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Judge blocks “politically motivated” changes at USPS over concerns “voters will be disenfranchised”

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily barred the recent operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) blamed for a nationwide mail slowdown, calling them a “politically motivated attack” that could disenfranchise voters.

Judge Stanley Bastian, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, issued a preliminary nationwide injunction sought by 14 states to prevent the USPS and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top Trump and Republican Party donor, from changing a wide range of policies ahead of Election Day. 

Bastian’s injunction orders the USPS to halt its requirement that trucks leave postal facilities on time, even if they have no mail to load; instructs the agency to reinstall any mail sorting machines needed to ensure the timely handling of election mail; and requires all election mail to be treated as first-class mail.

Bastian, an Obama appointee, cited Trump’s repeated baseless attacks on mail-in voting after a Thursday hearing.

“The states have demonstrated the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

Bastian added that the changes posed “a substantial possibility many voters will be disenfranchised.”

USPS spokesman Dave Partenheimer told the AP that the agency was reviewing its legal options in light of the ruling. He also vowed that “there should be no doubt that the Postal Service is ready and committed to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives.”

Lee Moak, who sits on the USPS Board of Governors, told the outlet that the charge that the operational changes were politically motivated was “completely and utterly without merit.”

The ruling comes after DeJoy announced that he would pause the operational changes through the election amid widespread criticism. Nevertheless, the postmaster general repeatedly balked at reversing the changes that have been blamed for the mail slowdown. The USPS also warned 46 states that mail-in ballots might not be delivered by their deadlines.

The 14 states, led by Washington, sued the agency, arguing that the changes were made without a public comment period and interfered with their ability to run elections.

Department of Justice lawyer Joseph Borson downplayed the effects of the changes on the election.

“There’s been a lot of confusion in the briefing and in the press about what the Postal Service has done,” he said, according to the AP. “The states are accusing us of making changes we have not in fact made.”

Bastian said in his decision that Trump’s attacks on voting by mail undercut the agency’s insistence that the changes would not impact the election.

“Although not necessarily apparent on the surface, at the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions is voter disenfranchisement,” he wrote. “This is evident in President Trump’s highly partisan words and tweets, the actual impact of the changes on primary elections that resulted in uncounted ballots and recent attempts and lawsuits by the Republican National Committee and President Trump’s campaign to stop the states’ efforts to bypass the Postal Service by utilizing ballot drop boxes, as well as the timing of the changes.”

Bastian noted that 72% of the mail sorting machines removed by the USPS were in counties won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, adding that it was “easy to conclude” that the changes were an “intentional effort on the part of the current administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state and federal elections.”

“Substantial evidence has been presented that these transformative changes have been done by the Postal Service, which has made mail delivery slower and less efficient,” he said.

The administration insisted that the changes would not affect the timely delivery of mail ballots, but Bastian noted that he was “personally warned” by the USPS that his family’s ballots may be delayed in a mailer sent by the agency, according to CNN.

“If nothing has changed,” he said, “why did I get a warning from the Postal Service yesterday for my own personal ballot?”

HHS lawyer pushed to gut testing safety rules to help “special interest friends”: Watchdog group

A watchdog group has accused Robert Charrow, the general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, of pushing to ease testing rules to help his former clients in the medical device and diagnostic industry.

Charrow, who was appointed by President Trump in 2017, led the administration’s push to ease rules ensuring the safety of coronavirus diagnostic tests developed by individual labs before HHS Secretary Alex Azar “overruled” Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to revoke their ability to regulate the tests, according to Politico.

“Top HHS officials led by General Counsel Bob Charrow argued for months that the FDA lacked the legal authority required to regulate this particular slice of the testing market, which includes labs located in larger academic medical centers and smaller commercial laboratories, as well as a handful of large corporations,” the outlet reported earlier this week.

Charrow, a veteran attorney who has specialized in cases surrounding federal regulation of health care, previously represented more than a dozen clients in the medical device and diagnostic space, according to his financial disclosure.

Charrow’s former clients included Hologic, which was the first diagnostic firm to receive support from the HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and later received an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for its coronavirus test. In July, the company received $7.6 million from HHS and the Department of Defense to expand its diagnostics.

Charrow’s other former clients in the industry include CVS, which is selling coronavirus tests to employers, and OPKO Health, which announced Phase 2 trials of a coronavirus treatment this week, along with Bracco Diagnostics, Cure Medical, CRH Medical, Genetic Technologies Ltd., Itamar Medical, LGC Limited, LifeBond Inc., MedBridge Healthcare, Medtronic and OrSense Ltd. He has also represented pharmaceutical companies like Teva and Sanofi, which have both received funding from HHS.

“This is the definition of the swamp that President Trump had promised to drain,” said Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the progressive watchdog group Accountable Pharma, in a statement to Salon. Americans are losing trust in the administration, he continued, especially in the face of evidence that “far too many political appointees at Azar’s Department of Health and Human Services care more about helping their special interest friends and allies than protecting patients and families,”

HHS did not respond to questions from Salon.

The department led a months-long pressure campaign against the FDA “urging the agency to abandon its responsibility for ensuring the safety and accuracy of a range of coronavirus tests,” according to the Politico report. The effort alarmed FDA officials who worried that such a move would result in “inaccurate tests … flooding the market” and might undermine efforts to combat the pandemic.

The FDA’s device chief, Jeff Shuren, was excluded from key meetings on the issue while HHS lawyers like Charrow led the push, according to the report.

“Primarily, it was our lawyers advising us that this [review] requirement was illegal,” HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison told the outlet.

But the push alarmed many career officials who expressed concerns about the politicization of public health policy. “I’ve never seen such a complete political overruling of the agency,”a former HHS official told Politico. “It makes me worried about what’s to come.”

Azar ultimately revoked the FDA’s ability to regulate tests developed by individual labs for their own use, despite opposition from FDA head Dr. Stephen Hahn. That decision led to pushback inside the FDA, which has not announced any changes to policy even though HHS published an announcement on its own website.

Earlier in the pandemic, the FDA’s decision to ease testing rules led the agency to grant Emergency Use Authorization for dozens of tests. More than 80 of the 125 tests submitted to the FDA for authorization had “design or validation problems,” according to an article by Shuren and Tim Stenzel, the FDA’s diagnostics chief, published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Politico reported that the push by Charrow echoed a position “long held” by some diagnostic companies despite “fierce resistance” from FDA lawyers and “skepticism” from White House attorneys.

Former Trump FDA chief Scott Gottlieb warned that as a result of the move the “FDA might not be able to provide critical advice to test developers or take needed enforcement actions against bad tests.”

Charrow pushed back on the concerns from medical experts.

“It is false to say that this will lead to unregulated, low quality COVID-19 tests,” he told Politico last month. “Every single COVID-19 test in the United States will still be regulated at the federal level. This simply removes an additional regulatory barrier that was erected in January that at most other times is not required.”

Bloomberg Law previously described Charrow as head of a controversial “dream team” of attorneys at HHS that has taken an “aggressive” approach in pushing political priorities. The team at the department’s Office of General Counsel has been intimately involved in crafting policies that stand to benefit the industry that Charrow previously represented. Charrow has expanded the size of the office by about 100 attorneys since taking over.

Charrow was also involved in pushing for an FDA authorization for chloroquine, a drug hyped by Trump before he switched to its less toxic cousin hydroxycholoroquine, which has since been shown to be ineffective in treating or preventing coronavirus infection.

Charrow sent former BARDA chief Rick Bright an “urgent directive” to make the drug widely available outside of medical settings and without close supervision from doctors, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by Bright after clashing with officials.

The push “raised alarms” inside the FDA, according to the Washington Post, where officials pushed to limit the authorization.

Two current officials confirmed Bright’s claim that Charrow “directly drove the project after Trump spent days in March publicly stumping for his health officials to expand access to the drug,” Politico reported in May.

One former administration official told Bloomberg Law that Charrow feels that he has nothing to lose by taking a more aggressive approach than previous office-holders.

Charrow “plans to make this job the last of his career,” the official said, “so he doesn’t feel the need to make nice with everyone.”

Bill Barr shows his true colors — and they’re terrifying. Honestly, we should have known

One of the greatest lessons of the Trump era is one we should have learned a long time ago. The idea of a Republican establishment made up of straight-arrow, patriotic, All-American “adults” has been a myth for decades now, and it needs to be thrown in the rubbish bin once and for all. There may have been a time when most GOP officials, whether conservative or moderate, were “traditionalists” or “institutionalists” or maybe “constitutionalists,” but that time is long past. Indeed, at this point there is only one Republican among the 53 in the U.S. Senate whom you could even remotely identify as being in that mold: Mitt Romney. And he is hardly a fearless crusader for truth, justice and the American way.

Just because someone’s been around since the days when all those Poppy Bush types were running things doesn’t mean they must be benign compared to today’s culture warriors. That was a huge mistake, and no one has proved that more dramatically than Attorney General Bill Barr.

We should have known. Barr’s record was out there for all to see and he hasn’t exactly been quiet about his views. After all, he was hired on the basis of an unsolicited letter in which he laid out the case for the president being answerable to no one but the voters. Barr simply does not believe that the normal understanding of constitutional checks and balances in the American political system is correct.

David Rohde of the New Yorker has delved deeply into Barr’s history and it’s clear that although he’s been in and around Republican government circles since the 1980s, he was never an institutionalist and his views of the Constitution are anything but traditional. He grew up in the 1960s as a right-winger and believes that ever since the reforms enacted in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation the presidency had been rendered impotent, which he claims makes the country vulnerable to all manner of threats, both internal and external. Barr is also an extremely conservative Catholic, who thinks the whole culture has gone to hell in a handbasket because of liberal Hollywood and the media. It’s pretty clear that he’s always been a down-the-line racist, constantly excusing the marginalization of Black people as a consequence of their own alleged shortcomings.

His brain has not, in fact, been rotted by Fox News, as I and others have speculated. He’s always been this way. The problem is that Washington has never grappled with the fact that these people have been at the heart of the conservative movement from the very beginning.

Barr has eagerly demonstrated the validity of his theory that a president cannot be held accountable by the Congress, law enforcement or the courts if he simply refuses to cooperate. It’s helpful, of course, that President Trump is completely shameless and ignorant, which is not something you could expect from any other president. Time after time, Barr has acted as Trump’s consigliere, helping his friends and confidants, spinning and propagandizing on behalf of the administration, and energetically supporting the president’s authoritarian impulses.

But Barr doesn’t do any of that out of loyalty to Trump, or because Trump had ordered him to do it. He does it to advance his own views, which align in many respects with the president’s but are driven by his own ideology and cultural mindset.

Barr gave yet another of his shocking speeches this week, this time at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. (He does this every few months and causes a mini-firestorm, after which we all shake our heads and gird for the next assault on what we thought was the rule of law.) He discussed his own far-right worldview, which he always couches in accusations that the other side (by which he means the secular left) are the real authoritarians doing the things he himself is doing. Presenting himself as the real civil libertarian is one of his most infuriatingly duplicitous poses.

He claimed that America is becoming like an Eastern European country where “you have to call your adversary a criminal and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail. … if you’re not in power, you’re in jail — or you’re a member of the press.”

The smug hypocrisy of this statement by a man who serves Donald “Lock her up” Trump is overwhelming. In fact, coming from a man who has explored ways to bring criminal charges against the mayors of Seattle and Portland for allegedly failing to uphold law and order, and recently directed his U.S. attorneys to charge protesters with “sedition,” it is obscene.

Lest anyone get the idea that Barr is a man of principle, he isn’t. During Whitewater, Barr said that Clinton’s claims of lawyer-client privilege were preposterous and said, “I’ve been upset that a lot of the prerogatives of the presidency have been sacrificed for the personal interests of this particular president.” (Yes, the man who just intervened in a civil defamation case by a woman who claims she was raped by Donald Trump 25 years ago actually said that.) When George W. Bush came in, Barr argued in op-eds and congressional testimony that the president had “maximum power.” But when every right-winger in Congress was screeching hysterically about Barack Obama using “dictatorial powers” by issuing executive orders, he had nothing to say.

I think this proves that Barr’s loathing for “the left,” along with his culture war goals and old-fashioned racism, are his true north. The powerful presidency is only important if it’s used for the advancement of right-wing conservative ideology.

And as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has recently pointed out, he is ready, willing and able to put the full force of the Department of Justice behind that cause, with his apparent commitment to helping Trump cause chaos in the upcoming election. Despite the utter hypocrisy of anyone associated with this president railing against political influence in prosecutions, Barr will undoubtedly be out there shaking his fist at anyone who tries to hold the corrupt Trump administration accountable for its crimes. For all we know, he might even be seeking to inoculate himself.

So the next time anyone tries to pass off some senior Republican who has been around politics and government for a long time as a “traditionalist” or an “institutionalist,” we had best ask what traditions and what institutions they are talking about. Most often, I’m afraid they aren’t the ones most people would define as democratic or constitutional or even American. 

“Climate arsonist”: Biden slams Trump’s wildfire response with a new insult

2020 has been such a bizarre year, it’s given rise to its own alarming vocabulary — “firenado,” “social distancing,” and “super-spreader,” to name a few newly common terms. But now, as thick, choking smoke and ash ripple across the West, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is adding one more: “climate arsonist.”

Delivering remarks from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday, the former vice president referred to President Trump using this eco-minded epithet. Citing the West’s wildfires, flooding in the Midwest, and hurricanes on the coast, Biden warned that the effects of global warming are becoming more obvious and more dangerous — and the man whose job he wants is ignoring them.

“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” Biden said. “If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if more of America is underwater?”

The fires in the western U.S. over the past week and a half have torched millions of acres and put hundreds of thousands of Americans under evacuation orders — against the backdrop of the still-ongoing pandemic. The blazes have been so bad that they turned the skies over the San Francisco Bay Area a dark orange; meanwhile, air quality in parts of Oregon has been literally off the charts.

Amid the catastrophe — and even as his opponent blasted him on his environmental record — Trump continued to sing from the hymnal of climate denial. At a roundtable with California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday morning, the president dismissed any evidence of global warming.

“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” he said, in response to a question from the state’s natural resources secretary. When challenged on this statement, Trump retorted, “I don’t think science knows, actually.”

It was a chilling reminder of the president’s unscientific claim, back in February, that one day the coronavirus would vanish. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” Trump said. (To date, there have been 6.5 million cases of the coronavirus in the United States, and almost 200,000 Americans have died.)

The president also reiterated his 2018 claims that the solution to California’s fires is “raking and cleaning.” “When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up,” he said shortly after landing in Sacramento. “It’s really a fuel for a fire. So they have to do something about it.”

Scientists agree that thinning trees, cutting back brush, and setting controlled burns can help reduce wildfire risk — but also point out that higher temperatures driven by climate change are making fires burn hotter and faster. Stopping the catastrophic fires, according to many experts, will take both aggressive emissions cuts and better forest management.

Interestingly, the responsibility for managing nearly all of the forest land in California falls on the federal government, according to Newsom. “One thing is fundamental,” the governor told Trump, “Fifty-seven percent of the land in this state is federal forest land, and 3 percent is California.” (That means 95 percent of the state’s total forest land is owned by the federal government, if you’re keeping score at home.)

With the election now less than 50 days away, the president’s comments and those of his challenger stood in sharp contrast. Biden has made climate change a centerpiece of his campaign, vowing to spend $2 trillion on a clean energy transition and produce all U.S. electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035. He has also repeatedly connected the fight against climate change with creating American jobs, embracing many aspects of activist-led push for a Green New Deal.

Trump, on the other hand, has been waging a war on environmental regulation since he was elected, dismantling Obama/Biden-era rules, as well as decades-old ones, and opening up federal lands for oil and gas drilling. Until this week, the president was also notably silent on the West’s disasters, distracted by political fires in Washington over the way his administration has responded to the COVID-19 crisis and his alleged comments disparaging fallen military members.

It remains to be seen how much the current crisis in the American West will even factor into the campaign. In the 2016 debates, for instance, the presidential candidates spent only 5 minutes and 27 seconds discussing climate change — and almost all of that time was Hillary Clinton speaking.

Meanwhile, a Pew poll released in mid-August suggested that climate change wasn’t among the top 10 issues that voters deemed very important. It stacked up behind concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic and racial inequality, both of which have been all over the news for months. But as hurricane season approaches its usual fall peak and the whole country feels the effects of wildfire smoke — a NASA model predicts that, by Wednesday, smoke from the Western blazes will reach all the way to the East Coast — climate change’s importance as a voter issue could change quickly.

Where QAnon meets Jesus Christ: Inside the “upside-down fantasy world” of Trump rallies

As of Friday morning, the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States stands at roughly 198,000 people. Epidemiologists and other public health experts warn that the real number of deaths is much higher. By the end of this year, the virus may well have killed at least 300,000 people, conceivably many more. If the Trump regime is permitted to pursue its preferred “herd immunity” strategy, it’s reasonable to assume that several million people will die.   

Journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” reveals that Donald Trump knew that the coronavirus was a highly lethal plague that could potentially kill millions of people in the United States. The president chose to publicly lie about that fact and minimize the danger. Moreover, Trump has actively sabotaged coronavirus relief efforts in the United States for his own (perceived) personal, financial and political gain.

In this season of death, Trump is once again holding political rallies across the country where thousands of his followers gather, most not wearing masks, and revel in their defiance of public health. Attendees at such events can potentially spread the virus to thousands of other people. In essence, Trump’s followers are a type of human biological weapon.

Trump insists on holding these rallies because he is an apparent sociopath who lacks empathy, care or concern for other people. His need for narcissistic fuel is more important than the lives of others.

What of Trump’s followers? Why do they continue to flock to his rallies, which are literal death traps?

To most outside observers, such behavior appears as mass insanity, proof that Trumpism is a form of religion, a literal death cult.

But the reality of TrumpWorld is perhaps even more frightening than that conclusion.

Carl Hoffman is the author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest.” Hoffman’s writing has also been featured in such publications as National Geographic Adventure and the Smithsonian. 

Beginning with Trump’s impeachment and ending with the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Hoffman traveled some 5,000 miles across the country attending Trump rallies, and spent almost 200 hours talking with the Trump faithful who attend those events. Hoffman documents these experiences in his new book, “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrible Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.”

In this conversation, Hoffman explains that Donald Trump’s rallies function as a form of alternate reality for his followers. This “upside-down world” is tied together by conspiracy theories, ignorance, racism and a longing for an earlier time in America where life was “simpler” because nonwhite people, LGBTQ people, women and other marginalized groups “knew their place” and white Christian straight men were understood as the most essential Americans. Hoffman also explores the similarity between Trump’s rallies and evangelical church revivals where the sick are healed, sinners are “born again” and the charismatic preacher is seen as a semi-divine prophet. 

Hoffman also warns that Trump’s rallies — and the realm of Trump believers more generally — are infused with delusions like the fast-spreading QAnon conspiracy theory, and that such beliefs pose a grave danger to American democracy and society overall.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

You have a unique insight into TrumpWorld given that you have attended so many of his rallies. Given all that has happened and is likely to happen in these final weeks before the 2020 election, how are you feeling?

I follow the news closely. I read the New York Times every day, I read the Washington Post. In general, I am a voracious consumer of the news. And yet I found that there is a profound difference between reading about something and being in the literal world of Trump at his rallies. That world was shocking to me.

I was shocked to see how Donald Trump has an urge, a type of deep need, for authoritarianism. I don’t think it’s a plan. He is not smart enough. But with Donald Trump — and you see this at the rallies — his ego is everything. Trump is such a damaged human being. He is empty inside and has to fill that space. He cannot lose. To lose is the worst thing in the whole world for Trump, psychologically. I saw it at the rallies. It makes one’s hair stand up to watch this urge toward power in person. As I explain in the book, Donald Trump is a dangerous person and anything can happen with him as president during the 2020 election.

What does the mainstream media, along with the general public outside of TrumpWorld, fail to understand about his power over and appeal to his followers?

It’s weird to be at a Trump rally. The first place I went to for a rally was Minneapolis. I went the day before the rally to get a sense of what was happening. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never been to any of his rallies before that one. The first 10 or 20 people were lined up. In line was a Black man wearing a stars-and-stripes baseball shirt and a MAGA hat. I didn’t talk to anyone. I left. The next morning, I got there about 6 a.m. and the line had grown exponentially throughout the night. I learned that I had to start getting in line much earlier.

At first, I was shocked because there were many more Black people there than I had anticipated. But then, as I hung out at more Trump rallies, I realized that 100 or 200 Black people out of 22,000 is nothing. And then. of course the Trump campaign people pick Black people out and put them in “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts and then have them standing behind Donald Trump’s podium so that the cameras can pick them out.

Donald Trump is a racist and a Trump rally is an overwhelmingly white event. Whether you see people engage in flagrant displays of outrageous racism or not, it’s a terrifically racist event. That slogan “Make America Great Again,” what does that even mean? What is a “great” America for people who are at a Trump rally? What they want is a world that looks just like a Trump rally.

The people at a Trump rally will tell you that what is great about being there is how everyone is alike. They are upfront about that. It is a very white world. The people at Trump rallies are very happy to have token Black people there who are wearing MAGA gear. Trump supporters do not want social change. The Black people at Trump rallies do not have any power. They do not threaten power. If you ask the people at the Trump rallies — I like to call them “Trumpians” — they will say right away, “Well, liberals always accuse us of being racist, and we’re not racist.” In reality, of course they are.

Trump’s rallies are a type of theater and scripted performance. What is the format?

Donald Trump’s world is an upside-down one. It is a fantasy world. One of the most popular songs at a Trump rally is “YMCA” by the Village People. There are 22,000 people pantomiming the letters YMCA at a Trump rally. The next person that comes on the stage is Vice President Pence. Out of 22,000 people, untold thousands of them are fundamentalist, evangelical Christians who think homosexuality is a sin. And yet their favorite song is a disco hit about having anonymous gay sex at the YMCA. 

This detachment from reality happens over and over again at a Trump rally. Trump will come out and say, “How many union people are here? Trump is for the working man. Trump is for the union man,” even though the Republican Party has relentlessly attacked unions for decades. A Trump rally is really a wild place where this man appears and says he is going to fix everything wrong in the world. He is going to fix every problem that you have in your life. Trump says the other people, the Democrats and people who don’t support him, are just dirt, they’re trying to ruin your life. They’re coming after you. But Donald Trump? He is going to fix your life. And he’s going to fix you too.

Donald Trump has been credibly accused of sexual harassment as well as sexual assault by numerous women. He has cheated on all his wives. He also wants to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. Yet millions of white women are devoted to Donald Trump. How do they explain themselves?

The women at the rallies are some of the most incredibly zealous Trump supporters. One of the great cultural strains at play with the Trumpians are issues with work and masculinity. This is particularly true for white, non-college-educated men who traditionally were able to make a living — and a relatively good living — and support a family just with their hands and the strength of their back and their work ethic.

Such white men have seen the world shift in some pretty dramatic ways. Women and people of color have become much more educated and much more integrated into the workforce during these last few decades. Women are more educated than men now in terms of degree attainment.

Many of the men who support Trump feel really lost. The women who are their partners feel the same way. Maybe those women had to work too, as teachers or as nurses. But they bought into a very old, traditional model of masculinity. With that world shifting, Trump’s “working class” supporters feel completely adrift. At a Trump rally one sees so many women buy into those emotions.

What are some of the shared values and beliefs at a Trump rally?

At a Trump rally, the biggest shocker for me was the extent to which everyone believes in the worst conspiracy theories. They do not read newspapers or follow the mainstream news. Trump’s supporters live in an upside-down fantasy world.

QAnon, for instance, is not some weird tangential belief held by a minority of nuts. QAnon is a mainstream cultural phenomenon among tens of millions of Trump supporters. It is also taken for granted that the American press is the “enemy of the people.” This would be repeated over and over again at Trump’s rallies on the speakers and the Jumbotron screen.

Moreover, there are a lot of people at Trump rallies who do not even watch Fox News. Again, they don’t watch any news at all. It was quite frequent for me to talk to somebody at a Trump rally, and they would tell me, “I do independent research.”

Trumpians are not doing critical thinking. They are looking at Twitter. Many of them are also into OAN, the One America News Network. OAN makes Fox News look progressive.

The role of right-wing evangelical Christianity is very important in understanding Trump’s appeal to these people. Many of them believe we are in the end times. That makes it easy for them to succumb to conspiracy theories. It is all fertile ground for the fantastical world that Donald Trump inhabits.

Why do Trump’s followers listen to him? Because they are used to listening to fire-and-brimstone preachers raging about the end of the world and the end times. They listen to him because there are tens of millions of non-college-educated white people who feel their privilege somehow ending. The world is changing, and they are very frightened of that. These are not people who live in Chicago, New York or Washington.

Is Trumpism a cult? Are the rallies cult meetings?

I do not believe that Trumpism per se is a cult. But I do think that Donald Trump plays off one of the great icons of American history and culture, which is the preacher.

When I first went to a Trump rally my assumption was that the lights would dim, and that Donald Trump would come out on the stage and there would be a spotlight on him. I was shocked and surprised to see that at a Trump rally it is hyper-lit — it is incredibly bright and there are no shadows. I shared that observation with a woman in Dallas. She explained to me that it is like church. Trump’s rallies are like a church revival. You want to see the preacher, and the preacher wants to see you. The idea of being “born again,” what does that mean? To be born again means you have to die. For an urban secular person, such thinking is very strange and foreign. But for millions of Americans it is all very mainstream and normal.

The idea of being reborn is something that happens because the preacher convinces you that the world is evil, and that you’re sinning so badly that you essentially die, and then he brings you back. At a traditional church revival, people faint, they pass out and then they come back to life and they are reborn. I have seen this happen at Trump rallies. I have watched people fall out at a Trump rally and then be carried out on stretchers and placed near the front row. To my eyes it is very clear and purposeful that the people who organize and plan Trump’s rallies are well aware of these echoes of the church and religious fundamentalism.

What do you think happens if Donald Trump is defeated by Joe Biden? As a group, will his followers become violent?

That is hard to answer. Most of the Trump people that I spent time with at the rallies were not violent. They were not carrying weapons — you can’t bring a weapon into a Trump rally anyway. I believe the Trump people I spoke with at the rallies would accept the outcome of the 2020 election.

Yes, there is certainly a much smaller subset of people who are potentially violent and dangerous. And I don’t know what happens with them. Perhaps I am being too optimistic? Maybe I believe in the goodness and innate people of human beings too much? I do believe that Donald Trump will do anything to win and that he does not like to lose. But I do hope that if Trump loses by a wide enough margin that will, in and of itself, be enough for a peaceful transition of power after the election.

You immersed yourself in TrumpWorld through all these rallies. What do you know now that you did not before?

I am shocked at the deep and widely held belief in conspiracy theories and the extent to which the right wing, from Fox News to Donald Trump, have perverted the truth to the point where people question if the truth even exists.

I believe that the truth exists. I believe it is reported in such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post and other places, every day. But there are many tens of millions of people who regard anything that comes out of the country’s leading newspapers as “commie propaganda” or what have you. Such beliefs do not bode well for the United States.

The virus doesn’t care about the election

How exactly the coronavirus reads an election calendar is unclear. How the FDA might read scientific reports to announce a timely vaccine by Nov. 1, now that is more understandable because that means that the White House is doing its reelection lean on the data.

Indeed, the political stench is so strong that even federal health officials are downplaying any vaccine announcement before November.

At this moment, following so many weird, disorganized or uncoordinated virus prescriptions from Washington, we have absolutely no confidence that any announcement of a preventive coronavirus vaccine timed with Election Day will be at all effective. Not that such an announcement would be a day too soon, it’s just plainly not believable that scientists from multiple competing companies are somehow going to smash through all the medical obstacles to make such an announcement on a specific date.

Hey, even those companies are coming together on a joint statement that they will not obey any political directive for a pre-election announcement, and insist on confirmed scientific successes before making any announcement, The Wall Street Journal. reported.

A CBS News/YouGov survey found 21% of Americans indicated that they would go out and be vaccinated as soon as possible should a no-cost COVID-19 vaccine be released, while 58%f said that they would wait to see how others were affected first.

Of course, were it to happen, it wouldn’t mean the pandemic is suddenly over. Getting the vaccine — or more likely multiple vaccines made, distributed across in the United States and the globe and actually working — will take months or more.

But, okay, even if all that were to happen, why would this benefit Donald Trump’s re-election — presumably, the reason for the White House to tag this particular date for the announcement of long-awaited success?

The biggest truth here is that in addition to a pandemic problem, we have a trust problem that is even worse.

Throwing our money at a vaccine

At this point, Donald Trump and Joe Biden agree on announced strategies to bring about as early a vaccine as possible, though there is clearly an ocean of difference between them about what actually passes as a realistic plan. But at heart, Team Trump has thrown a ton of money at drug manufacturers to come up with competing vaccine possibilities without a lot of oversight, and there already have been early signs of problems with contracts.

The government has committed to ponying up now towards guarantees that there will be hundreds of millions of doses for distribution — somehow.

Vaccines work if everyone takes them. Partial vaccine coverage in a pandemic just degrades the effectiveness of the results of billions of dollars of development.

We lack a realistic program for who will get the vaccine, when, and what we do if multiple vaccines will be required. Not only do the different companies take different research approaches, but the changing nature of the coronavirus itself also makes any solution a bit of a moving target.

What is unchanging here, whether Trump or Biden wins the election, is a residual trust deficit for a government order to take vaccines. If we can’t get people reliably to wear masks or to stand down from off-campus keg parties, what hope is there that Americans will take any vaccine, particularly one that is introduced in a span that is measured by a scheduled election rather than clinical trials?

It’s a question that The Daily Beast took up recently: Even skipping over the difficulties in effectiveness and underwritten costs, how does the government actually get people to take it?

Trump himself has been an anti-vaxxer over time, asserting that there is a connection between childhood vaccines and autism, and certainly would oppose any mandate for a vaccine. Governors found armed opponents in their statehouses merely for trying to win support for mask-wearing. Trump seems to be depending these days on Dr. Scott Atlas, who thinks we should halt testing, than on Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birks, the infectious virus chiefs.

A recent poll by NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist found that more than one in three Americans said that they would not choose to get a vaccine, which would leave large portions of the country vulnerable to infection and would make it functionally impossible to eliminate the virus for good.

The best chance likely would be for a legitimate public education program aimed at persuading Americans that it is in their personal interest to take the vaccine. But that’s where the trust issue kicks in.

Trust-building?

Speeding the processes involved in drug development and clinical tests to hit artificial is a slap at public trust. Any belief that this administration is leaning on the FDA to approve vaccines by clipping medical safety is bound to cause more problems than it solves. Thus the debate over whether even to believe that a vaccine is pending in the next two months.

Trump owns the coronavirus response. He thinks a spotty path through hyping malaria drugs and overselling the effectiveness of antigen plasma transplants as widespread treatments spell huge success, but the medical world generally has responded with collective gasps at each White House announcement.

The perception that politics is driving this bus rather than Science proves to undercut the trust that will be needed on the day — Nov. 1 or not — on which vaccines truly start to be available.  Some scientists and bioethicists want the FDA to forego any emergency authority to declare the early availability of a vaccine just to meet Election Day desires. Trump keeps repeating that a vaccine announcement will come by the end of the year, and has ordered the Centers for Disease Control to order states to speed local regulatory obstacles to approve anything announced by Nov. 1.

Both FDA administrator Stephen Hahn and Dr. Fauci have noted that an independent monitoring board could recommend a trial be ended early if interim results show strong efficacy. The FDA could then decide whether to authorize it.

Medical people and scientists may be able to solve the vaccine approvals.

But the trust issue is a deeper and bigger trough right now.

Journalists must face the 2020 challenge: This isn’t a normal election, and the truth is at stake

With the first votes in the 2020 presidential election already being cast, the nation’s political journalists face a moment of reckoning: Will they continue to treat this like a normal election, acting as if both sides have equally compelling claims on the American voter?

Or will they sound the alarm, and make it clear in every story precisely what is at stake for the country?

Our top newsroom leaders need to empower their political reporters and producers and editors to do the latter — right now — because equating the two choices currently before the voters in any way is bad journalism.

The solid, evidence-based reporting that’s been done over the past four years clearly establishes that Donald Trump’s ignorance and authoritarianism endanger our democratic institutions and core democratic values. The federal government under Trump is failing at its basic tasks — in many cases, fatally — and during a second term would inevitably be turned against its own people. At a historic moment that offers hope for a national coming-together on race, Trump is trying to foment hysteria and division. This election is the moment of accountability that all of that skillful journalism has been building toward.

But out of habit and a misbegotten sense of obligation, the mainstream media’s campaign coverage is still framed as if this were a normal contest, in which reasonable voters could go either way. And the relentless who’s-up-who’s-down narrative actively obscures just how morally and ethically asymmetrical a race it is.

Our top newsrooms need to start producing campaign coverage with a clear, relentless message: Donald Trump is unfit and democracy is in danger. His constant lying alone is enough to justify taking this approach; it is an affront to journalism’s central mission of telling the truth.

Sly hints to the already convinced are not enough. Campaign reporters must make the case so clearly and with so much evidence that it will persuade the unpersuaded.

Political journalists during this election cycle cannot afford to simply watch and report the ups and down of the campaign from a moral remove. They can’t just do stenography and call it a day. They can’t report on the poll numbers as if there weren’t something dangerous and malignant going on in our body politic. They can’t keep repeating Trump’s campaign slogans as if they were a matter of opinion.

Every day there are new developments that reveal the urgency of removing Trump from office — new revelations about his willful incompetence in the face of a pandemic, his stifling of information that doesn’t suit him, his bigotry, his shocking lack of empathy, his endless lies.

But even as right-wing media is constantly bombarding its audiences with over-the-top disinformation and conspiracy theories intended to create hysteria, hatred and chaos, mainstream campaign coverage still sticks to its both-sides-have-a-point framing — framing that at this point is tantamount to enabling.

And there’s another thing: By insisting to themselves that both sides are equally and legitimately vying for the votes of the American public, our elite news organizations are  blinding themselves to the real story of this campaign, which is that Trump isn’t actually trying to win over a majority of the American voters. He’s trying to find some way to create enough chaos and uncertainty to prevent enough votes against him from being cast or counted, so he will have an excuse to retain power.

That’s a great story, the stuff of great journalism. Pretending that it isn’t happening — that Trump is genuinely trying to win an election in the normal way — is naïve fantasy and a journalistic failure.

To all the political reporters and editors out there, I ask you: Is your job not to protect democracy?

How will you feel after this election if you haven’t done everything you reasonably could to prevent an authoritarian takeover? What will you tell your children or grandchildren about what you did in these dark days? Will you tell them you protected your standing among your peers and your access to the powerful by reporting from a great moral distance on what was going on? Or will you be able to say that you became brave, and did your damnedest to inform the electorate of what was really at stake?

You had an excuse in 2016: You didn’t think he could possibly win, and the dangers he posed were hypothetical. This time around, you have no excuse at all.

Yes, it’s true that the discipline of political journalism in this country typically requires that journalists not take sides. Normally, that’s a good rule; partisans, in stark contrast to reporters, inflate facts that support their beliefs and ignore those that don’t, which is inimical to American journalistic values.

But it’s not your fault that truth has become a partisan dividing line this time around.

So if taking sides with the truth in this one election is tantamount to taking sides with a particular candidate, so be it. What else could your job possibly be, if not speaking the truth, defending democracy and holding the liars accountable?

What not to do

What political reporters should most assuredly not do is throw their hands in the air when it comes to determining the truth.

Sadly, this has become the calling card of some of our top reporters, like, as I have painstakingly chronicled, Peter Baker of the New York Times.

Yet the ultimate recent example probably came from New York Times reporters Katie Glueck, Annie Karni and Alexander Burns, as they looked back at two national political conventions that couldn’t have been further apart in their relationship to reality. They neutrally described the emerging “battle lines,” with Joe Biden “focusing on President Trump’s virus management, while the president is hammering a law-and-order message.”

The framing was tit for tat — even when the Times noted that Trump was lying. So on the one hand, “Mr. Trump and his allies spent four nights hammering Mr. Biden with misleading and often false claims about his record on fighting crime and support of the police.” But on the other hand, Biden “charged Mr. Trump with a failure of leadership, particularly regarding his handling of the pandemic.”

The outcome of the election, they wrote, would depend on “which argument feels more urgent to the American people.”

And after repeatedly granting Trump the mantle of “law and order” candidate, the reporters — in their 24th paragraph! — showed Trump delighting in his lawlessness, quoting aides who said that “he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations” and “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.”

That one goes in my Hall of Shame. But the Times reporters were hardly alone.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Associated Press chief political reporter Steve Peoples described the “dizzyingly different versions of reality” being espoused in the presidential election — without even hinting about which version was based in lies and which was based in truth.

In Trump’s view, “the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America’s suburbs,” Peoples wrote. In Biden’s view, “the pandemic is raging, the economy isn’t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.”

Peoples’s conclusion? “All the conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others.”

That’s a total abandonment of journalistic responsibility, by Peoples and by every editor who signed off it.

As media critic Eric Boehlert noted, the piece “perfectly captured everything that’s gone wrong with political news reporting in the age of Trump.”

The symmetry is a distortion, argues NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

Campaign reporters are prone to seeing everything as a partisan issue, even the question of whether democracy survives. A recent, important New York Times story by Trip Gabriel explored the real possibility that Trump would declare victory if in-person vote tallies showed him in the lead on election night, even if mail-in ballots later ended up flipping the race to Biden. But it was appropriately flamed on social media for the headline, describing it as the “Democrats’ Doomsday Scenario for Election Night” — rather than a doomsday scenario for electoral democracy.

Some reporters are even taking their sense of obligation to treat both sides equally to an inane and morally depraved level by making the case for how Trump could turn things around. I wrote in July about how Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa described Trump’s abject failures as president and constant grotesque lies as simply “self-destructive behavior” that was hurting his campaign effort but could potentially be rectified.

More recently, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni warned that “with less than eight weeks left until the election, and with early voting beginning in some states this month, the number of days Mr. Trump can afford to burn is dwindling.” Haberman and Karni wrote as if the “constant churn of scandals, resignations, tell-all books and racist or sexist tweets” were something Trump could turn off at will — as if it weren’t intrinsic to his very existence.

The most chronic offender here, however, has got to be Dan Balz, the Washington Post’s “chief correspondent” — once a must-read, but now a pathetic parody of his former self. In his weekend column, Balz has pontificated that for Trump, “the challenge in the weeks ahead will be to undo impressions of nearly four years of chaotic leadership, to demonstrate the kind of discipline and focus that has too often been missing.” He has insisted that the central question of 2020 is whether Trump “has the skills to turn around his candidacy in hopes of replicating his 2016 surprise victory.”

Just this past weekend — even as Trump has been abusing the powers of his office beyond anything dreamed of by any of his predecessors — Balz warned that Trump “is frittering away the advantages of incumbency” rather than effectively using the “levers of the federal government to benefit himself politically” in a way that would overshadow the events that are currently distracting him “from his ability to deliver a consistent and effective campaign message.”

A digression on “law and order”

How pathetic is your favorite news organization’s campaign coverage? Here’s a simple test. Are they going along with Trump’s attempt to create a false narrative in which he is saving the country from lawlessness?

Washington Post political blogger Greg Sargent beautifully called out his colleagues on Aug. 31, writing that “any news organization that uncritically describes President Trump’s reelection campaign as premised on ‘law and order’ appeals, without placing his concerted efforts to destroy the rule of law in America front and center alongside them, is helping to drain those words of all meaning.”

He continued: “Let’s not flinch from this: Trump is explicitly campaigning on law and order without the rule of law, in all its terrible implications. That makes Trump not the law-and-order candidate, but rather the candidate of arbitrary violence, lawless abuses of power and civil breakdown.”

Sargent’s news-side colleagues at the Post seem to have largely heeded his advice, but reporters at the New York Times and many other news organizations continue to dutifully and stenographically recount Trump’s rhetoric.

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin repeatedly referred to Trump’s “law-and-order message” — without any caveats. The headline referred to “scathing law-and-order attacks on Joseph Biden.” Their article claimed that “Mr. Trump’s law-and-order message has rallied support on the right” in swing states. (Although the writers, to use the Times’ favorite new euphemism for lying, “provided no evidence” to support that conclusion — quite possibly because there isn’t any.)

This continues at the Times even after repeated scoldings on social media, like this one from political scientist Norm Ornstein:

And keep in mind that reporting that Trump is for “law and order” isn’t simply inaccurate, it actually serves to amplify his racist, real message. As emptywheel blogger Marcy Wheeler tweeted:

The only way reporters should address Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric is in articles about what a dishonest campaign slogan it is, and what it really reveals. Conveniently, the Trump campaign continuously provides news pegs for that almost every day.

Trump whisperer Kellyanne Conway said the quiet part out loud on “Fox & Friends” in late August: “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

And on Sept. 12, Trump told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that the execution-style slaying by law enforcement of Michael Reinoehl, the man suspected of gunning down a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon, was “the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

As University of North Carolina criminal law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick tweeted:

The even fuller context is that every Trump campaign slogan is fundamentally dishonest. Here’s Brian Beutler writing for Crooked:

Trump’s commitment to mass deception as a campaign tactic is exclusive and total. Not one of his central appeals to voters, or his in-progress schemes to manipulate them, is rooted in truth. Not his claims about his pre-coronavirus economic record; not his handling of the economy in the wake of the pandemic, nor of the pandemic itself; not his efforts to undo the Russia investigation, or persecute its investigators; not his absentee-voting disinformation or his feigned ignorance of sabotage at the Postal Service; not his claim to being “tough on China” or to “draining the swamp” or to protecting pre-existing conditions protections. The notion that he embodies law and order is just as topsy turvy, but news outlets have nevertheless allowed him to dictate the tenor of their coverage of civic unrest to them.

Beutler concludes:

If professional journalists respond to the challenge of a president campaigning on fiction by pretending, for the sake of argument, that it’s truth, then the media failures of 2020 will outstrip the media failures of 2016, which nearly destroyed the country.

How to do it right

Campaign reporters should contrast Trump’s actions and statements not with what “Democrats say” but with the overwhelming consensus of experts in their field — who on almost all occasions find him profoundly and dangerously wrong. They should start with constitutional experts and climate scientists.

When appropriate, they should aggressively relate what is going on in the world to the stakes in November. So kudos to Evan Halper and Noah Bierman of the Los Angeles Times, who led their piece on Tuesday by observing that the “wildfires raging through the West” are forcing “millions of voters to confront the consequences of a warming planet.”

And they should use the campaign as a news peg to revisit structural problems with Trump’s leadership that sometimes get lost in the day-to-day, like the fact that he doesn’t really seem to understand what he’s talking about a lot of the time, or that there appears to be no actual decision-making process in the White House.

Rather than relegating them to news analyses, reporters should use highly critical, totally factual and accurate phrases to contextualize their campaign coverage, for instance noting that Trump turns conspiracy theories into rallying cries, or often uses graphic depictions of violence to incite his supporters, or throws accelerant on the fire of the nation’s social unrest rather than trying to put it out, or revels in attacks and boasts, but appears to lack empathy.

Instead of headlining his latest lie, they should write about how he lies all the time, makes a mockery of the truth, treats the public like gullible idiots, spreads toxic conspiracy theories, and has destroyed the credibility of his office and the nation at a time when accurate information is the difference between life and death. Then maybe they could mention whatever that particular, latest lie was and debunk it. (Here’s a reminder of what not to do.)

Instead of headlining some outrageous prediction or threat, they should recount his long record of failed predictions and idle threats.

When he attacks someone, they should relate it to his all-consuming narcissism. And they should write about his tweets — but primarily in the context of the ways they are almost always projections of his own failings onto others.

They shouldn’t write about how something Trump just said will play; they should write about what it means, how it relates to core American values, whether it’s a lie. As author Steven Beschloss tweeted:

And they should actively refute the misinformation spread by far-right propaganda outlets pretending to be news, starting with Fox.

Excavating the source of Trump support

Campaign reporters also need to find a better way to interview Trump voters.

These days, whenever I read an article in the traditional media quoting Trump supporters, I am struck that none of what they are quoted as saying actually explains their support.

They repeat his lies — but that doesn’t make them true.

So the reason they say they’re supporting Trump can’t really be that he is “taking on China and putting ‘America first,” as a supporter told New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel. It’s that they believe Trump when he says that’s what he’s doing. In other words, they’re supporting him because they’re misinformed.

The Economist recently interviewed members of a construction worker’s union in Youngstown, Ohio, and gathered quotes like “He’s done more for our country than the past ten presidents put together,” and “He’s made — who is it, China or Japan? — pay our farmers billions of dollars. He got health care done, which the Democrats could never do. He built the wall.”

But those workers don’t support Trump because he “got health care done.” Trump didn’t do any such thing. They support him because they are the victims (and, in turn, purveyors) of misinformation.

Sometimes supporters complain to reporters like Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter that they are unfairly called racist, but that only hints at their real motivation, which is — surprise! — that they are indeed racist.

So reporters need to go out and do better, more probing interviews of Trump voters, and better, more honest reporting about what drives them. As I wrote in July, that means acting more like sociologists than typical political reporters. It means exploring not just these voters’ political opinions, but their formative moments and their value systems. It means exploring certain dynamics that rarely get much attention from journalists: peer pressure, cultural tribalism, news consumption, residential segregation and educational standards, among others.

It means being more empathetic to the Trump voters, to fully understand them.

Then it means calling them out for what they are.

And reporters should contextualize their words with the work of political scientists. For instance, as Eric Levitz wrote for New York, Vanderbilt University’s Larry Bartels has found that many Republican voters value “keeping America great” more than they value democracy — and by “keeping America great,” such voters typically mean “keeping America’s power structure white.” That’s pretty terrifying.

And talking to voters shouldn’t just mean talking to Trump voters, although that’s the preponderance of what I see out there.

More than a year ago, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that “anti-Trump voters are practically invisible in recent mainstream political coverage,” even though they represent the majority of Americans.

It’s still true. Where are the voices of the ordinary people?

Which side are you on?

The argument against becoming more activist about exposing the Trump menace was most recently made by New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, who — even as he himself cited Trump’s attack on democratic institutions – decried “the increasing temptation” reporters face “to posture for those most eager to oust him.”

In Smith’s telling, warning the public against Trump is only for soft-headed journalists succumbing to flatterers. It’s a surrender to the forces pushing reporters “toward making ourselves the story and toward telling you exactly what you want to hear.”

Smith’s argument is very much like that made by his boss, Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who has repeatedly stated that he wants reporters to keep an open mind and not “take sides” — even when one side is the stark truth and the other side is pure duplicity.

But with only weeks to go, in this race like no other, it’s clear to me that this time around, not taking sides is really tantamount to taking sides, just not being very honest about it.

It’s choosing not to ring the alarm bell when there’s a fire.

And there’s a fire.

Are you with me?

Schumer demands immediate resignation of HHS Secretary Alex Azar for being “subservient” to Trump

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday morning demanded the immediate resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for remaining “almost entirely silent” in the wake of explosive reporting detailing efforts by his subordinates to distort and censor the CDC’s weekly Covid-19 reports for the political benefit of President Donald Trump.

“Too many people within HHS are trying to suppress the science,” the New York Democrat said in a speech on the Senate floor. “It has become abundantly clear that the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services has allowed perhaps the most important federal agency right now to become subservient to the president’s daily whims. So today, I’m calling on Secretary Azar to resign immediately.”

“We need a Secretary of Health and Human Services who will look out for the American people,” added Schumer, “not President Trump’s political interests.”

Watch:

Schumer’s call came days after Michael Caputo, the top communications official at HHS, publicly accused CDC scientists of engaging in “sedition” against Trump and baselessly warned that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to prevent President Donald Trump from winning reelection.

The department responded to Caputo’s unhinged remarks with a statement praising the former Trump campaign aide as “a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.”

 

Late Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) issued a statement demanding that Azar fire Caputo over his public attacks on CDC scientists and private interference with the agency’s work.

“Secretary Azar cannot meet his basic responsibilities while allowing Michael A. Caputo, a yes-man for President Trump with no scientific expertise who publicly attacked CDC scientists and privately interfered with key CDC reports, to continue serving in such an influential role,” said Murray.

Politico reported last Friday that Caputo and his top science adviser, Paul Alexander, have for months been working to alter the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, a crucial resource for experts and the public seeking to track the spread of Covid-19 and understand the state of the pandemic.

“Since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether,” according to Politico.

Following the explosive reporting, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Monday launched an investigation into the Trump officials’ reported interference with the CDC’s work, declaring that the “public needs and deserves truthful scientific information so they can keep themselves and their families healthy.”

“We are gravely concerned by reports showing that the president’s political appointees at HHS have sought to help him downplay the risks of the coronavirus crisis by attempting to alter, delay, and block critical scientific reports from CDC,” members of the subcommittee wrote in a letter (pdf) to Azar and CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield.

“During the pandemic, experts have relied on these reports to determine how the virus spreads and who is at greatest risk,” the lawmakers added. “Yet HHS officials apparently viewed these scientific reports as opportunities for political manipulation.”

Former Trump officials are in open revolt against a president like we’ve never seen

Waves of former officials working for President Donald Trump have consistently turned on him and denounced his conduct throughout his first term in the Oval Office, a trend that only seems to be accelerating as the November election approaches.

Olivia Troye, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who worked on the coronavirus task force, was the latest to condemn the president in searing terms on Thursday. In an ad for Republican Voters Against Trump, she described the president as callous to the deaths of Americans and only interested in his re-election.

She likely isn’t the last Trump officials to come out against him, and she certainly wasn’t the first.

Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, both former high-ranking employees in the Department of Homeland Security, also appeared in videos for RVAT and were unsparing in their criticisms of the president.

But long before the election was in sight, officials under Trump have resigned, quit, or been fired — only to swiftly break with the president. Many have often subsequently publicized damning revelations about his conduct.

An incomplete list of these officials includes:

  • Former FBI Director James Comey
  • Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe
  • Former National Security Adviser John Bolton
  • Senior State Department official Mary Elizabeth Taylor
  • Pentagon official James Miller
  • Senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency Kyle Murphy
  • Assistant to the president Omarosa Manigault Newman
  • Former Trump campaign staffer Alva Johnson (accused Trump of sexual misconduct)
  • Michael Cohen
  • Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci
  • Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
  • Former Defense Secretary James Mattis
  • Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

Others have issued more equivocal criticisms of the president, and some critics, like Rick Bright, continue to work within the administration despite having aired deeply troubling accusations. Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats ominously warned about threats to the election on Thursday without directly attacking Trump, but Bob Woodward reported he feared Putin “had something” on the president. A recent report from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on Trump’s disparagement divulged an incendiary comment the president made to his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, strongly suggesting that Kelly himself intentionally allowed details of the conversation to leak.

It’s become so routine for former officials to disavow the president that the White House has a pat response to new allegations. They dismiss the complainant as merely “disgruntled,” and they offer criticism of the former official’s job performance. What they don’t explain is why so many officials seem to end up “disgruntled,” or why the administration hires so many people who supposedly turn out to be unsuited for their positions.

And the truth is, this is not normal. Presidents don’t typically face waves of former employees and officials coming out against them, depicting them as dangerous and unfit, and endorsing their opponents. It’s a sign of a uniquely disastrous president.

Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler noted:

And MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted: “It was an *enormous* story when Robert Gates wrote a book about his policy disagreements with Obama and now you’ve got multiple former staffers coming out saying “PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HE’S A MONSTER.”

And according to Miles Taylor, what we’ve seen is just a a tip of the iceberg. Countless other officials within the administration reportedly know and fear how radically dangerous the president is (though surely some, like Stephen Miller, are true believers). Others have similar claimed that Republicans in Congress feel the same way about the president — that he’s deeply unfit. The problem is they’re just too afraid to break from him as long as he controls the party, and as long as they have a chance of holding on to power.

GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn reveals she doesn’t know what an “Amendment” is — on Constitution Day

It’s Constitution Day in America, which is generally the day in which politicians try to prove their immense knowledge and appreciation for the U.S. founding documents. Occasionally some of them misquote it, instead citing the Declaration of Independence, but Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) took another route.

“We will never rewrite the Constitution of the United States,” she proclaimed proudly on Twitter.

When the Constitution is changed it’s called an Amendment and the founding document is rewritten. As Justice Stephen Breyer has remarked, the Constitution is a “living constitution” that looks to text, history, precedent, purposes, consequences and current values to interpret any text that may have been vague, The Olympian recalled in 2011. It was 1992 the last time the Constitution was rewritten, when Blackburn was serving as the chair of the Williamson County Republican Party. She also lost her first campaign for Congress that year.

As one reporter pointed out, Blackburn is currently sponsoring three Constitutional Amendments to rewrite the document:

She drew a lot of criticism for her remarks, from people trying to explain to her how the Constitution works and what an Amendment is. You can see them below:

https://twitter.com/MykeCole/status/1306681798882189315 https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1306655723628224512 https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1306636329434800128 https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1306651796564303872 https://twitter.com/ggreeneva/status/1306657611673198598 https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/1306655345322930177 https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1306664652797956096 https://twitter.com/janeknowsshit/status/1306712588135182336 https://twitter.com/hugie075/status/1306713468251373569 https://twitter.com/Deb3921/status/1306713471657140225 https://twitter.com/spookysee/status/1306714062978347010 https://twitter.com/DaveRapps/status/1306714085359222786

Scientists just discovered an “impossible planet” orbiting too close to its parent star

In a discovery that could transform our understanding of astronomy, an international team of astronomers reported on Wednesday that they believe an intact exoplanet is tightly orbiting a white dwarf, something previously thought to be impossible.

“We report the observation of a giant planet candidate transiting the white dwarf WD 1856+534 every 1.4 days,” the authors write in an article published for the scientific journal Nature. “Transiting” refers to when a planet eclipses the star that it orbits from the perspective of us on Earth, and is a common means by which astronomers search for exoplanets. The paper also explains that the planet candidate is about the same size as Jupiter. 

Part of the reason that the discovery is so strange is that it defies so much of what we know about planet formation, as researchers involved in the study explained to Salon. Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who contributed to the paper, explained the finding’s potential significance. 

Stars like our sun “burn” hydrogen fuel into helium in nuclear fusion reactions, which warms up ours and other planets. When stars run out of hydrogen, however, “a couple of unusual processes will occur,” Vanderburg explains. “First the star will swell up and get really, really big. This is kind of like its death throes. Once it runs out of hydrogen, it starts burning helium and turning that into a carbon and oxygen, eventually. But this is an inefficient process and it doesn’t last very long. So pretty quickly after the star runs out of hydrogen, it loses much of its mass, so the outer layers of the star all get blown away into space, and what’s left is the hot core of the star, which is no longer producing energy.”

That hot core, Vanderburg explained, is what we call a white dwarf — and one of the defining characteristics of a white dwarf is that, because of its strong force of gravity, it tends to pull celestial bodies toward it and break them up in the process. The possible planet discovered by the scientists using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope, however, has seemingly remained intact. If this is further verified, it will be unprecedented.

“The explanation that we think is the most likely is that there were other planets in the system or other objects in the system,” Vanderburg explained. “We know that there are two other stars orbiting this white dwarf very far away. Maybe they could have exerted some influence on this planet that we saw back when it was orbiting far away originally because it had to be orbiting far away, or it would have been engulfed. It could have changed its orbit so that it was very, very elliptical, and then when it came in close to the star, it just barely grazed the surface.”

He added, “The other alternative explanation is that the planet actually would have been engulfed by the star, but it had enough heft to essentially save itself.”

Vanderburg also said that, like the recent discovery of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus, the new discovery about this planet could suggest new types of planets to search for life.

“I think the biggest implication for this is that there’s a possibility for life to be in places that we hadn’t really considered before,” Vanderburg told Salon. “Not that people didn’t consider that life could be around white dwarfs — people speculated about that for awhile — but the biggest question that we had was, ‘Can planets actually get to the place in systems where they would need to be in order for life to be similar to the way it is on Earth, but around [a] white dwarf?'”

As Vanderburg pointed out, planets are believed to only be capable of supporting life if they exist in a “habitable zone” — that is, close enough to a given star to benefit from its heat but not so close that the heat eliminates the conditions necessary to support life.

“In a white dwarf system there’s also a habitable zone, but because the white dwarf is really tiny and it’s cooling off and is really, really faint, you have to huddle a lot closer to that star in order for it to be potentially habitable,” Vanderburg told Salon. If the astronomers’ recent discovery pans out, it “is essentially telling us how they can do that.”

Ex-model Amy Dorris accuses Trump of 1997 sexual assault: “He just shoved his tongue down my throat”

Former model Amy Dorris revealed in a new interview that she felt “sick” after President Donald Trump allegedly sexually assaulted her outside of the bathroom in his VIP box at the 1997 U.S. Open tennis tournament.

“He just shoved his tongue down my throat, and I was pushing him off. And then that’s when his grip became tighter, and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything,” Dorris told The Guardian in an exclusive interview.

“I was in his grip, and I couldn’t get out of it,” she said. “I don’t know what you call that when you’re sticking your tongue just down someone’s throat, but I pushed it out with my teeth. I was pushing it, and I think I might have hurt his tongue.”

Dorris, who was 24 years old at the time of the alleged incident, said it made her feel “violated.”

Speaking through his lawyers, Trump “denied in the strongest possible terms having ever harassed, abused or behaved improperly toward Dorris,” The Guardian reported.

Dorris, now a 48-year-old mother to twin daughters, gave The Guardian evidence to support her allegations: her ticket to the U.S. Open that year, as well as six pictures of her spending several days with Trump in New York. Among them was a photo of Trump wrapping his arm around her in the VIP suite, with the location of the alleged assault in the background.

Trump had at the time been married for four years to Marla Maples, his second wife, whom he would go on to divorce two years later.

Several individuals corroborated Dorris’ account, including her mother and a friend, according to The Guardian. They said the former model called them immediately following the alleged assault.

Dorris said she did not go public during the 2016 campaign, at which time several women leveled similar accusations against Trump, out of fears for her family’s safety. She recently changed her mind in order to set an example for her daughters.

“Now, I feel like my girls are about to turn 13 years old, and I want them to know that you don’t let anybody do anything to you that you don’t want,” she said. “And I’d rather be a role model. I want them to see that I didn’t stay quiet — that I stood up to somebody who did something that was unacceptable.”

Dorris claimed that the assault occurred in the middle of a weekend trip to the city with Jason Binn, her boyfriend at the time. He was a fashion and lifestyle magazine publisher, as well as a friend of Trump.

“He came on very strong right away,” Dorris recalled of Trump. “It seemed typical of a certain guy, people who just feel like they’re entitled to do what they want . . . even though I was there with my boyfriend.”

The details recall descriptions of similar behavior documented by a number of Trump accusers. Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People magazine, published a personal essay in October 2016 recalling Trump allegedly “pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat” during a 2005 interview at his Mar-a-Lago club.

In off-camera audio from a 2005 Access Hollywood tape, released weeks before the 2016 election, Trump told host Billy Bush about an attempt to seduce his co-host Nancy O’Dell, who was married at the time.

I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

I did try and fuck her. She was married.

And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture — I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look . . .

I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Dorris said the alleged assault occurred behind a partition wall outside of the VIP suite’s bathroom as other Trump guests mingled in the next room.

“I was having some issues with my contact lenses,” she said. “I remember going in there to moisten my lens.”

Allegedly waiting outside was Trump. 

“Initially, I thought that he was waiting to go to the bathroom, but that wasn’t the case, unfortunately,” Dorris said.

Dorris then claimed that the future president forced himself on her, even though she told him to “get away” and to “please stop.”

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” she said. “Any time anyone says no, no means no. And that just didn’t work out for me. It wasn’t enough.”

“I just kind of was in shock,” she added. “I felt violated, obviously. But I still wasn’t processing it and just was trying to go back to talking to everyone and having a good time because, I don’t know, I felt pressured to be that way.”

Though Dorris said Trump did not attempt to allegedly assault her again, she claimed that he continued to make advances at her throughout the weekend.

Days later, Dorris attended a memorial service for Gianni Versace with Trump and Binn.

Dorris told The Guardian that she continued to spend time with Trump, in part because the weekend in the city was “overwhelming.”

“I was there from Florida, and I was with Jason. I had no money — nowhere to go,” she said. “We were going from event to event, and it was overwhelming.”

“People spend years around people who have abused them,” she added. “That’s what happens when something traumatic happens — you freeze.”

Over the last four years, Dorris said that she had grown increasingly frustrated watching the president dismiss his other accusers as liars.

“I’m sick of him getting away with this,” she said. “I’m tired of being quiet. It’s kind of cathartic. I just want to get this out. And I want people to know that this is the man — this is our president. This is the kind of thing he does, and it’s unacceptable.”

Phosphine gas, seen on Venus, is also produced by bacteria on Earth — but we don’t know exactly how

The science world was rocked by the recent revelation that Venus could harbor simple life forms. In the relevant paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers detail their discovery that the upper atmosphere of Venus contains trace amounts of phosphine gas. On Earth, phosphine is believed to be created by anaerobic bacteria — meaning bacteria that live in environments without oxygen. Comparably, after three years of Venusian chemistry and geology research, the scientists were hard-pressed to find any explanation for how the phosphine ended up in Venus’s atmosphere aside from the possibility of anaerobic life. 

Phosphine, a simple molecule consisting of three hydrogen atoms and one phosphorus atom, is thought to be created by anaerobic bacteria on Earth. Thus, it can be detected emanating from sewers and from the gut bacteria inside us — among other dank, oxygen-rare environments.

But precisely how bacteria generate phosphine is still something of a mystery.

“We don’t know if they are actually producing phosphine,” Matthew Pasek, a professor of planetary science at the University of South Florida who specializes in “understanding the origin of life from the perspective of meteorites, metabolism, and phosphorus,” told Salon. “There are suggestions they might, but it has not been proven. For anaerobic bacteria, there are sets of reactions they do perform, including turning other compounds into things like phosphine. They turn carbon dioxide into methane —  CO₂ to CH₄. They turn sulfate into sulfide, so SO₄ to H₂S.”

He added, “There are all sorts of processes that do occur, and we have actually worked out the chemistry that that takes place with. There are sets of biological enzymes they use for that and everything like that. We do not have the same evidence for phosphine generation.”

Pasek listed for Salon the things that scientists know for sure about phosphine gas: It is associated with very low oxygen environments (also known as anaerobic environments), associated with biology because “some sort of biological process is probably going on to do this” and is prevalent across a large group of environments, although the compound’s abundance varies significantly from environment to environment.

“What we don’t know is we don’t know if microbes are actually making phosphine or if they’re making some other compound that then turns into phosphine,” Pasek explained. “And in the case of something else that turns into phosphine, the question then becomes: ‘if you could make that something else first during non-biological processes, can you then skip the whole life argument?'”

Salon also reached out to some of the scientists who participated in the paper that revealed the presence of phosphine in Venus.

“This is not yet known, that is, the biochemical pathways have not been elucidated,” Sara Seager, an astronomer and planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored the recent paper, told Salon by email when asked about how anaerobic bacteria create phosphine. “We hope our findings will motivate people to work further on this.”

Seager noted that “the evidence is extremely strong that phosphine is associated with life in oxygen-free environments.”

This does not necessarily mean that there is life on Venus, Seager emphasized, as it is possible that unexplained processes in the Venusian atmosphere’s chemistry could account for its presence there. Still, the scientists involved in the discovery paper spent several years attempting to find a non-biological explanation for the phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, and came up short. 

Yet some kind of cloud-borne, phosphine-producing anaerobic bacteria in Venus’ atmosphere would certainly not resemble similar bacteria on Earth. Seager says that there are no anaerobic organisms on Earth that live in conditions anywhere near comparable to those of Venus.

“The conditions in the Venusian atmosphere are 50 times drier than the driest place on Earth,” Seager explained. “The acidic droplets are billions of times more acidic than the most acidic environment on Earth.”

Helen J. Fraser, a co-author of the paper and professor in the astronomy division of the Department of Physical Sciences at The Open University in the United Kingdom, told Salon that it is not impossible for phosphine to be produced by non-living matter.

“On Earth, phosphine can result from natural processes such as lightning and volcanic activity, but only in small amounts,” Fraser explained via email. “The only known processes that produce phosphine on Earth in similar quantities are biological in origin.”

She added, “What’s exciting is that this is the first detection of a possible sign of life for which we have no plausible alternative explanation. That doesn’t mean that there definitely is life, as we could be missing some other method of producing phosphine in the required amounts, but it’s a very exciting possibility which needs more investigation.”

Venus is not the only planet in our solar system that has traces of phosphine. Significant quantities of the gas have also been detected in Jupiter and Saturn, but there are non-biological reasons that explain its presence on gas giants, as those planets have hot, high-pressure interiors that create the gas and then force it to the surface through a process known as convection.

Yet such conditions and constituent chemicals do not exist to a sufficient degree on a rocky planet like Venus to explain its presence there through geochemistry.

“We have searched all the ways that we can think of and can calculate — reactions between gases in the atmosphere, gases and dust, clouds and dust, reactions caused by the Sun’s UV light,” William Bains, an astrobiology expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Salon by email. “None of them can explain the discovery. So I think the presence of phosphine is pretty clear, and that we do not know why it is there is compelling. But there is a lot we do not know. What our papers are trying to get across is that a) phosphine is there, b) we do not know why, but c) on Earth phosphine is uniquely associated with life, so we should include life in any list of possible explanations.”

“Antebellum,” Janelle Monae’s cross-dimensional thriller, was literally born from a nightmare

The William Faulkner quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” opens “Antebellum,” Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s canny new thriller.

The quote is appropriate as some of Eden’s (Janelle Monáe) experiences as an enslaved woman on a Southern plantation overlap with those of Veronica (Monáe also), a professor, in the present day. It’s best left to let viewers see how that happens, but Bush and Renz make the parallel storylines engaging.

The two narratives are used to show how Black women (and by extension Black men) have been treated badly throughout history. Eden is abused physically and sexually, and even branded. In contrast, Veronica speaks out against the “angry Black woman” trope and emphasizes authenticity to her fans and followers. They are two sides of the same coin in a sense, and Bush and Renz want viewers to reflect on Black Lives Matter and the macro- and microaggressions that are part of daily life for women like Eden and Veronica.

In a recent Zoom interview, the filmmakers chatted about “Antebellum.”

I can see you guys getting excited as you came up with this story and some of the elements. People may pick apart the film for being gimmicky — it’s a risk you take — but viewers who go along for the ride will likely appreciate it. What inspired you to tell this story, and in this very specific way?

Gerard Bush: There was no strategy in it. I had a nightmare a little bit over three years ago, shortly after my father passed. That process was rather traumatizing for me; how to reset my mother for her future and keep everything together. In this nightmare, this woman, Eden, had been screaming cross-dimensionally for help. That was the story of “Antebellum.” When I awoke from the nightmare, in tears, I wrote in my notes, all of the details of that nightmare. The next morning, Christopher and I created the short story, and that was the basis for the script.

Christopher Renz: Gerard explained his nightmare to me, and I said, immediately, “We need to write this story today,” and we wrote the short story that afternoon. It had to be told.

One of the things that interests me — and I do not want to offend, but to really engage with the material because it’s worthy of it — is asking Black actors to play enslaved people. What aspect of these characters did you want to come across, especially in the context of this point in history?” 

Bush: Our wonderful Jewish community have been very careful and vigilant in their protection in amplifying the accuracy and truth of the trauma and horror of that history. We as Black Americans have served in many ways, unwittingly, as co-conspirators in the erasure of our own history in our discomfort in confronting it over and over again. I, too, as a Black American had issues sitting through a slave narrative, to be perfectly frank. In retrospect, that is to my detriment. It is important that we confront the truth of the past head-on in all of its ugliness.

When we had these conversations with actors, the material either resonated with [the actors] or it didn’t. It was important that we work with actors that felt as much a responsibility to the material as we did. We also have to serve the role as responsible stewards to the art that is entrusted to us, because it’s inspiration. It comes from this mysterious place. I get the sneaking suspicion that if you are not responsible with it, and if you are not responsible with the actors and the artists that are helping you in collaboration to manifest this vision then perhaps inspiration won’t come knocking again. I hope that we were really careful to provide a safe space for these artists to really dig into the material and allow the possession to take place for them to get into a headspace that grounded them in something so authentic that provides a visceral response from the audience. The actors were incredibly enthusiastic and felt they had to be a part of it.

Renz: We wanted to tell the truth with this film, and we weren’t a part of this revisionist history that tries to soften what happened in the past. In the educational system we have all these textbooks that refer to enslaved people as workers from Africa, trying to soften and make people feel more comfortable. Especially in this point in our history, [we must] really take a hard, truthful, honest look at what happened. “Gone with the Wind” was an inspiration for us in that we view that film as a horror film and a type of propaganda. We wanted to correct the record on that. We went and obtained the lenses that were used to shoot “Gone with the Wind,” and refit them for our cameras to literally shoot the Antebellum South in a more truthful way. 

How do you want viewers to reflect on and process the themes of the racism, inequality, and microaggressions, in this era of Black Lives Matter? 

Bush: These microaggressions are part of daily life for Black people in America. Black Lives Matter is a crescendo event; we’re exhausted, but we recognize that it’s a war of attrition. We have to continue even in our exhaustion if we want to arrive at any sense of peace with ourselves as Black Americans. Our hope is that for people that belong to the privileged class that don’t necessarily recognize their history and how these microaggressions are tethered to this country’s original sin and this sense of treating Black people as if we are unwanted guests in their country when the country was built on the ancestors of our stolen bodies and free labor.

Renz: If there is any way that we can play a small part to disprove the Faulkner quote that opens the film, that would be an outcome that would make us pretty happy.

Bush: The only way that we are going to get to that point is if we confront the ugly truth of the past. Otherwise, that past is going to continue to haunt our present and it is certainly going to rob us of our collective future.

“Antebellum” is very precise in the use of words, from phrases like “Blood and Soil” and “snowflake,” to Dawn (Gabourey Sidibe) “woman-splaining” to several people. I love the exchange where Eden tells Julia (Kiersey Clemons) “to keep her head down and her mouth shut,” and Julia responds, “Being quiet — what has that ever gotten us?” Can you talk about constructing the film’s verbal content and how words and phrases used by the characters can be radioactive?  

Bush: If a white supremacist saw the movie, they would know exactly what it was before anyone else because of the language we used. We also took that same language from “Gone with the Wind” — the word “inferior.” We deliberately didn’t have any of the white people on plantation use the N-word ever. We felt that was a cop out. That gives people an off-ramp. “I would never . . . I’m not using the language.” But those are pantomimes that represent or avatars for the inequity and brutalization of the Black body collective. We were very, very deliberate about every word in the movie at all times. Because it all means something. It’s all tied to actual history. We sent Jena Malone the book “They Were Her Property,” about white women [as slave owners] in the Antebellum South and having full agency over the decisions and their inheritance, which was human chattel. 

There are some scenes of violence that will make viewers wince and some scenes that will make them cheer. What can you say about creating those moments? 

Renz: That goes back to the honesty — it’s violence that were seeing. It’s important for people to experience and understand what had happened and what is happening in a real and honest way.

Bush: It’s never gratuitous. It’s necessary for the story and it’s necessary to tell the truth. We’re not going to defang the truth of the thing. That means recognizing and depicting the causal and durable brutality of these people that represent the history of this country that is still rearing its ugly head today. We hope that we were responsible in the depiction of that violence. It could have been far more violent if we wanted to really lean into the accuracy of what it was at that time. There are no lashings with a whip. So much of what you are seeing is off screen. It’s what we don’t show that makes it even more brutal in some ways. We were cognizant and quite vigilant in making sure that none of our violence was gratuitous and not whitewashing what happened.

“Antebellum” is available at home on demand on Friday, Sept. 18.

Egg price-gouging accusations, a pandemic cheese “roller coaster”: Why food costs are still in flux

Since the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic in early March, restaurants in the United States have been attempting to stay profitable amid mandatory safety closures and service restrictions. They have adapted in innovative ways, from transforming unused dining room space into makeshift community bodegas to creating cocktail kits for customers. 

Many states have since reduced service restrictions; every state has now allowed restaurants to reopen for dine-in service of some kind. But even as restaurants adapt to the “new normal,” the pandemic set off a series of supply and demand inequalities, and as a result the price of essential ingredients like meat and dairy has yet to normalize. 

Salon breaks down the costs restaurants are contending with in the pandemic era, and some of the ways they are attempting to stay afloat. 

Meat 

Meat processing plants have been hit incredibly hard by the pandemic, as legions of industry workers were diagnosed with the novel coronavirus. A month after President Donald Trump issued an executive order on April 28 encouraging meat plants that had shut down to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, more than half of the 30 meat processing plants that had closed were reopened. Over the month that followed, the number of Tyson Foods employees with the coronavirus rose dramatically, from less than 1,600 a month ago to more than 7,000, the Washington Post reported. 

Despite increased safety measures, like protective gear and updated ventilation systems, implemented across the industry, employees work in close conditions and, some factories report, social distancing recommendations are nearly impossible to enforce. “This scenario highlights the potentially fatal cost of reopening the economy,” Salon’s Nicole Karlis wrote back in May, “and emphasizes how difficult it will be to go back to ‘normal’ at busy workplaces like these.” This is disastrous, first and foremost, for vulnerable workers. It has also resulted in meat price fluctuations over the last six months. 

Before Trump’s executive order, John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods wrote in an April blog post, “as pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain.” In the grocery store meat aisle at the time, many national chains started implementing purchasing limits on items like ground beef and pork products (my local Kroger, for instance, had signs posted for about a month restricting buyers to two items from the butcher’s counter). 

Restaurants weren’t immune to the rising costs. According to a Business Insider report on a Buyers Edge Platform analysis of $1.3 billion in purchases restaurants made in February and May, meat costs have steadily increased during the pandemic — standard beef cuts rose about 87%, ground beef patties were up 81% and chicken breasts rose by 23% per case in the same period.  

Brad White, the owner of the Michigan-based Goog’s Pub & Grub, told the Holland Sentinel in May that the cost of “everything has just skyrocketed.” 

“When this whole thing started, a burger patty cost $1.55,” White said. “Now it’s $3.90, and it’s still going up. Everything from lettuce to bacon to buns. All of it.”

Meat prices are finally beginning to normalize a little — they fell in July 2020 for the first time since January 2020, with an 8.2% price decrease in beef and veal from June to July 2020 and a 2% price decrease in pork during the same time period. 

But the slow decline in prices often isn’t enough to save restaurants that are really hurting. Goog’s, for instance, made national headlines after implementing a standard $1 Covid Surcharge for each order, but announced late last month that they were closing. 

Eggs

The humble egg has made headlines throughout the pandemic, from news of people “panic buying” baby chickens to reports of “egg hoarding.” Prices have increased — sometimes by as much as three times the pre-pandemic cost — and both home cooks and restaurants have been impacted. 

But unlike in the case of items like pork or yeast, where price increases can be attributed at least in part to interruptions in the production pipeline, there have been multiple allegations of price gouging in the egg industry. 

As the New York Times reported, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and a group of private individuals in California filed suit separately in late April against Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the United States, for what they call “excessive, unfair, illegal profits during the coronavirus pandemic.” 

“The Texas lawsuit contends that Cal-Maine, which owns its entire production and distribution process, faced no supply issues or other disruptions to drive up costs,” wrote reporter Neil MacFarquhar. “It is a ‘powerhouse’ both in Texas and nationally, the suit said, producing one-fifth of the eggs in the United States under brand names including Eggland’s Best, Land O’Lakes, Farmhouse and 4-Grain.”

The company has strongly denied the allegation. 

Then in August, Modern Farmer reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James was suing egg producer Hillandale Farms for allegedly gouging its prices during the pandemic. 

“The lawsuit alleges that Hillandale has raised its prices not because of increased costs, but simply to take advantage of higher consumer demand during the pandemic,” said a press release announcing the lawsuit. 

Dairy

Let’s rewind to 2014. Things were good for Big Dairy as the average farmer’s milk prices rose to $2.16 per gallon in September — the highest level on record at that point. Restaurants felt the effects. As the Washington Post reported, many menu items from popular chains became more expensive to cover the increase in ingredient costs.

“Chipotle delivered a blockbuster quarter overall, recording a 20 percent increase in sales at its restaurants open more than a year,” wrote reporter Sarah Halzack. “But executives said that higher food costs, including for cheese and sour cream, ate into the burrito chain’s profit margins this quarter.” 

At Panera Bread, the cost for dairy items was up $2.5 million over the same quarter the year prior, while the Cheesecake Factory — which relies heavily on cream cheese for its signature desserts — said higher dairy prices cost them $4.3 million in the quarter, or about $0.06 in earnings per share.

What caused the surge? Economist Mary Keough Ledman described it then as a “perfect storm” as “European output was lower, Oceania’s output was lower, and China’s was lower.”

In that sense, the global dairy market is deeply volatile. After the pandemic hit, and many consistent wholesale buyers like restaurants and school systems closed, the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimated that farmers were dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. 

“And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear,” David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery reported for the New York Times in April. “Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.”

Wholesale dairy prices dipped to five-year lows, as a result, but then they started to surge, especially in the cheese sector. According to a report by Wisconsin Public Radio, the wholesale price of cheese plummeted to $1 per pound in April, skyrocketed to $2.81 per pound by June, and has settled at $2.70 over the last few weeks.

John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, told the station that the industry was on “a roller coaster like we’ve never seen before.”

“It’s not unusual for the cheese price to move a penny or two and make news in our industry,” he said. 

While Umhoefer said that supermarkets tend to absorb some of the price hikes to encourage consumer spending, it’s likely that reopening restaurants that are refilling their supply of perishable ingredients will feel the effects of the fluctuations. 

Yeast and flour 

You may remember the Great Yeast Shortage of 2020 which began as hordes of amateur bakers stocked up for their new at-home activity.  For the four-week period ending April 11, yeast sales jumped 410% year over year, according to market research firm Nielsen.

 “It’s just that everybody wants to make bread at home, I guess,” Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, told Quartz.

In an interview with the New Mexico Political Report, Patti Stobaugh, the president of the Retail Bakers of America, reported that some of her organization’s members said they had trouble acquiring certain ingredients necessary to make their baked goods. 

“We did run into problems with yeast early on. However, our suppliers have been very good to take care of us. I know a lot of smaller operations have had trouble sourcing the type of flour they need, and yeast,” Stobaugh said.

Martha Jimenez, owner of Jimenez Bakery & Restaurant in Lubbock, Texas, was one of those bakers. She told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in June that yeast still wasn’t available from her normal supplier. 

“The people that normally deliver it to me, they say they don’t have it,” Jimenez said over the phone on Monday. “I had some from before, but I’m about to run out. I keep telling them every week, but I still haven’t been able to get any.”

Some bakers turned to independent online sources, but the increase in demand drove prices up. As USA Today reported, a 2-pound pouch of Red Star Active Dry Yeast was listed for about $7 by a third-party seller on Amazon at the beginning of March, and surged as high as $48.95 on March 24, according to Amazon price tracker Camel Camel Camel. The price is currently down to $12.82.

The new essentials

In addition to supply and demand irregularities that affect the price of essential ingredients, restaurants are also having to manage the cost of non-food items like additional takeout containers, face masks and gloves. 

According to Restaurant Business Online, 42 percent of restaurants that didn’t previously do delivery added the service; echoing that statistic, Grubhub reported in early August that a net 25,000 restaurant partners had joined the platform since May for a total of 225,000. 

But delivery packaging is not immune to production snags. Natha Dempsey, the president of the Food Packaging Institute, told the publication that at the start of the U.S. quarantine, Europe and Asia were already shut down for weeks, and problems developed over importing materials for containers and disposables. Further issues were caused by reduced labor overseas and transportation delays.

Sourcing items like cleaning supplies, PPE, gloves and hand sanitizer have all presented similar issues for restaurant owners at various points during the pandemic; and while supply has largely caught up with demand, those same restaurant owners are still adjusting to paying for these additional necessities. 

Rick DeCuffa, the general manager of Joey’s Italian Restaurant in Syracuse, N.Y., said in late July that the restaurant used to spend only a few hundred dollars a week on such supplies, but are now spending up to $1,400. 

How restaurants are adapting 

Individual restaurant owners, like Brad White of Goog’s Pub & Grub, implemented $1 or $2 COVID-19 surcharges to cover additional costs of running a restaurant right now, like increased food prices or having to budget for extra sanitization measures. 

But now some cities are looking at legislation that would allow restaurants to add a standard surcharge to all orders. On Sept. 17, as Eater reported, New York City Council voted in favor of a bill that will give restaurants in the city the option to add a surcharge of up to 10 percent to diners’ bills as an economic recovery support measure during the pandemic. 

“The provision will go into effect immediately after the mayor, who is in support of the bill, signs it into law,” Eater’s Erika Adams wrote. “It will extend until 90 days after indoor dining at full capacity is allowed.” 

“This bill will give restaurants the freedom they need to increase revenue to help cover rapidly rising labor and compliance costs and keep them in business,” Councilmember and bill sponsor Joseph Borelli, whose district includes the south shore of Staten Island, said in a statement.

Surcharges are already allowed elsewhere in the state and in other U.S. cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles, but without meaningful support from local and federal governments — in the form of relief funds that small to medium-sized businesses can access, or grant and low-interest loan opportunities — many restaurants won’t survive the pandemic.

“Ridiculous”: Barr calls coronavirus lockdowns “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since slavery

Attorney General Bill Barr came under fire from Democrats after arguing during a Wednesday speech that coronavirus lockdowns were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” outside of slavery.

“You know, putting a national lockdown — stay-at-home orders — is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Barr said during a Q&A session after a speech at Hillsdale College.

Barr appeared to suggest that political leaders rather than doctors should made decisions about public health.

“The person in the white coat is not the ‘grand seer’ who can come up with a right decision for society,” he said. “A free people makes its decision through its elected representative.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., the No. 3 Democrat in the House, took offense to Barr’s remarks.

“I think that statement by Mr. Barr was one of the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, god-awful things I have ever heard,” he told CNN on Thursday. “It is incredible the chief law enforcement officer in this country would equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives.”

Clyburn rejected Barr’s comparison, because “slavery was not about saving lives — it was about devaluing lives.”

“This pandemic is a threat to human life, and the experts — the medical experts, the scientists — are telling us what it takes to respond successfully to this pandemic,” he said.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, also criticized Barr for likening lockdowns to “one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.”

“The casual way in which he referenced it pretty much tells you all you need to know about Bill Barr and his inability to process the dynamics, particularly as it relates to the systemic racism that has been in the soil of America for 401 years,” he told CNN.

Despite arguing that elected officials — not medical — experts should make public health decisions, Barr castigated governors who imposed lockdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

“Most of the governors do what bureaucrats always do, which is they . . . defy common sense,” Barr said. “They treat free citizens as babies that can’t take responsibility for themselves and others.”

Barr has repeatedly complained about the coronavirus lockdowns, intervening in local decisions and instructing Justice Department prosecutors to go after “overbearing” coronavirus restrictions.

Barr, who has increasingly made political statements aimed at the president’s political opponents, also used his appearance to lash out at career Department of Justice employees after many criticized him for intervening in cases involving Trump associates.

“Name one successful organization or institution where the lowest level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct — there aren’t. There aren’t any letting the most junior members set the agenda,” Barr said. “It might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency.”

Barr rejected the criticism that he was “interfering” with cases, arguing that he has sole authority over Justice Department decisions.

“What do you mean by interfere? Under the law, all prosecutorial power is vested in the attorney general, and these people are agents of the attorney general,” he said. “And as I say, FBI agents, whose agent do you think you are?”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., whose state has seen more than 100 consecutive days of protest in Portland, cited a New York Times report that Barr “wants people who are protesting in opposition to the administration to be charged with sedition” as he denounced the attorney general’s remarks. The Associated Press later reported that the Justice Department also considered bringing criminal charges against officials in Portland over unrest in the city.

“This is part of an imperial presidency,” Merkley told CNN, “an authoritarian approach where you undermine the legitimacy of the press and you absolutely make disagreeing with the administration a crime — charge them with sedition.”

Meghan McCain fact-checked on “The View” over false claim that doctors lied to public about COVID-19

“The View’s” Meghan McCain says that she was “lied to” by doctors that she shouldn’t wear a mask early on in the pandemic because others needed them. It’s a false claim that was quickly fact-checked by co-host Sara Haines, who tried to explain that she was misconstruing the importance of getting personal protective equipment to hospitals and healthcare workers.

During Thursday’s opening segment, the ladies addressed the confusing back and forth between President Donald Trump and his CDC virologist expert Dr. Robert Redfield in which Trump claimed Redfield didn’t know what he was talking about with regard to masks.

“When it comes to the mask issue, I think part of the problem is the American public has been lied to, and we can’t forget that information,” claimed McCain. “The last conversation I had in studio at ‘The View,’ I was told by a doctor that you don’t need to wear a mask and they should be donated to health care workers. And we were lied to because there was a worry there weren’t going to be enough masks to first responders. I would have gladly given my mask in any way to make that sacrifice, but it was misinformation.”

McCain didn’t name which doctor she spoke to, but early on in the pandemic when people were talking about masks, the CDC began encouraging masks as early as the first week in April, around the time Trump was issuing the first nation-wide stay-at-home order. Personal protective equipment was getting scarce and doctors and nurses were starting to get sick after exposure. Americans began making masks of their own and delivering them to their local hospitals.

The last time “The View” aired in the studio was March 11, but just the day before, Trump was still telling Americans, “Just stay calm. It will go away.”

On March 12, Trump announced, “You know, you see what’s going on. And so I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stopped it.”

It wasn’t until April that Trump invoked the first Defense Production Act for companies to start creating more ventilator and N95 masks.

Sara Haines cut in to try and explain to McCain that early on people simply didn’t know. At the same time, the president, who was being advised by experts, was saying the virus would disappear.

“What you said about masks and that early information, my problem with that is early on, I think people were doing the best they can,” said Haines. “We saw a lot of doctors and scientists –”

“Sara, Sara,” McCain cut in, stopping Haines from speaking. “With all due respect, the doctors knew. They lied and they said we should not be wearing masks. Again, had I just been told the truth about the American public, I’m one of the people that I ended up — I had masks from a trip I took in my house and I ended up having my husband give it away. I was early pregnant at that time. There was a lot unknown. I don’t — I know there were things going on, but that lie has unsettled me, and now I don’t go anywhere without a mask because obviously we know the truth, but we can’t be screwing around with things like this, and again, when you are already a person which a lot of conservatives are, who are skeptical of the government, skeptical of big pharma, and big business, I don’t think it’s important. People should be wearing their masks. It’s not a conversation we need to have now, but I was told different by doctors.”

By the end of March, less than a month after “The View” stopped airing in their studio, the CDC announced that masks should be worn.

McCain claimed that new polling numbers show Americans don’t care about COVID-19 anyway because a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed the virus dropped to three in the list of issues they care about.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Big Pharma gave more than $20,000 to Tillis campaign after he co-sponsored drug pricing bill: report

In late 2019, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina co-sponsored a bill on prescription drug prices — and WBTV, the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, is reporting that Tillis received more than $20,000 in campaign contributions from pharma-associated political action committees “within two weeks.”

The bill that Tillis co-sponsored was the Lower Costs, More Cures Act, which was introduced on December 19, 2019 and was similar to a competing bill sponsored by another Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. But a key difference between the bills, WBTV reporter Nick Ochsner notes, is that the one Tillis co-sponsored “omitted a key provision opposed by the pharmaceutical industry that would cap drug prices at inflation.”

Ochsner reports, “Campaign finance records shows Tillis received $20,500 in campaign contributions from political action committees tied to pharmaceutical companies in the days before and after the bill was filed, including two contributions totaling $7000 on December 16 and 18, respectively — and seven contributions totaling $13,500 given on December 20, 26 and 31.”

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, discussed the contributions with WBTV — saying, “It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a quid pro quo. It may indicate a cordial relationship they’ve developed over a period of time, but it is worth noting. And it doesn’t happen every day.”

The Center for Responsive Politics operates the Open Secrets website, which tracks campaign contributions.

Krumholz also told WBTV, “I think that indicates the fact that he is viewed as a very close ally of the industry — that they view him as a very dependable vote in favor of their interest and somebody who, clearly, is willing to champion their legislation, their legislative agenda. And I think that is borne out by the pattern of contributions that you examined last December.”

Tillis is among the incumbent Republican U.S. senators who is considered vulnerable in the 2020 election. Recent polls have shown a close race between Tillis and his Democratic opponent, Cal Cunningham, with Cunningham having single-digit leads. According to polls released in September, Cunningham is ahead by 4% (USA Today/Suffolk), 1% (CNN/SSRS and Trafalgar), 2% (Monmouth) or 3% (Rasmussen). However, polls by WRAL-TV in Raleigh and CNBC/Change Research found Cunningham ahead by 7%. And a Fox News poll released in early September found Tillis trailing Cunningham by 6%.

Noam Chomsky: We are facing the most dangerous moment in human history

Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, left-wing author and activist Noam Chomsky has seen a lot in his lifetime — from the Great Depression and World War II to the social unrest of the 1960s to Watergate to 9/11. And during an interview with the New Statesman this month, the 91-year-old Chomsky explained why he finds the events of 2020 especially perilous.

“There’s been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky told the Statesman. “I’m old enough to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much of Eurasia — that was not an idle concern. U.S. military planners did anticipate that the war would end with a U.S.-dominated region and a German-dominated region . . . But even that, horrible enough, was not like the end of organized human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”

Chomsky spoke to the Statesman before the first summit of the Progressive International, an organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in response to the increase in far-right authoritarian movements in different parts of the world.

In 2020, Chomsky has been sounding the alarm about a variety of perils: climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s authoritarian response to the George Floyd protests. And he told the Statesman, “We’re at an astonishing confluence of very severe crises. The extent of them was illustrated by the last setting of the famous Doomsday Clock. It’s been set every year since the atom bombing, the minute hand has moved forward and back. But last January, they abandoned minutes and moved to seconds to midnight, which means termination — and that was before the scale of the pandemic.”

Chomsky has vivid memories of the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 — he was 16 at the time — as well as the Cold War, which ended with the end of the Soviet Union and the Easter Bloc in the early 1990s. And Chomsky believes that in 2020, the “threat of nuclear war” is “growing” and is “probably more severe than it was during the Cold War.” Adding to the peril, Chomsky told the Statesman, are “the growing threat of environmental catastrophe” and “the sharp deterioration of democracy.”

A key figure in that deterioration, according to Chomsky, is Trump — and other troubling examples of authoritarianism he cited range from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who Chomsky said is “creating a proto-fascist state.”

Chomsky, the Statesman’s George Eaton notes, has “lived through 22 U.S. presidential elections” — and he pointed out that Trump has said that he might not concede if former Vice President Joe Biden wins in November.

“He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election, he won’t leave,” Chomsky told the Statesman. “And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers, ex-military leaders — who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if the president refuses to leave office and gathers around him the paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorize people in Portland.”

Trump’s properties have charged taxpayers at least $1.1 million since he assumed office: report

President Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, earlier this year was shut down due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

However, that didn’t stop the president from spending nearly $22,000 there in new billing records uncovered by The Washington Post.

As The Post reports, “Trump’s club charged the Secret Service more than $21,800 to rent a cottage and other rooms while the club was closed and otherwise off-limits to guests.”

The documents do not give a reason that the Secret Service was staying at the club, although there are reports that first daughter Ivanka Trump spent at least part of Passover weekend at the president’s Bedminster property.

What’s more, The Post found that staying at the president’s properties carries a heavy price tag compared to other options in the area.

“The records show that Trump Bedminster charged the Secret Service $17,000 a month — or $567 per night — to rent the three-bedroom ‘Sarazen Cottage’ near Trump’s own villa,” The Post writes. “That rate charged is unusually high for a rental home in the area, according to an analysis of local real estate listings.”

“The waste inherent in this is appalling,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president at the watchdog group Public Citizen, told The Post. “They’re nickel-and-diming the American people at a moment when every penny counts.”

Looking at the broader picture, The Post has now found that the president’s own businesses have charged the government at least $1.1 million for trips to his personal properties since the start of his first term.

Right-wing talk about “sedition” and the Insurrection Act has one purpose: Stealing the election

There has been a ton of news about Bill Barr — official title, “Attorney General of the United States;” actual job, Donald Trump’s capo — crawling across cable news chyrons in recent days, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of it all. There’s that thing he said about quarantine restrictions being nearly as bad as slavery. And the thing where he whined about the Justice Department staffers that’s more interested in enforcing the law than protecting Trump’s political power. And where he compared such people to preschool children, for having the temerity to question his decisions. 

All that is bad, but probably the worst news this week is a report from the New York Times that “Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition.”

He also asked federal prosecutors “to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer.” 

This is especially alarming in light of Barr’s assertion, in the same speech where he made offensive comments about his own staff and about slavery, that he believes he has “virtually unchecked discretion” in determining what cases to prosecute. 

Barr was talking about cases stemming from the protests in various cities over the summer. Although the vast majority of those protests were peaceful, there were a few incidents of violence and looting, though absolutely no evidence of plots to overthrow the U.S. government (which is what “sedition” means). Barr’s eagerness to overreact, however, is another alarming sign that he is exploring ways to assist Trump’s public and obvious plans to do whatever he can to steal the presidential election. 

Thursday morning, in the midst of one of his lengthy morning Twitter tantrums, Trump hinted yet again at his plans to use phony claims about “fraud” as cover to keep election officials from counting all the ballots after Election Day:

It’s a muddled mess of a tweet, but basically, he’s using scare quotes to suggest that votes by mail, at least by Democrats, are illegitimate. He’s also, in his usual manner, accusing his opponents of doing what he’s clearly planning to do, which in this case is to keep the ballots from being accurately tallied. 

This is where Barr’s dark talk of “sedition” comes in. Should the votes in swing states be close — and every indication from polling is they will be — Trump will likely try to declare victory on the night of the election. After that, there will be a massive battle, as happened under similar circumstances in 2000, over how and whether to count all those mail-in ballots. Much of that will be in the courts, but there will be a street component, as well, as pro-democracy protesters will hit the streets to demand a full vote count, and election officials could face efforts to physically stop them from counting votes. 

It’s increasingly clear that putting down those anticipated protesters and stopping the vote count is a priority for Trump and his allies. So there’s increasing talk from prominent Trump allies of a possible “insurrection” by the left after Election Day, and the need to use maximum force to put it down. 

Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide and bug-eyed right-wing conspiracy theorist who was given the job of assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, recently made news for a truly wacky set of utterances during a recent Facebook Live event. Among other things, Caputo accused government scientists of, yep, “sedition” and accused the left of plotting an insurrection, recommending that right-wingers “buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

A wave of bad press compelled Caputo to take a leave of absence from his government job, citing vague medical concerns, but what he said directly echoes the rhetoric of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and fellow Trump confidant. Stone recently saw his sentence for felonies related to his role in the Russian conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election commuted by Trump, and has been at the forefront of trying to characterize efforts to count all the votes as an “insurrection” to be suppressed with violence.  

During a segment on Infowars last week, Stone suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act or declare martial law and that early voting and mail-in ballots in Nevada “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” to keep them from being counted. Stone claimed such ballots were fraudulent, but of course the real concern is that they’re legitimate — and that far too many of them will be cast for Joe Biden. 

On Tuesday, Mark Levin — who is currently a radio TV host, but formerly worked with Barr at the Justice Department during the Reagan/Bush years — warned that the protests from the summer will “multiply by five or 10” and that Trump should declare them insurrections because they “need to be put down.”

Levin was being vague about what he thinks might provoke such enormous protests, but it’s not hard to see what upcoming event might do such a thing: A close election that Trump will try to steal by suppressing vote-counting. 

And let’s be clear that Barr himself is on board with this idea that mail-in ballots are inherently illegitimate and that fighting to keep them from being counted is therefore justified. Barr has repeatedly floated baseless claims that mail-in ballots are fraudulent or that foreign countries “could easily make counterfeit ballots.”

None of this, it cannot be stated strongly enough, is true. It’s a shameless pretext for what is likely an upcoming fight to get those ballots thrown out. 

It’s tempting to see all this talk of “insurrection” and “sedition” from the right — including Trump’s own government officials — as nothing more than hyperbole from Republicans who are emotionally overwrought in the face of what looks to be a lost election. Unfortunately, as the scandal around slowdowns at the U.S. Postal Service and lawsuits over mail-in voting make clear, the Trump administration is doing more than talk. It’s actively pulling whatever levers it can to keep Democratic votes from being counted this November. 

Once those ballots have been cast, the fight to make sure they’re counted is going to get rough — not just in the courts, but in the streets. Much could depend on the ability of the left to hit the streets, not just in protests to put pressure on election officials to finish the vote count, but possibly to physically protect officials who are counting votes from armed right-wingers whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy. All this chatter about “insurrection,” “riots” and “sedition” is an effort to preemptively characterize pro-democracy protesters as a threat, and to justify using violence to suppress them.

Remember, Trump was willing to use tear gas and baton assaults against peaceful protesters just to keep them from heckling him. There’s no telling how far he’ll go to keep those same peaceful protesters from messing with his efforts to steal an election. 

“The tide has turned”: Susan Collins trails rival Sara Gideon by 12 points in new Quinnipiac poll

“The tide has turned” on embattled Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, according to an analyst from Quinnipiac. A new survey released this week by the non-partisan pollster found the incumbent senator trailing Maine Speaker of the House Sara Gideon, her Democratic challenger, by 12 points.

“The tide has turned on Senator Susan Collins, who was so popular in Maine that she won nearly 70% of the vote the last time she ran,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Mary Snow said. “Likely voters are sending the message that there’s no ‘middle of the road’ when it comes to President Trump, who is deeply unpopular in the state.”

The poll, which was conducted before and after this weekend’s first debate in the much-watched Senate race, found that 89% of the state’s likely voters have already made up their minds. Meanwhile, 10% of likely voters could swing in either either direction. Gideon posted a 5-point lead in a Bangor Daily News poll sampled one month earlier.

The Bangor poll included another statistic possibly unfavorable to Collins: Green Party Senate candidate Lisa Savage polled at about 6%. In any other tight race, a Green Party candidate could a spoiler for Democrats. But in Maine’s unique ranked-choice voting system, voters’ backup choices come into play if no candidate earns a majority of votes outright. Savage voters are more likely to rank Gideon as their second choice. 

Also likely troubling for the Collins campaign is a significant negative favorability rating — 43%-51%. Moreover, voters believe Gideon is honest by a 49%-33% margin, while Collins posted a 48%-42% deficit in the category.

While the cause of the divergence remains unclear, new reporting on Collins has recently raised questions about possible corruption. Last week, Salon exclusively reported that the American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF) had sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee two days ahead of the debate — and one day before Quinnipiac began its poll — requesting an investigation into allegations that Collins used her office to financially benefit her husband, and subsequently, herself.

The charges were informed by a recent HuffPost article reporting that Collins had advocated and voted for policies benefiting her husband’s consulting and lobbying business. Salon also revealed that the value of some of his investments as much as doubled following Collins’ vote in favor of the Republican Party’s 2017 tax bill, according to financial disclosures.

Asked whether the candidates cared about average people, voters said Gideon does by a 60%-27% margin. Meanwhile, Collins found herself seven points in the red: 51%-44%.

The Cook Political Report currently marks the race as a “toss-up.”

Democrats see Maine as one of a handful of flippable GOP seats which could open up a path to regaining control of the Senate. And conservative spending in the state suggests that Republicans may see things similarly: Organizations such as the Federalist Society have invested heavily in Collins, while on the other side, the influential Republican-led never-Trump Lincoln Project has done the same.

A dark money group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and election strategist Karl Rove has dumped millions into the battle since January. (That same month, Collins knocked McConnell out for the top slot in public-opinion polling as the most unpopular member of the U.S. Senate.)

A sizable chunk of those Republican efforts aim to divorce Collins from Trump in the minds of voters without alienating enthusiasm from the president’s supporters in the state. Collins’ own team has used a similar approach. 

For instance, Collins skipped a tour of the state with Trump amid the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide reckoning on race in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Though Trump has endorsed Collins, the senator has declined to say whether she will in turn endorse the president. Last month, Collins’ campaign edited Trump signage out of an ad.

Instead, Collins has leaned heavily on state interests in her ads, often in the form of video testimonials. But a Salon report in July revealed that more than 20 of those testimonials, packaged as “regular” Mainers, came from current or former elected Republican officials and Collins staffers.

Jaime Harrison raises $1 million overnight after new survey shows him tied with Lindsey Graham

On Thursday, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced that he had raised $1 million just in the last 24 hours.

Graham, who has won previous elections by comfortable margins and was a close friend of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), has become a nationally controversial figure in recent years as he has tied himself heavily to President Donald Trump — despite being a fierce critic of him during the 2016 election.

Jaime Harrison, a former aide to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, has attracted national, shattering fundraising records for a South Carolina Senate race.

His campaign has been compared to the 2018 Texas campaign of Beto O’Rourke, who took on Sen. Ted Cruz against long odds, and raised tens of millions of dollars thanks to national animosity towards his challenger and a charismatic speaking style that attracted local grassroots support. O’Rourke went on to lose the race narrowly, and has since focused on supporting down-ballot races in Texas.

Mitch McConnell rams through six Trump judges in 30 hours after blocking coronavirus aid for months

The Republican-led Senate confirmed six of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to lifetime appointments over two days this week, even though it has delayed crucial coronavirus relief since May.

The Senate filled four federal vacancies in California and two in Illinois, Bloomberg Law reported. It is also expected to confirm two additional Illinois judges in short order.

“The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation.”

Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.

The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.

Advocacy groups sounded the alarm over the confirmations of Dugan and McGlynn, who received support from anti-abortion organizations and signaled their opposition to abortion rights.

“Today’s vote should never have even happened. People are calling on their senators to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession and the rampant anti-Black violence occurring around the country,” Anisha Singh, the director of judiciary affairs at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. “And yet, the Senate majority continues to prioritize confirming judges for lifetime appointments — many with hostile records on reproductive and civil rights, including abortion.”

Singh called on the Senate to “immediately halt” upcoming votes, noting that the two judges’ “records demonstrate they are more likely to be threats to people’s health, rights and bodily autonomy.”

Lena Zwarensteyn, the Fair Courts campaign director at The Leadership Conference, said it was “deeply cruel” for McConnell to “prioritize his takeover of the courts” over pandemic relief.

“The confirmations of David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn put that court takeover into stark relief. Both have worked against reproductive freedom in their professional and personal capacities,” she said in a statement. “Dugan previously campaigned on an anti-abortion stance and questioned the legality of Roe. Similarly, McGlynn has been instrumental in pushing forward an anti-abortion agenda in Illinois. Their records on this and other critical civil and human rights make them unfit for lifetime positions.”

There are about 35 nominees in the Senate pipeline, but it is unclear how many the upper chamber will be able to confirm before November. Republicans could also confirm judges during the lame duck period after the election.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., predicted in September that the chamber would confirm another 30 judges, including ten who have been approved since then.

The latest votes came as the Senate failed to advance any tangible coronavirus relief measure for weeks after much of the funding in the $2 trillion CARES Act expired in August. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has stalled relief negotiations after balking at the $3 trillion HEROES Act passed by House Democrats in May, as well as a subsequent $2.2 trillion compromise offer.

Last week, McConnell unsuccessfully attempted to pass a $300 billion relief bill, which would have slashed federal unemployment benefits and did not include either aid to hard-hit cities and states or stimulus payments. After the measure was voted down, McConnell accused Democrats of “historic” obstruction and “stonewalling” the relief effort, vowing to use the coming days to push through more of Trump’s judicial nominees.

“We are breaking Democrat filibusters on nominations, because Democrats filibustered coronavirus relief,” McConnell said in a statement.

The Senate has confirmed more than 260 judges nominated by Trump, but McConnell complained in the statement that “Senate Democrats have forced us to break more filibusters on nominations since 2017 than had occurred cumulatively in all of Senate history before President Trump was sworn in.”

Ari Berman, the author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” argued that it was McConnell who was obstructing key votes, particularly those dealing with election protections.

“Mitch McConnell has been blocking $25 billion in USPS funding for 124 days, legislation to restore Voting Rights Act for 284 days & legislation to prevent foreign election interference for 328 days,” he wrote, “but confirmed six more extreme Trump judges in 30 hours.”