the show are teens and tweens and college students. The show has taken on a life of its own. Young people have watched it eight, 10, 12, 15 times. It’s astonishing how it’s taken off, and people love it and it’s brought them a lot of solace. But I think it’s about family. Isn’t everything really about family? “The Office” is this crazy, dysfunctional family, and people love it. The quirky characters remind them of their own families, and they want to go live with this family, and they get to do it in 22-minute increments.

It all comes back to family, which is where we are with “Blackbird.” Rainn, it is such a beautiful, beautiful film. And you do get to have wild sex with Kate Winslet.

Right? It’s like, me and Leo. That’s where Leonardo DiCaprio and Rainn Wilson cross.

“Blackbird” is in selected theaters now and available to stream on various platforms, including Vudu.

CDC softened school reopening guidelines criticized in fringe group’s letter to President Trump

Quack medical opinions promoted by a right-wing organization appear to have influenced federal guidelines for reopening schools amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The month after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published its initial guidelines for school reopenings, President Donald Trump received a letter bashing the recommendations from a group known as the Tea Party Patriots (TPP)

The group, which has raised a combined $24 million for conservatives since 2014, is behind a website called the “Second Opinion Project,” where doctors espousing marginal medical opinions attack mainstream scientific consensus on the new coronavirus. The TPP was also the organizing force behind America’s Frontline Doctors, a fringe collection of medical professionals who drew fierce backlash in July for a viral video promoting scientifically inaccurate information about the virus. One doctor in the video, later revealed to have preached that diseases are caused by dream sex with demons, falsely claimed that scientists were developing a vaccine to destroy a gene in the human brain associated with religion.

Recently, Democratic senators have demanded an investigation into whether administration officials pressured the CDC to soften its school reopening guidelines in service of the president’s political interests. While many of the talking points in the TPP letter are shared by a number of other conservative think tanks, the letter was not only published on the group’s website but also sent directly to President Donald Trump at the White House.

Trump admitted in private to journalist Bob Woodward that he had purposely downplayed the risks posed by the looming pandemic in order to avoid creating a public panic, even though he had long known the coronavirus was “deadly stuff.” This included acknowledging the threat it posed to young people.

“Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old — older,” Trump told Woodward on March 19. “Young people, too — plenty of young people.”

The president publicly said as recently as Aug. 5 that children were “almost immune.”

“While Donald Trump was downplaying the pandemic and calling children ‘COVID stoppers,’ he acknowledged behind closed doors that children were just as vulnerable to the virus. Trump knew rushing schools to re-open was dangerous. Still, he did it anyway, because he thought gambling away their health could help him win re-election,” Kyle Morse, a spokesperson from Democratic PAC American Bridge 21st Century, told Salon. “With lives hanging in the balance, Donald Trump is now doctoring reports and trying to cover up just how bad infection rates among school-aged children has become. Trump views students and teachers as political pawns, and we cannot trust him with one more day — let alone four more years.”

The New York Times revealed Thursday that CDC scientists had not written a controversial guideline released last month saying it was not necessary to test individuals without symptoms of COVID-19 — even if they had been exposed to the virus. The guideline from the Department of Health and Human Services was reportedly “dropped” into the agency’s website against protocol and the objections of CDC experts.

In mid-May, the CDC published its first road map for reopening the economy — including child-care, restaurants and mass transit — which warned that some institutions should remain closed. The CDC laid out a number of social distancing policies for schools: staggered arrival times; desks at least 6 feet apart, facing the same direction; eating lunch in classrooms; face coverings for all staff; and daily temperature checks for everyone.

Two weeks later, the TPP wrote to Trump demanding a “top to bottom” overhaul as it , criticized those safety recommendations:

We have reviewed these “considerations,” and find them wholly out of touch with the way people live in the real world that is America in 2020. They are totally unworkable, and we urge senior officials to review and revise these new CDC “considerations” to bring them into line with how real people live. […] The CDC “considerations” are entirely inappropriate, and must be rewritten from top to bottom.

The letter (available in full here) went on to make a number of recommendations which ultimately found their way into the CDC’s school reopening guidelines published on July 23. As CNN noted, that guidance came down “hard in favor of opening schools.” Some of the recommendations from the TPP included the following:

Eliminate disinfection and cleaning protocols

Drop recommendation to wear face coverings

Remove “dystopian” suggestions to reconfigure classrooms for social distancing

Get rid of “impossible” suggestions to stagger school schedule or create small groups

Include importance of schools in delivering nutrition to children

Emphasize low risk posed by COVID-19 to children

The TPP was not the only non-medical conservative group whose recommended changes found their way into CDC guidelines. As Trump attacked the CDC, conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, published their own reopening recommendations. Members of the same groups were also appointed to Trump’s Coronavirus Reopening Task Force.

Politico posited in a July 8 article that Trump’s drive to reopen the country’s schools was also about the economy and his re-election odds as “the issues are interlinked”:

With children out of the house, they argue, parents can more easily return to work and juice the economy — something even the president’s allies consider a necessity for Trump to win re-election. And with Trump’s sagging poll numbers against presumptive 2020 rival Joe Biden, aides also hope the campaign for in-person schooling will play well with the female and suburban voters the president needs to remain in office.

In early July, the president vowed to personally intervene as he blasted the CDC’s guidelines as “very tough & expensive.”

“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” Trump tweeted on July 7.

Vice President Mike Pence joined the fight, saying at a press conference that day that Trump did not want the CDC guidance to create reopening “barriers.”

The original recommendations emphasized caution: “The more people a student or staff member interacts with, and the longer that interaction, the higher the risk of COVID-19 spread.” They also laid out a risk table for distancing scenarios, ranging from complete virtual learning to “full sized, in-person classes, activities and events” with students “not spaced apart.”

The TPP letter claimed those “strange” recommendations were so extreme that they could only be implemented through “the use of force”:

You’re going to enforce social distancing on a playground or in gym class? Impossible. You’re going to order children not to use the jungle gyms, the slides, the horizontal ladders, and the carousels, because they cannot be disinfected between each use? And we are expected to believe this will succeed without the use of force? Try telling a nine-year-old he can’t climb on the horizontal ladders, or a five-year-old she can’t use the slide. Good luck with that.

The TPP complained about the inefficiencies of sanitizing surfaces. It also wanted the CDC to emphasize that children were unlikely to get sick and spread the disease. In addition to reflecting those concerns, the revised CDC guidelines emphasized another of the group’s qualms: the “social, emotional, and mental health needs of students” that could be impacted by “potential learning loss.”

The letter also inaccurately cited a medical journal report to argue against requirements for face coverings included in the CDC recommendations:

This insistence on masks flies in the face of data, science, and common sense. A study that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 21st reports that masks provide ‘little, if any, protection from infection.’ Furthermore, the possibility of ‘catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal.’ So, why the insistence on masks? The article provides this explanation: ‘In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.’

The authors of that study wrote a clarifying letter to the NEJM pushing back against this misinterpretation, which had become widespread. It read, “In truth, the intent of our article was to push for more masking — not less.”

“We did state in the article that ‘wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection,’ but as the rest of the paragraph makes clear, we intended this statement to apply to passing encounters in public spaces — not sustained interactions within closed environments,” they said.

“We therefore strongly support the calls of public health agencies for all people to wear masks when circumstances compel them to be within 6 feet of others for sustained periods,” the letter added.

Nevertheless, the revised CDC guidelines tempered the mask guidance, saying that while it was “critical” that schools include cloth face coverings as part of a larger strategy, “more research and evaluation is needed” to determine how effective it would be in schools.

The TPP also criticized the CDC’s recommendation that classes configure seating charts so that all students face forward, minimizing face-to-face contact, calling the idea “straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel.” For support, the letter cited an ophthalmologist, or eye doctor, who claimed that the agency’s recommendations would create a “dystopian environment for our children.” Again, the CDC eased its recommendations in this case.

The early guidance also suggested that small groups of students and staff stick together throughout the day as much as possible, including staggered arrival and drop-off times. Those guidelines were also softened after the TPP letter told the president that schools had been intended to “prepare our next generation to be productive members of society – a society that will not always allow for social distancing, staggered scheduling, herding into small groups and the like.”

While influential conservative think tanks combatted the guidance with white papers, the TPP — which has raised tens of millions of dollars for conservative causes — took a more grassroots approach.

Four days after the CDC released its revised guidance, the TPP funded and hosted a press conference in front of the Supreme Court featuring a group called “America’s Frontline Doctors.” Those individuals made false claims about COVID-19 “cures,” and alleged that public health measures such as mask mandates and school closings were ineffective and unnecessary.

One of the speakers, Stella Immanuel, claimed that she had cured 350 COVID-19 patients using a hydroxychloroquine treatment. Immanuel said doctors who refused to use the Trump-backed trherapy, which by that time had its emergency authorization revoked by the Food and Drug Administration, were like the “good Germans who allow the Nazis to kill the Jews.”

Trump and his eldest son, Donald Jr., both shared the video, but social media platforms soon began to strip it from their platforms for violating rules about promoting misinformation related to the pandemic.

Trump, however, called those in the group “very respected doctors.” He specifically singled out Immanuel — who did not receive her medical degree in the U.S. and espoused ridiculous theories, such as that diseases come from “demon sperm” — as having been particularly “spectacular.”

“I thought she was very impressive in the sense that, from where she came — I don’t know what country she comes from — but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients,” the president said.

Immanuel’s practice operates out of a strip mall in suburban Houston.

Trump shared a doctored video of a “racist baby” — now he’s being sued by the parents

President Donald Trump earlier this year shared a doctored video that claimed to depict a “racist” white baby chasing a Black baby — and now he’s getting sued by both sets of the children’s parents.

TMZ reports that the parents are suing Trump for sharing a video of their two children without their permission and “inflicting emotional distress” upon them by misrepresenting an interaction between their children.

The original video, which went viral in 2019, featured a Black toddler running up to a white toddler on the sidewalk and hugging one another. After the two embraced, they both started running down the street, with the white toddler following the Black toddler.

Pro-Trump internet trolls took the tail end of the video and made a parody of a CNN report that claimed that white baby was a racist Trump supporter chasing down the Black baby.

In their lawsuit, the parents claim that Trump tried “to exploit the children’s images for his own purposes and gain” in order to promote “his brand of sensationalism in complete disregard for the truth.” They also accused the makers of the doctored video of debasing something that was originally seen “as the epitome of love and unity.”

Mail ballots cast by Black voters in North Carolina rejected 4 times more than white voters: report

Early voting has started in North Carolina, and many Black voters in the state are already seeing their mail-in ballots getting rejected at a higher rate than white voters.

FiveThirtyEight’s Kaleigh Rogers reports that “Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters” in North Carolina as of Sept. 17.

In total, Black voters have seen 642 of the 13,747 ballots cast rejected, a rejection rate of 4.7 percent. White voters, in contrast, have seen 681 out of 60,954 ballots cast rejected, which is a rejection rate of 1.1 percent.

According to Rogers, “the vast majority of these ballots were rejected because voters made a mistake or failed to fill out the witness information,” although she also notes that these voters can still have these ballots counted because “North Carolina allows for a process called ‘vote curing,’ where voters are notified that there’s a mistake and given a chance to fix their ballot.”

That said, recent data from a Nevada primary showed that less than half of voters who were given that opportunity to correct mistakes on their ballots successfully did so.

Read the whole report here.

Feds admit “Putin’s favorite congressman” offered to pardon Assange if he hid Russian interference

American prosecutors said this week that former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon from President Donald Trump if he agreed to help cover up Russia’s role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

The Daily Beast reports that witness Jennifer Robinson has testified that she attended a meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange in 2017 in which he made a direct quid-pro-quo offer.

Rohrabacher was joined in the meeting by Charles Johnson, a pro-Trump racist internet troll, and the two men led officials at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.

“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said.

The White House has denied that Trump was ever aware of such a scheme, however, and attorneys representing the U.S. government seemed to dispute Rohrabacher’s claims.

“After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim,” The Daily Beast reports. “They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.”

Treasury Department investigating allegations of “rampant racism” at US Mint: report

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department has launched an internal investigation into the U.S. Mint in response to accusations contained in a letter delivered to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin by Black employees back in June.

According to the Journal, which has reviewed the letter, the department has been accused of “rampant racism” that includes a lack of diversity at the executive level and the failure of attorneys at the U.S. Mint to take complaints seriously.

The letter alleges, “several workplace incidents from recent years that the authors said have contributed to mistrust of Mint leadership by many Black workers. These included a white worker who received a settlement after being dismissed for allegedly displaying a noose in the Philadelphia facility, graffiti of the N-word in a Mint restroom and a white Mint executive using the term ‘zoo keeper’ to refer to a Black colleague.”

“Mint employees have tried both anonymously and openly to address the racial tension and disparities, but Mint management has historically worked in tandem with Mint legal counsel to railroad and punish those who oppose racism,” the letter also states.

According to the Journal, the letter was signed by six employees who stated they were representing more Black employees who were afraid to sign on over fear of reprisals.

In response, a Treasury official stated that “although some of the incidents occurred years ago, the Mint was reviewing how it handles such complaints.”

You can read more here (subscription required).

Trump treated the pandemic as “The Apprentice: COVID Edition”: It’s blowing up in his face

It’s hardly new or revelatory to say this, but it’s critical to remember the role that “The Apprentice” played in turning Donald Trump, a notoriously bad businessman with a string of bankruptcies, into an American icon of capitalist success. Everything from careful editing to set designers giving the dreary Trump Organization offices a glow-up came together to create the illusion of success where only failure and mediocrity had been before.

It was an experience so profound for Trump that he did something highly unusual: He learned something. He absorbed the idea that a well-constructed illusion of competence gets you all the benefits of being accomplished, without having to do the hard work of actually achieving anything.

Unfortunately, it was a lesson we are all paying the price for now.

On Thursday evening, the New York Times published an exposé about how the Trump White House forced the CDC to publish dangerously misleading coronavirus testing recommendations on its website.

The new “guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus,” Apoorva Mandavilli writes, noting that actual public health experts at the agency strenuously objected because the virus is often spread by asymptomatic people and vigorous testing is crucial to preventing that.

It’s not hard to see that Trump’s reality TV instincts fueled this effort to discourage coronavirus testing. Trump has made clear from the beginning of this pandemic that he would prefer to leave as many coronavirus cases on the editing-room floor as possible, and he thinks the best way to do that is to keep people from getting tested. Trump truly believes that the best way to get coronavirus numbers down is not by preventing people from getting infected in the first place, but by hiding the true number of cases and juking the stats.

Even during this week’s town hall hosted by ABC News, Trump asserted this belief, claiming that the only reason the U.S. has more 20% of the world’s coronavirus cases (despite having only 4.5% of the world’s population) is that “we do much more testing.”

Of course, the U.S. also has more than 20% of the world’s deaths, a fact that exposes that Trump’s instincts aren’t just immoral, but wrong. Those dead Americans tell the real story of what’s happening, and no amount of trying to monkey with the numbers is going to change that.

Trump is also playing the reality TV game with the vaccine. He has been dropping hints for weeks, reality TV-style, that there will be a shocking and heartwarming twist right before the election, which he clearly views as the penultimate episode of this “season,” in which he will dramatically unveil the vaccine that will save us all and also ensure his re-election. He’s even used CDC resources to prop up this insinuation that the big vaccine reveal is coming, right in the nick of time.

“You could have a very big surprise coming up,” Trump said in a press conference last week.

“We’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date. You know what date I’m talking about,” he added. Gee, I have no idea. What date could he possibly mean?

It’s doubtful that Trump cares, one way or another, that he’s making empty promises. In reality TV, it’s normal to hype some big revelation to lure in viewers for the next episode, only to produce some anticlimactic nothing-burger. All that matters is sucking people in, not delivering them what was promised.

Trump’s playing the same game here. He doesn’t care that there won’t be anything close to a readily available vaccine this year. He just wants to hype that idea long enough to somehow scrape out an election victory, legitimate or otherwise, at which point he’ll not only abandon the idea entirely, but mostly likely interfere with the process of getting one safely on the market.

But of course, trying to deceive people about their own health and lives isn’t just reality TV sleaze. It’s a deeply immoral gambit that appears to have given the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, a minor crisis of conscience. At least Redfield he wasn’t willing to lie to Congress flat out, and told the obvious truth that even if a vaccine is approved this year, it probably won’t be widely available until the middle of 2021. He also encouraged mask-wearing, even though Trump seems to think every mask applied to a face is an eff-you personally directed at him.

Trump, as usual, reacted poorly to someone trying to pierce his poorly constructed illusion of competent leadership. He responded by claiming that Redfield had “made a mistake” and offered “incorrect information.”

This is just another example of Trump treating the leaders of important government institutions not as if they were public servants, but as if they were TV producers whose main job is to clean up Trump’s image, cover for his ignorant mistakes and odious statements, and present him to the public as the brilliant statesman he absolutely is not.

Much has been written about the hard work that it took for the team on “The Apprentice” to conceal Trump’s repugnant personality and mediocrity as a businessman.

“What we did, that was a scam,” Bill Pruitt, a former producer on “The Apprentice,” said in the Netflix documentary “The Confidence Man,” which explored how the people behind that show used TV magic to make Trump seem smart and accomplished.

“If you walked around Trump’s actual office in Trump Tower you’d see the wood’s chipped, and what’s that smell?” Pruitt added, noting, “It wasn’t the empire we were going to have to sell to people. We needed to gussy it up a bit. And we did.”

“Most of us knew he was a fake,” Jonathan Braun, another producer, told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

In a 2017 essay about “The Apprentice,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum wrote that “the Trump of ‘The Apprentice’ receives endless praise, even behind his back. All scandal and debt are erased; Trump’s combative streak is alchemized into Daddy’s tough love.”

For Trump, being a fake success is better than being a real success. For one thing, it’s less work. For another, it feels like cheating the system, and Trump loves to believe he’s doing that. So even with the death toll from the pandemic closing in on 200,000 Americans, Trump still clings to this notion that he doesn’t need to actually do anything about it. He just wants someone to come in and edit reality to make it look like he’s doing something.

While it was undeniably hard work for the team at “The Apprentice” to present this false image of Trump-the-competent-businessman, they at least had the benefit of being able to contain the illusion within the the rectangular frame of the TV screen.

The real world, it turns out, is too big to be captured and controlled in an editing bay. Trump’s increasingly futile efforts to make the pandemic disappear through reality-TV antics keep running up into the biological realities of people who get sicker and sicker, wind up in hospital ICUs and then on respirators, and then die. Trump can’t hide that his management of this crisis has been a total failure, and on some lizard brain level, he seems to to understand that he’s unpopular. That’s why his next big gambit is to try to replace the real election, which he would almost certainly lose, with a fake one where he’s declared the winner.