Trump ramps up his assault on the election — because there’s no other way he can win

Donald Trump recently held his first indoor rally since the super-spreader event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June. The campaign sent out a snotty statement to justify this:

If you can join tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, gamble in a casino, or burn down small businesses in riots, you can gather peacefully under the 1st Amendment to hear from the President of the United States.

The protests take place outdoors with people moving about mostly wearing masks. The casinos hand out masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines — and have the most advanced air ventilation systems in the nation. Putting several thousand people indoors, telling them that those who wear masks have psychiatric issues and encouraging them to stand closely together, screaming and cheering for hours, is something else again. Considering the age and evident comorbidities of many of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, some will get sick and perhaps die. Who knows how many others they will spread it to?

It seems counterintuitive that you would want to kill your own voters but it’s clear that Trump and his henchmen have decided that we’re close enough to the election now that the sickness and death that will likely result won’t make a difference in the outcome. And that’s all they care about.

There’s a problem here for the Trump campaign, though. Every super-spreader rally he holds also spreads Joe Biden’s message that Trump is an irresponsible, reckless, unfit leader. There he is, mocking his own government’s public health guidelines that save lives, up on a big stage demonstrating his total disregard for the American people, including his own cheering crowds.

You might think Trump would have sobered up about the virus in the wake of the revelations in Bob Woodward’s tapes that prove that he knew very early on that the virus was “deadly stuff,” much worse than the “most strenuous flu,” and that he admittedly “played it down.” His recent insistence that we are “rounding the corner” on the pandemic is absurd. Logically, that can only be seen as a macabre celebration of rounding the corner to the imminent milestone of 200,000 dead Americans (which is, tragically, now only a few days away).

The president’s disastrous mismanagement of the greatest crisis of his presidency is taking a toll. This Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked the question directly:

Asked if their opinion of Trump’s coronavirus response has changed because of Woodward’s big scoop — a tape of Trump privately acknowledging the virus was “deadly stuff” even as he publicly sought, in his own words, “to play it down”— nearly a quarter of Americans (23 percent) say yes. Even 15 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 say the Woodward news has changed their mind about the president’s handling of the pandemic.

Those might seem like small numbers. But in an age of extreme polarization, they could augur a real shift. Overall, 15 percent of Americans say the Woodward quotes have made them less likely to vote to reelect the president in November — and a third of these were 2016 Trump supporters.

It’s obvious by now that Trump is no longer trying to win the election by legitimate means. He’s tried to scare suburban women with the specter of rioters in their cul-de-sacs, and that hasn’t worked. He hoped he could hurriedly broker some “deals” in the Middle East and win the Nobel Peace Prize, but nobody takes him seriously on foreign policy. His alleged love of the military has been seriously called into question and his demands that government agencies push unproven cures and vaccines before they are ready haven’t helped his standing.

So this is all that’s left:

“The only way we can lose this election is if it’s rigged — remember that,” pretty much says it all. It’s not the first time Trump has made claims like that. Back in 2016 he told rally-goers that he would only accept the results of the election if he won.

Trump’s efforts to delegitimize mail-in voting have been well-covered. He’s not being subtle about it. He’s had his hatchet-man postmaster general sabotage the Postal Service just as it faces a massive upsurge of mail-in ballots. He has literally telling his followers to vote by mail and then show up at their polling places and try to vote again, which of course is illegal. He has repeatedly lied about states sending ballots only to Democratic voters and not Republicans. He has insisted that Democratic officials “control millions of votes” which they intend to steal for their own party.

If you wonder about the veracity of any of these claims, look no further than the words of the most prominent Republican election lawyer in the country, Benjamin Ginsberg, who says in this Washington Post op-ed that it’s all bunk.

It’s clear that Americans are going to vote in large numbers, potentially record numbers. The big question is how long it will take to count the votes and whether the public will accept the results whenever we finally get them. Trump and his Republican allies are working overtime to persuade his supporters that only the in-person votes counted on election night are legitimate.

The idea here is to end election night with Trump in the lead and cement the idea that he’s the winner, no matter what. This isn’t unprecedented. The George W. Bush campaign of 2000 took advantage of the fact that they were in the lead in Florida on election night to frame Bush as the true winner and Al Gore’s campaign as the “sore-losermen” who were trying to overturn the result. The media was complicit in spreading that 20 years ago, and it remains to be seen if they’ll do things differently this time around.

Brian Stelter of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” recently asked ABC’s Jonathan Karl how his network planned to handle election returns and Karl said they would stick to the facts and the numbers and basically report the returns straight. We’ll see.

But considering that the one state Trump has endorsed as having a reliable mail-in voting system is Florida, this observation from Karl was particularly interesting:

In terms of how long this is going to go, look early in the night on election night. Florida — despite what happened 20 years ago, Florida is a state that has its act together, has had a lot of mail-in voting, won’t have a dramatic increase this time. It’ll be very similar to what’s happened before. If you remember, the networks called Florida before 11:00 four years ago. If Donald Trump doesn’t win Florida, it’s not a very long night.

Florida is always important. But doing battle against this “perception of winning” makes Florida even more important than usual, which may just explain this news:

The Bloomberg playbook in '18 often involved striking very late. Most of the time, they didn't show their hand until they played it. And why should they? There's plenty of evidence that late ads are most effective. Striking late means no opportunity to organize a counter.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 13, 2020

It may be that the Democrats are well aware that Florida counts its mail-in votes quickly, so winning there is more important than ever. If that happens Trump will find the tables turned on him and will suddenly have to tell his voters to wait for the mail-in votes in other states to be counted. He’ll still cause chaos and declare that the vote was stolen elsewhere, of course. But it sure won’t look good if his “perfect” state goes the wrong way.

Biden campaign adds more staff in Texas

Joe Biden’s campaign is expanding its staff in Texas, bringing on 13 more people as the state continues to look competitive with just over seven weeks to go before the November election.

The Democratic nominee’s latest hires, shared first with The Texas Tribune, include several experienced Democratic operatives from the state. They include Dallas Jones, a Houston political consultant who will serve as Biden’s Texas political director, and Jackie Uresti and Jerry Phillips, who will each serve as political advisers to the campaign in Texas. Uresti was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 state director, while Phillips brings deep experience around Texas House politics and previously was executive director of the House Democratic Campaign Committee.

Biden’s campaign has also named Bethanie Olivan as digital organizing director and Terry Bermea as organizing director. Olivan recently held similar roles for the state party and Julián Castro’s presidential campaign, while Bermea is the former organizing director for Battleground Texas and was deputy state director for Michael Bloomberg’s White House bid earlier this year.

The campaign also said David Gins will serve as state operations director. Gins is a former U.S. Senate staffer who has since worked for the LGBTQ Victory Fund and the data science company Civis Analytics.

The campaign announced that Victoria Godinez, a former staffer to state Rep. Diego Bernal of San Antonio, is being hired as communications associate.

Rounding out the hires are six deputy coalitions directors, most with varying levels of Texas political experience: Deidre Rasheed, Karim Farishta, Dominique Calhoun, Teri Ervin, Lola Wilson and Joseph Ramirez.

Biden’s campaign has now named 19 staffers in Texas, following its initial hiring announcement in early August. The first six hires included a state director, Rebecca Acuña.

For months, polls have pointed to a close contest in Texas between Biden, the former vice president, and President Donald Trump. While Biden’s campaign has discussed Texas as competitive territory and made TV ad reservations here this fall, Trump officials continue to dismiss the notion that Biden will seriously contend in the historically red state.

The Trump campaign has touted what it says is a far bigger — and longer established — presence in the state, though it has not provided specific numbers.

Still, the Trump campaign has made recent moves to shore up support in Texas. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chairs Trump’s reelection effort in Texas, led a bus tour through the state earlier this month, while another group of surrogates went on a Women for Trump bus tour in the state this past weekend.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/14/biden-texas-campaign-staff-president-election/.

Black progressives denounce claims they want Wall Street insiders in Biden cabinet

Progressives pushed back on new reporting that some Black lawmakers are urging Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to resist calls from the left to reject Wall Street executives and K Street lobbyists from his administration should he win in November. Creating a diverse cabinet that will simply “do the bidding of Wall Street” will do nothing to bring about reform, say advocates.

“There’s been work done recently to argue that the term Black is mutually exclusive from the term progressive,” Maurice Moe Mitchell, national director of Working Families Party, tweeted in response to reporting from Politico Monday. “It’s pretty clear who that narrative benefits. Liberal diversity is not racial justice.”

Progressive organizations including the Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, March for Our Lives, IfNotNow, and Alliance for Youth Action submitted an open letter to Biden last spring urging him to pledge to reject “current or former Wall Street executives or corporate lobbyists, or people affiliated with the fossil fuel, health insurance, or private prison corporations, to your transition team, advisor roles, or cabinet,” in addition to other demands including appointing a Department of Homeland Security secretary committed to dismantling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies “as we know them,” and implementing a wealth tax.

According to Politico:

Black Democrats on Capitol Hill and on K Street say [rejecting Wall Street insiders who are Black] is in direct conflict with the party’s overarching diversity goals and would keep many people of color, including those with ties to the financial world, from ascending to key positions long dominated by white males.

Black professionals are very much the minority in high-powered Wall Street positions. CNBC reported in July that just 2.7% of executives, senior officials, and managers are at Goldman Sachs are Black, and just 2% of those positions are held by Black people at Citi.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), a senior lawmaker on the House Financial Services Committee and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Politico, “We’ve got to fix all of the problems that were created over the last four years,” adding, “We’re going to need every hand on deck.”

Critics jumped on the premise that it would hurt the party’s diversity goals to prohibit Wall Street insiders from cabinet positions.

“We have seen the effects of corporate control over the American government for our entire lives; it has blocked universal access to healthcare, real action on the climate crisis, and started endless wars that waste taxpayer dollars we need to invest in schools and jobs,” Emily Mayer, political director of IfNotNow, told Politico. “We reject the false choice between having the people leading our country represent the diversity of our nation and removing corporate control from our politics.”

Biden has maintained centrist positions, even when popular opinion and progressives attempt to pull him left. In July, the former vice president reaffirmed his opposition to Medicare for All in an interview with dying single-payer advocate Ady Barkan, despite the soaring popularity of the policy, particularly amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In August, Green New Deal advocates — another popular progressive platform plank Biden does not support — decried the Democratic party’s refusal to adopt plans to end fossil fuel subsidies in this year’s party platform, and Biden, responding to comments made by President Trump, told a crowd in Pennsylvania last month, “I am not banning fracking.”

In addition, Biden has refused calls from progressive activists to embrace policies like defunding or dismantling police forces and legalizing marijuana, that would benefit minority communities who are disproportionately affected by mass incarceration, police brutality, and systemic racism.

Jamaal Bowman, a Black former educator who upset centrist incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) in the Empire State’s congressional primary in July, also disputed Politico’s report, calling the framing racist.

“This Black Democrat is urging Biden to do the opposite,” Bowman tweeted in a threaded response. “We need less Wall Street in the next administration and more working class representation.”

If you’re looking for more diverse representation in a potential Biden administration, Wall Street is probably the last place I’d look.

— Jamaal Bowman Ed.D. (@JamaalBowmanNY) September 7, 2020

Centrist and progressive Black lawmakers have often been at odds over policy issues. The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, backed longtime incumbent Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) — whose father co-founded the CBC — in his failed re-election bid against progressive Black Ferguson activist Cori Bush this year. Bush, who, like Bowman, shocked pundits by winning on a platform that included Medicare for All, police reform, abolishing ICE, and decriminalizing cannabis, reiterated calls for Biden to reject Wall Street appointees.

There could be dozens of qualified BIPOC candidates in St. Louis alone who would bring that change. So, where should folx send their resumes? Asking for a friend.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) September 7, 2020

Jeff Hauser, director of government watchdog Revolving Door Project, told Politico that Biden could easily find diverse, qualified cabinet appointees outside Wall Street board rooms and executive suites.

“To say that we would have to have people who are currently working in private equity or Wall Street or the banking industry to take up senior economic jobs is absurd,” Hauser said. “You can come up with a very rich set of potential appointees of color without taking on people who are currently and very recently closely identified with high finance.”

How did mask wearing become so politicized?

The United States has lagged behind much of the world in its efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Not wearing a mask has become a political act even though masks slow the spread of the virus. As someone who just finished a dissertation on political bias, I was not surprised.

Surveys show the U.S. is polarized over COVID-19.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about the virus as scientists were still learning about it. This resulted in some mixed messaging from health organizations regarding the importance of wearing masks. Research finds that individuals turn to experts during times of national crisis, but the uncertainty from experts made political leaders a prominent source for guidance and clarity.

The message from American politicians was much more direct, but also differed substantially by political party. Democratic politicians generally took the virus much more seriously and quickly adopted mask-wearing behaviors compared to Republicans. President Trump consistently downplayed the severity of the virus and often refused to wear a mask. This created a clear political divide among politicians about how seriously they took the outbreak.

The social science of political bias

This division within politicians was internalized by the American people as well, according to research and surveys. Identifying as a Democrat was significantly associated with practicing social distancing and being concerned about the virus. Additionally, Republicans were far less likely than Democrats to view COVID-19 as a major threat to public health, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Sixty-three percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said that masks should be worn always, compared to just 29% of Republicans and those leaning Republican. Furthermore, 23% of Republicans said that masks should rarely or never be worn, compared to just 4% of Democrats. Finally, a recent CBS/YouGov poll showed that 57% of Republicans believed the number of U.S. deaths from coronavirus had been acceptable, compared to 10% of Democrats.

Once the decision to wear a mask became informed by political beliefs, it did not matter that scientists better understood the severity of the virus and the evidence in favor of mask wearing became clearer. Why? Research on identity theory shows that individuals are motivated to maintain consistency between the values associated with their identity and the information they encounter. The groups we identify with provide us with a sense of belonging and self-worth. Thus, if we identify with a political group, our psychological motivation is to process information in a way that supports the group we belong to.

This identity protection process was exactly what I found in my dissertation as well. Both Democrats and Republicans interpreted fictitious news headlines very differently depending on whether the headline was favorable or unfavorable toward their political group. This is consistent with a meta-analysis showing robust political bias for both Democrats and Republicans.

Political polarization is extremely strong in the United States, which further perpetuates political bias. The political divide regarding COVID-19 has actually grown over time, despite our increased knowledge of the virus and the efficacy of mask wearing.

How does this divide continue despite the greater knowledge we have about the virus? Well, Democrats and Republicans trust and consume different news media. These media bubbles can lead to many Americans receiving news regarding COVID-19 that is biased toward supporting their political in-group. Democrats and Republicans each prefer to associate with people who share their political beliefs. Research has also found that political attitudes become more extreme after a group discussion with like-minded people. Additionally, a study of mine found that greater political homogeneity in one’s personal network was associated with stronger political beliefs. This finding was replicated in my dissertation research where I found political polarization was positively associated with having a greater proportion of close associates who hold similar political beliefs.

In summary, once misinformation becomes political, it is very hard to correct because of our motivation to protect our identity and the reinforcement from our political echo chambers.

What next?

To slow the spread of the coronavirus, Republican and Democratic politicians could take COVID-19 equally seriously and listen to the experts. Reducing the political nature of the pandemic will increase people’s receptiveness to information from scientists.

On an individual level, people can also make an effort to reach out to those who are against mask wearing and don’t take the virus seriously. As my research shows, depolarization can occur when there is exposure to opposing viewpoints in one’s personal network. Furthermore, I found in my dissertation that Republicans were more likely to agree that climate change is influenced by human activity when they had more positive feelings toward Democrats. This is consistent with other work that shows how connecting with people we disagree with on an emotional level is key for depolarization and persuasion. Relating this to the pandemic, we can say that when members of our community engage in mask wearing, it becomes more solidified as a social norm among our group, which ultimately leads to more people adopting the behavior.

Finally, increasing mask wearing is just one hurdle. There may be a vaccine for COVID-19 in the months ahead, but the majority of people will have to take it for herd immunity to be achieved. Unfortunately, some polls suggest that about 50% of people may not take the vaccine once it becomes available. Hopefully, the pandemic is less politically charged by then and we can defeat this virus together.

Matthew Facciani, Postdoctoral Researcher, Vanderbilt University

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

House Democrats demand IG probe of Pompeo’s widely denounced RNC speech from Jerusalem

A pair of top Democrats in the U.S. House on Friday called for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Inspector General to immediately launch an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to deliver a speech to the Republican National Convention last week from a rooftop in Jerusalem while he was there on official travel.

Even before Pompeo’s prerecorded address was played on the second night of the RNC, the secretary’s choice garnered widespread criticism. Activists, Obama administration officials, Democratic lawmakers, and other commentators decried the move as “unprecedented and wrong,” accused Pompeo of “using Judaism as a political prop,” and suggested that his stunt could violate the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees from participating in certain political activities.

In a letter (pdf) Friday to Diana Shaw, the State Department’s deputy inspector general, Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) wrote that “Secretary Pompeo’s decision to make this speech appears to have violated long-standing prohibitions on department employees’ participation in political activities and sends a message that the rules and standards that govern most department employees don’t apply to the department’s senior political appointee.”

Chairs @RepEliotEngel & @NitaLowey urge State Department Office of Inspector General to launch a probe into Secretary Pompeo’s RNC speech while on official foreign travel.@SecPompeo's speech appeared at odds with @StateDept policies that Pompeo recently sent to all employees. pic.twitter.com/e8ORJuLeCv

— House Foreign Affairs Committee Dems (@HouseForeign) September 4, 2020

The lawmakers referenced a cable (pdf) that Pompeo sent to State employees in July emphasizing the importance of abiding by the Hatch Act and all department policies regarding political activities. They also noted a December 2019 memorandum (pdf) from the department’s Office of the Legal Adviser detailing current restrictions on political activities for all presidential and political appointees.

As the House Democrats highlighted in their letter, the 2019 memo says in part that appointees may not “engage in political activity in concert with a partisan candidate, political party, or partisan political group.” The memo add that “Senate-confirmed presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention or convention-related event” (emphasis original).

Engel and Lowey, who respectively chair of the House Committees on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations, also pointed out that Pompeo’s predecessors “have long avoided weighing in on domestic political matters” because as the nation’s top diplomat, they have been “responsible for representing all of America to the rest of the world, not the narrow interests of a particular president or of a single political party.”

The pair further expressed concern about Pompeo’s “use of taxpayer money in connection with the speech,” writing that “the secretary would not have been in Israel had U.S. taxpayers not funded his travel, his security detail, and his lodging. It seems to be a logical conclusion that at least some Department resources were used to facilitate Secretary Pompeo’s speech, in possible violation of the law, relevant regulations, and/or State Department guidance.”

Secretary Pompeo has "absolutely put himself at risk for civil or criminal violations of the Hatch Act, and we need to know a little bit more about just how much he was screened into his 'personal capacity' for his speech," our @AREvers told ABC News. https://t.co/noyxLoj41T

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) September 3, 2020

The State Department said in a statement before the speech that “Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity. No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo’s appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”

Pompeo, a former GOP congressman from Kansas who previously served as CIA director under President Donald Trump, has repeatedly defended his decision by echoing the statement from the federal department he currently runs and claiming that the move had been reviewed and approved by attorneys.

Asked about the speech and the message it sent to employees during a Wednesday press conference, Pompeo said: “All I can say in my role of secretary of state—I did this in my personal capacity. All I can say in my role as secretary of state is the State Department reviewed this, it was lawful, and I personally felt it was important that the world hear the message of what this administration has accomplished.”

Just before the speech aired, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the panel’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, announced that lawmakers would investigate Pompeo’s decision. Following the announcement, Engel revealed last Friday that the committee was launching contempt proceedings against Pompeo for defying subpoenas.

Engel—who was defeated by progressive Jamaal Bowman in New York’s June primary—said last week that by refusing to comply with official document requests, Pompeo “has demonstrated alarming disregard for the laws and rules governing his own conduct and for the tools the Constitution provides to prevent government corruption.”

Trump makes it clear: He revels in the killing of his political opponents

For all the demands that former Vice President Joe Biden condemn rioting and looting, no serious observer actually thinks he supports violence in the streets. The most plausible criticism of Biden is that he’s a creature of the existing political system — a product of and adherent to the established institutional order. He doesn’t want violence and chaos to shake the foundations of society.

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, really does relish chaos, and he cares little for any institutions that he doesn’t see as directly benefiting him. And in a new Fox News interview this weekend, he made clear that he’s not just a fan of violence — a view he has expressed repeatedly, even if he occasionally reads from scripts that say the opposite — but he is actively pleased by the deaths of his political enemies.

While discussing with host Jeanine Pirro the fact that U.S. Marshals — a part of the Justice Department, a part of Trump’s administration — killed the avowed antifa activist Michael Forest Reinoehl, the president expressed no regret at his death. In fact, he was triumphant about the killing.

Here’s the section of the transcript, per Factba.se:

Trump: They are arresting a lot of people. Now, we sent in the U.S. Marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street — he shot him, I mean it was on television.

Pirro: Right. Yes, cold blood.

Trump: Cold blooded killed him. He didn’t like his hat or he didn’t like something — and it wasn’t a Trump hat.

Pirro: Right. It was peaceful [Inaudible] prayer.

Trump: It was a lot — it was a religious hat.

Pirro: Right.

Trump: And he shot him — cold blood. Two and a half days went by and I put out, when are you going to go get him? And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him and in a short period of time — they ended in a gun fight, this guy was a violent criminal —

Pirro: There are a lot of them out there.

Trump: — and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this. There can’t be guys standing up that want to fight, they want to fight — you can’t throw bricks at people with shields on.

Here’s what we actually know. Contrary to Trump’s claim, Reinoehl’s killing of Aaron Danielson, who was wearing a hat for the far-right group Patriot Prayer, was not clearly in “cold blood.” Video suggests a conflict between the men in which Danielson began firing pepper spray at Reinoehl, who then shot Danielson twice with a gun. That day, Portland had been the site of a pro-Trump caravan, which at times turned violent. Trump supporters fired pepper spray and paintballs into crowds, and at least one video showed them aggressively driving through a crowd of pedestrians.

Before his death, Reinoehl claimed he was acting in legitimate self-defense against Danielson, who he said he believed had a knife. It’s not clear Danielson actually had a knife. It’s also hard to see how plausible a self-defense argument would have been had a case or trial proceeded, and now we’ll never know. It is reasonable to believe that Reinoehl would have rightly been found criminally culpable in Danielson’s death.

But Trump showed no interest in actually determining Danielson’s guilt through the criminal justice process. It is truly a shame that we won’t ever have a better understanding of the incident, but not in the president’s view. He’s already made up his mind. He demanded the U.S. Marshals act, and he’s pleased that Reinoehl was killed.

“That’s the way it has to be,” he said. “There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

Usually, political leaders call for justice in these cases, not retribution. And justice would have entailed letting the criminal proceedings play out, rather than having law enforcement kill Reinoehl upon finding him.

The circumstances of Reinoehl’s death remain murky. Witness accounts of his death conflict, and it’s not clear whether the killing was justified. In this case, not only should we regret the fact that the Danielson killing cannot be resolved through the criminal justice process, but we should demand that Reinoehl’s killing be vigorously examned to determine whether the officers acted legally and with necessary force, or if they unjustly killed him. But again, Trump showed no interest in getting to the bottom of Reinoehl’s death. He only cares about the death of Danielson, one of his supporters. The death of Reinoehl, a political opponent, leaves open no questions of justice for the president — it’s just “the way it has to be.”

This is even clearer when examining Trump’s reaction to another shooting — that of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Illinois resident who brought a semi-automatic rifle in a misguided effort to respond to the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He ended up shooting three people there, killing two.

According to the criminal complaint, Rittenhouse first shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, who was not armed. One witness said Rosenbaum tried to disarm Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse ran away from the scene, and a group of people eventually caught up with him, trying to stop him. He fell to the ground and shot two more people who had come after him. One person hit him with a skateboard, video showed. Another was holding a handgun. Rittenhouse again fled the scene, walking past police even while still armed, and returned home. He was later arrested in Illinois, and he is facing charges of murder. His attorneys have claimed he is innocent and was acting in self-defense.

Though the Rittehhouse shootings extend over a longer time period than the Reinoehl’s shooting, the incidents bear striking similarities. Both Rittenhouse and Reinoehl were armed with guns and killed others who were not armed. Both claimed they were acting in self-defense, despite the fact that they apparently used disproportionate force to respond.

But Rittenhouse, who has painted himself — like Trump — as a defender of the police, is still alive. And instead of arguing that his death would be good or that he was a cold-blooded killer, Trump has defended Rittenhouse.

“That was an interesting situation,” Trump told reporters of the Rittenhouse killings. “You saw the same tape as I saw. And he was trying to get away from them. I guess it looks like he fell and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now, and it’s under investigation. But I guess he was in very big trouble. He would have been — probably would have been killed, but it’s under investigation.”

In this case, Trump argued in favor of a self-defense case for Rittenhouse. He showed no sympathy for the people Rittenhouse killed, as he did for Danielson. When discussing Reinoehl, Trump didn’t even mention the fact that he had similarly claimed self-defense.

Though the groups involved in both incidents have clear partisan valences, the reaction to the cases need not be partisan. It should be easy to say, at a 1,000-foot level, that the tensions need to come down and the escalation must stop. We can say that anyone who has a hand in the death of someone else should be investigated, regardless of their political affiliation, and everyone should have the right to put forward a legal defense if they face criminal charges.

But this is not the president’s view. When someone he views as on his team kills others, he looks to exonerate them. He has no sympathy for those killed. And when someone on his team is killed by someone who he views as an opponent, they have no right to due process, no benefit of the doubt.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Trump previously shared a video that declared: “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

“Who are those people?”: Morning Joe rips Trump fans who swallow president’s continued lies

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blasted Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel for defending President Donald Trump’s lies about his coronavirus response.

The president was caught on tape admitting to Bob Woodward that he had purposefully downplayed the coronavirus, and the RNC chairwoman justified the revelation six months into a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 people in the U.S.

“I understand because she’s been working for Donald Trump for as long as she has, and she doesn’t remember actually what it’s like when you have people like Mitt Romney, who actually tell the truth to the public and don’t think the public is stupid, and you can actually trust them to take the information and protect their families,” Scarborough said. “But just imagine what would have happened if he told the truth, but he can’t. He can’t. That’s the amazing thing.”

Scarborough wondered how some Americans could trust the president over their own eyes and ears.

“You look at Woodward and you look at this book, and he is so twisted and contorted what the truth is,” Scarborough said. “You have to admit, he is a symbol of a pretty huge personal personalty cult, who are those people? Am I talking about you? I don’t know. Maybe if you hear an audio tape of the president of the United States admitting he lied to Americans when about 200,000 people died, if you think that that is Bob Woodward’s fault, that the president’s own voice is fake news, you too may be in a personality cult. Call your doctor and check and see.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter: Fox News “is bigger than Trump” — if he fights the network, he’ll lose

Do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does, which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it?

The answer is always yes and no to something like this, because some outlets are using the L-word all the time and others are not. And no matter what NBC and CNN and the New York Times do, there will always be this megaphone at Fox, which is what’s believed by a sizable minority of the population, and will always tread very lightly, be very cautious. What I find frustrating is that when I talk to folks at Fox on background, meaning anonymously — more than 140 current staffers and 180 former staffers and others around Fox World — some of those folks said they had the same concerns about Trump that the rest of the media folks did. You hear on CNN about Trump’s mental fitness, about his fitness for office. There are people at Fox asking those same questions, but they’re only asking them off the air. They’re not asking them on the air.

That’s the fundamental part of the problem. You’re always going to have this pro-Trump universe of media that is not going to call them out on the serial lying and fabricating, and not going to call them out on the racist rhetoric. But I do think the other major outlets have more of a — I don’t want to say a willingness to call it what it is, but you do see that happening more often in the news coverage.

Trump is a unique person, we get it. He understands the media, he was a household name before he ran, he has a lot of money. At some point, Trump will no longer be president. Do you think Fox News finds their new Trump? Because he has been really obviously great for ratings. They’ve set records.

There will be others that try to pull a Trump and use the same entertaining techniques and use the same rally techniques, and Fox may well glom onto that and give that a lot of attention. But Fox’s true secret sauce is that it’s more anti-Democrat than it is pro-Trump, it’s more anti-Democrat than it is pro-Republican. That’s what is preferred by a lot of the staffers there, a lot of the stars there. It’s easier to be against something than for something in the Fox universe, sad though tat may be. So actually, the network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where it’s tails you win and heads you win. They win either way because the audience is so loyal and so committed to these shows that whether it’s Biden or Trump, the network stands to gain either way.

You make the point that if Trump loses he might not go on Fox as much. He might even start his own competitive network.

Right, he might become a rival. And in that case, I think Fox is bigger than Trump. I do. I may be proven wrong. Now I’m on the record saying this, but I think that Fox is bigger than Trump. He would have a hard time launching a Fox rival. It would be one thing to start what he’s doing for his campaign, which is web video shows. But for him to launch a widely distributed television network in 80 million homes and get a Nielsen rating on it, I think would be very, very difficult. It’s possible, but I think it’d be very difficult.

Big picture, do you think Trump has done lasting damage to the credibility of the media overall?

I don’t know if lasting means 10 years or 50 years. I think for the 10-year horizon, yes, he has done damage. He has said “fake news” and “hoax” so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are yet. I’d like to think that in a longer time horizon, let’s say a 50-year time horizon, hopefully his attacks on the media will be viewed as an aberration, not the new normal. Hopefully other politicians will not follow this same shameless path, but I don’t know what Donald Trump Jr. will do, for example.

You’re a media critic. What can the major media do to bolster credibility in a post-Trump world, to try to get people, at least a big swath of this country, to have confidence in them again? There are people on the left who have issues with the media the same way people on the right do, but from different points of view, like they’re not tough enough on Trump. While people on the right go, “You’re too tough on Trump.” Is there anything we can do, or is this now a world where everyone gets their own cable channel and you can watch whatever you want any time.

Well, I think everybody trusts some form of media. It’s just that everybody trusts different outlets and different forms of media. There’s a sense of media distrust when, in fact, everybody has their own silos that they do trust. I think what big mainstream brands that try to appeal to everybody can do is to take on these issues and these concerns head-on. Don’t be afraid of them. Talk about why we do what we do. Be accessible and transparent. Show that we are human beings and not robots reading the news and reading our columns. Show that we have reasons for why we do what we do and let people find the primary sources for themselves.

When we say the president is lying about something — it’s one thing for me to say it, and another thing for me to show it. During his inauguration, he said the sun came out at the end of his speech, when in fact it was raining. It doesn’t take me to say that. All I have to do is show you the video of the speech and then show the lie. Primary source material, letting people find it for themselves and being transparent with the audience — I hope that gradually helps. with these. It’s not a full solution. These are all partial solutions.

Rudy Giuliani collaborated on smear of Joe Biden with “active Russian agent”

Former LifeLock spokesperson (and New York mayor) Rudy Giuliani is now seeking to distance himself from a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was sanctioned last week by the U.S. Treasury Department as an “active Russian agent.”

The sanctions target Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker who has ties to Russian intelligence that date back more than a decade. Treasury now accuses Derkach of running a “covert influence campaign” aimed at the 2020 U.S. presidential election since late 2019.

Giuliani met with Derkach last year in Ukraine in the former mayor’s role as Donald Trump’s attorney, during a trip aimed at digging up dirt on Joe Biden, then viewed as the Democratic frontrunner and now the party’s presidential nominee. Derkach and Giuliani discussed the much-debunked allegations about Biden in a segment on One America News Network (OAN), which Giuliani replayed on his personal podcast this March.

According to the Treasury Department, Derkach was pushing “false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 presidential election” into U.S. media via press conferences, interviews and other statements.

His efforts include releasing edited audiotapes that purport to document improprieties by Joe Biden in his dealings as vice president with the Ukrainian government.

When asked how he felt about his work with someone whom the Trump administration has now sanctioned as an active Russian agent, Giuliani offered no remorse, replying to Salon by text message:

“Yes I am very comfortable with what I did now leave me alone I’m with my friends discussing our experience on September 11 and keep covering up for the Biden Family making millions selling his public office.”

Giuliani, who forwarded a supposed dossier of information on Biden to the State Department in the spring of 2019, told NPR that he had “never tried to influence the election.”

Derkach, Giuliani said in comments to NPR, “had no unique information that wasn’t already known except the $5.3 billion and that is being investigated in UKRAINE.” That again promotes Derkach’s debunked claims that Biden and his family somehow enriched themselves on a grand scale from business deals in Ukraine.

Giuliani’s activity in Ukraine last year led directly to the impeachment of his client, President Trump. Even as congressional impeachment hearings were proceeding, Giuliani traveled to Ukraine with an OAN news production team in an apparent attempt to justify his smears against Biden and create an alternative to the impeachment narrative. A few weeks after his trip, the House voted to impeach Trump.

Giuliani also popped up in an intriguing photograph with Chinese journalist Ding Gang, an associate of expat billionaire Guo Wengui, a Mar-a-Lago member who has been accused of being an agent of the Chinese government.

Adding to the mystery, former Trump aide and campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht last month on federal fraud and money laundering charges, can be seen in the background of that photograph, above Giuliani’s shoulder.

http://twitter.com/jonah_jill/status/1304299665702227968

As Salon first reported, Bannon’s nonprofit group Citizens of the American Republic — subject of a documentary and now also a federal investigation — employed top Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller from October 2019 until at least February 2020, at a salary of $20,000 a month.

Fox News poll shows Trump losing to Biden on “mental soundness”

Likely voters believe that Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more mentally sound that President Donald Trump, according to a recently-released Fox News poll.

The survey of likely 1,191 likely voters found that 51% believe that Biden “has the mental soundness to serve as president.”

Only 47% of likely voters told Fox News that President Trump has the “mental soundness” to be commander-in-chief.

The current president has made his mental stability a cornerstone of his campaign.

The same voters preferred the compassion of Biden over Trump, 62% to 44%, the poll found.

In all, the Fox News survey found that 51% of likely voters would choose Biden and 46% of likely voters would pick Trump if the election were held today.

The poll has a margin of error of ± 2.5 percentage points.

Read the entire poll from Fox News.

Washington was silent, but Trump tweets regularly — running for president has changed over the years

Presidential campaigns haven’t always looked the way they do in 2020 – or the way they did in 2016, before the coronavirus pandemic changed everything about conventions, political outreach and voting.

The requirements have stayed the same – just about any natural-born citizen over the age of 35 can run for president. But who decides who runs has changed substantially. So has campaigning.

Nowadays, people have to register as official candidates for president after they have raised US$5,000 toward the effort. At that point, the Federal Election Commission asks them to declare their political party affiliation, which they can choose even if the party leadership doesn’t want that person to run.

Party elites are still powerful, but in past eras, they were much more so.

The era of statesmen

When creating the presidency during the Constitutional Convention, many of the country’s founders saw George Washington as the ideal person to hold the office. Despite this consensus, they had a peculiar problem.

They thought anyone who sought the votes of the people wanted power for the wrong reasons and would use that power to undermine the government. For that reason, even Washington himself maintained a “guarded silence” on the topic to avoid appearing “vain-glorious,” admitting only privately that he would serve as the nation’s first president if he was called upon.

When combined with the very real fear that “those men who have overturned the liberties of republics” started “their career by paying an obsequious court to the people,” early candidates knew they had to avoid looking too eager for power.

Thomas Jefferson took this position to an extreme when he vowed never to serve in public office again after being the new nation’s first secretary of state. He discovered he would be on the ballot in 1796 only when his close friend James Madison wrote a letter claiming he “ought to be preparing” himself for the presidential nomination. Jefferson came in second that year, becoming the vice president; he won the top job in 1800.

Until 1824, candidates remained reserved about campaigning for themselves. That year, candidate Andrew Jackson stepped forward, promising to govern for the common man rather than the party elites who had controlled Washington for too long. The turbulence in the lead-up to, during and after the Civil War left elections more disorganized until the late 19th century, when the era of the machine began.

The rise of the political machine

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, American politics was a dirty business. Party elites sat in smoke-filled rooms deciding whom they would support as a candidate and how they would stop others from winning the election.

Once in office, members of both parties used their position to provide others with patronage jobs and expected kickbacks as thanks. Party bosses usually maintained control over those in power, even demanding a say in who served in the positions that were appointed by elected officials.

As New York City’s police commissioner and later governor of New York state, Theodore Roosevelt resisted the system so much that an aggravated party boss strong-armed members of the Republican Party into offering the ambitious politician the notoriously powerless post of vice president. The scheming backfired, however, when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt became president and instituted a variety of progressive reforms, like hiring for merit rather than favoritism, some of which helped diminish the power of party bosses.

By the 1920s, candidates had an even easier way to sidestep the party elites: the invention of the radio.

The first communication revolution

The invention of the radio soon led to a watershed moment for democratization. Through this medium, presidents could speak directly to the citizens, creating a more visceral connection between the country’s leader and its people.

Eager for popular content, broadcasters gained access to nominating conventions and sold radios by claiming the people could get an inside look at the process. With the addition of television in the early 1950s, candidates started hiring advertisers to determine how to “sell” themselves directly to the people, rather than going through the party.

By 1968, when the Democratic Party ignored the results of the primaries and nominated Hubert Humphrey for president, the rioting in Chicago reached a boiling point, leading to reforms. The primary elections became more influential, and the elites lost more of their power. In 1976, however, Jimmy Carter’s surprising win in Iowa caused Democrats to claw back some control by creating superdelegates, individuals selected by the party who could give their vote to a candidate and potentially overcome the results of the primaries. These efforts worked relatively well – until the creation of social media.

The second communication revolution

During the 2008 Democratic primary, almost everyone assumed Hillary Clinton’s time had come. Political players and pundits alike expected people would vote accordingly; very few took Barack Obama’s candidacy seriously. They thought the self-proclaimed “skinny kid with a funny name” would learn the ropes and maybe get a Cabinet post.

Instead, Obama revolutionized campaigning by using the “tremendous communication capacity” of social media to spread his message and recruit volunteers. Obama harnessed the energy created by platforms designed to bring “friends” together and allow them to share their interests among anyone in their network. When coupled with his ability to bring a crowd to its feet – and a very friendly media – Clinton and the party backing her did not stand a chance: The people wanted hope and change.

The people surprised the elites once again in 2016. Donald Trump offered a unique vision of a country in disrepair that needed an outsider to come in and make America great again.

Republican operators like Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan did not take him seriously, nor did the media. Many believed Clinton would beat him handily.

Once again, elites did not realize the power of social media – this time to divide the country. The powerful algorithms used by various media platforms dramatically increased the amount of radical content people saw.

Simultaneously, Donald Trump fed the feeling of injustice among some in the country, claiming he would work for the “forgotten men and women.” The sustained feeling of injustice among many groups and the violent actions deployed to address them remains an element of the current election, where once again a brash outsider (who is also the incumbent) battles a respected party elder in good standing.

Each president leaves a permanent mark on the office. The last two presidents have fully capitalized on the power of the internet to connect them to the people. How future presidents will use these tools, and whatever new tools are yet to come, is difficult to predict. It is easy to see how mediums like Twitter and YouTube can maintain a connection and can convey small pieces of information.

It is also possible to see the value in creating a community through social media to help broadcast a political message through networks of supporters and their friends. It is difficult, however, to think back upon the great speeches of America’s past presidents and see how they could repackage those stirring moments into 280 characters.

Sarah Burns, Associate Professor of Political Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

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

Chess is taking over the online video game world — and both are changing from this unlikely pairing

As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a livestreaming website called Twitch.tv. An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game.

While viewers eagerly await Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself.

From Aug. 21 to Sept. 6, Twitch and Chess.com are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most popular gaming streamers in the world compete in a chess tournament with US$50,000 on the line.

The current renaissance in chess is happening at the confluence of livestreaming technology, video game culture and one grandmaster’s exceptional skills as both a chess player and entertainer. What is emerging is an unexpectedly good pairing between chess and a digital generation that is showing how influential gamers can be.

The game of kings is more popular than ever, with over 605 million players worldwide, and now, memes are involved.

Chess explodes on Twitch.tv

Twitch.tv is a live-video streaming website that was started in 2011 as a platform for users to watch other people play video games. In recent years, Twitch has grown to become the cultural hub of the gaming community. It now hosts tens of thousands of creators who broadcast live to a global audience of around 17.5 million viewers a day.

Since 2015, chess viewership has experienced exponential growth on Twitch. Then, a mere 59 people were watching chess streams at any given time. Today, that number averages 4,313. At the time of writing this, viewers have consumed close to 38 million hours of chess in 2020 alone.

At the helm of this explosion is Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Nakamura is a five-time U.S. chess champion and a top 10 ranked chess player in the world.

In addition to his traditional competitive career, in 2015, Nakamura began streaming chess on Twitch. At first, he was relatively unnoticed, but in 2019, when he started dedicating upwards of 30 hours per week to streaming, Nakamura became known as GMHikaru to his growing fanbase online. In 2020, those fans have already watched an astonishing 9.95 million hours of Nakamura’s channel. At times, over 45,000 viewers have watched a single game.

Why is this flood of interest in chess happening now?

A surprising fit

Nakamura is a great player and a jovial person, but there are many thousands of modern, high-production video games being played by charismatic and skilled streamers on Twitch. Viewers on Twitch have discovered a profound interest in learning the fundamental mechanics of a board game from the sixth century.

Nakamura has attracted the interest of other massively popular streamers with millions of followers — xQc, forsen, Nymm and the late Reckful, to name a few. These collaborations with celebrities of the gaming world have been a huge boost to chess’s popularity as Nakamura plays games against these streamers while blindfolded or foregoing the use of the queen. These games illustrate for the new fans and top streamers the skills, cunning and joy that are rapidly coming to be associated with chess. “Hikaru is literally the discipline in action,” comments Devin Nash, a popular Twitch analyst.

This popularity culminated in a chess tournament called Pogchamps. In June, 16 of Twitch’s top streamers played in a round robin chess tournament after being coached by a number of world-class chess players, including Nakamura. The event was so popular with both the streamers and fans — at one point more than 150,000 people were watching — that a second Pogchamps was immediately scheduled. The second tournament is running through September 6 and features streamers like xQc and even Hafthor Julius Bjornsson — the actor who played The Mountain in “Game of Thrones.”

Bridging two worlds

There are a few pieces involved in this world of online chess: the streaming technology of Twitch, Nakamura, the online gaming community and the game of chess itself. Just as in the board game, no single piece in this evolving landscape of chess is alone driving the popularity. As Nakamura, gamers and the chess world collide, each piece is changing the others.

My research focuses on understanding the economic and cultural significance of video game communities. This year has proven what many who study video games have long claimed: that online gaming is significant far beyond the confines of video games. Today, music artists are shaking the foundations of their industry by migrating onto Twitch to great success. Doctors and medical researchers as well are strengthening their ties with gaming and gamers: for instance, raising $3.1 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation in collaboration with Twitch in early 2020.

Beyond these headlines, I focus specifically on how streamers like Nakamura create micro-communities with their own cultural norms and spheres of influence. The strong human connections that develop in these spaces extend beyond the digital world. In the case of Nakamura and chess, the results are new ways of playing chess, a new meme-filled language surrounding chess and, as gamers continue to watch chess in huge numbers, an illustration of how gamers connect with each other and parts of the offline world in meaningful ways.

A clash of cultures

But not everyone is accepting of this cultural shift. Twitch viewers are mostly males in their early 20s and are, in general, a notoriously irreverent bunch. This is partly how they gain the reputation as disillusioned and dysfunctional.

As chess has grown in this community, an established elite guided by a few longtime chess players and commentators see the trend as detrimental to a once noble contest.

Ben Finegold, a prominent U.S. grandmaster, refers to the streamers with whom Nakamura has collaborated as “negative talent.” Unlike a “normal person who has talent” in chess, says Finegold, users on Twitch ought to be ignored lest they diminish the good name of a traditional chess community.

Some at the head of traditional chess, however, disagree. David Llada, the chief marketing and communications officer for the International Chess Federation, acknowledges the damage of insular thinking: “Our main sin is that chess people tend not to think ‘outside the chess board.’ They don’t pay enough attention to the world around them.”

Whatever the old guard of chess believes, this ancient game has found a new, passionate and receptive audience. A digital generation on Twitch has built bridges between worlds not only for chess but for the musical and medical worlds as well. The memes are here to stay. What is next for online gaming and the game of kings remains to be seen, but neither will likely be the same.

Ilya Brookwell, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside

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

The brighter and sweeter flavor profile of limoncello sends this Negroni soaring to new heights

Shaken, stirred, clarified, layered, floral and more—these stunning recipes are made for every cocktail lover. Natalie Migliarini’s self-taught cocktail skills and James Stevenson’s industry know-how form the power partnership that is “Beautiful Booze.” Their mixology wizardry and worldly expertise will have you twisting cocktail classics with ease—from sours and tropical tipples to beverages with more unique ingredients. (Martinis made with butterfly pea gin, anyone? With vibrantly photographed recipes like the Limoncello Negroni, Prickly Pear and Pineapple Clarified Margarita and more, you’ll be just as thrilled to show this book off as you will be to mix its drinks.

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This Limoncello Negroni may be quick and easy, but it certainly doesn’t sacrifice anything when it comes to flavor. We’ve eliminated the gin and substituted it with the brighter, sweeter flavor profile of limoncello, which plays well with the bitterness of the Campari. Wanting to keep this Negroni on the lighter side of the palate, we opted for blanc vermouth in the place of sweet vermouth, enabling the limoncello to really shine. To pay homage to the limoncello in this variation, we also charred a lemon slice to use as a garnish, and to add some contrasting color to the overall presentation.

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Recipe: Limoncello Negroni

Serves 1

Suggested glassware: Double old-fashioned glass

1 ounce limoncello
1 ounce Campari
1 ounce blanc vermouth
3/4 ounce chilled water
Charred lemon slice to garnish (see note)

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice.

Stir for approximately 30 seconds to chill and combine ingredients.

Strain into a double old-fashioned glass.

Garnish with a charred lemon slice.

Note: To char a lemon slice, simply take your lemon slice and char it with a kitchen torch.

Like this recipe as much as we do? Click here to purchase a copy of “Beautiful Booze: Stylish Cocktails to Make at Home.”

Inside the mind of an anti-vax parent

Who is the typical “anti-vax” parent? What motivates them to disregard the advice of physicians, scientists, and public health officials? What do they value? Whom do they see as their peers? And how has their thinking gone astray? We have looked at cognitive effects, such as biased assimilation, the credibility heuristic, selective perception, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and backfire effects. We have also looked at how the availability of misinformation can lead people astray. We have examined at length the arguments made by major figures in the anti-vaccine movement, such as Andrew Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Robert Sears, and the Geiers. We have examined the demographics and religious beliefs of anti-vaccine activists and their historical predecessors. What does this all add up to? Let’s paint a portrait of typical anti-vaccine parents, based on what we’ve learned them.

This exercise isn’t intended to set up straw men that will be easy for us to knock down, but rather to give us a concrete image of those to whom we can direct messaging. Anti-vaccine parents are deeply concerned with being good parents. They are college educated and usually members of the middle class. They have read multiple parenting books and perhaps belong to parenting groups in their neighborhood or online. They have made decisions, in conjunction with discussions with their peers, about what kinds of parents to be. Breast or bottle feed? Public or private school? They may see themselves as “crunchy” parents, who are interested in “attachment” or “natural” parenting.

Let’s give them names: Jim and Jenny, who live in Measlton, Michigan. One day Jenny sees a discussion in the Facebook group Measlton Moms. One parent says, “I went to the pediatrician and they wanted to vaccinate my baby. I said no. I don’t want them injecting toxins into my baby.” Another parent chimes in: “My daughter is vaccine injured. After she got the MMR shot, she had a fever for three days and then had seizures.” These stories alarm Jim and Jenny. They want to learn more before making a decision.

Jim researches articles on websites like Natural News and InfoWars. Jenny finds books on Amazon. Some of what they read is alarming. Claims of medical fraud and toxins that poison the blood being injected into children. Comparisons to Nazi doctors experimenting on children. Jim’s cousin weighs in when she’s visiting one day: “I didn’t vaccinate my kids. Look how healthy they are.” Rather than appealing to science, these sources appealed to moral concerns.

Moral foundations theory is a theory from social psychology meant to explain the variations in how people respond to moral arguments. It posits that moral arguments tend to be based on certain foundations: concerns about care or harm, about fairness, about loyalty, about authority, and about purity. Some research indicates that these concerns respond best to arguments premised on harm or fairness and that conservatives tend also to respond to arguments based on authority, loyalty, and purity. Jenny views herself as more liberal and is swayed by the arguments claiming that vaccines harm children and that it is unfair for the government to impose such a choice on her family. Jim, who views himself as more conservative, is swayed by these arguments, but also by the authoritative doctors and scientists that seems to support anti-vaccine views and by revulsion at the idea of compromising his child’s purity by injecting it with foreign matter. They make what they feel is the right choice.

When Jenny takes the baby to its checkup with the pediatrician, Dr. Smith brings up its vaccine schedule. Jenny refuses and has come armed with information she’s pulled from her sources on the internet and in books. She insists that there’s mercury in vaccines that causes autism. She lists chemicals with long names that are in vaccines. Dr. Smith is taken aback. She agrees to delay but will try to persuade Jenny again at the next office visit. At the next office visit, Dr. Smith has come prepared with responses to the anti-vaccine claims made by her patient. However, for every answer she can provide, Jenny has a rejoinder. The pediatrician is again delayed in vaccinating. Jenny feels ambushed by Dr. Smith. “I’ve done my research,” she says. “As a mother, I know what’s best for my own child, better than anyone else.”

Jim and Jenny feel they’ve done their best for their child. They identified a potential danger, did research, and avoided that danger, which is the duty of good parents, after all. When Dr. Smith tried to convince them with facts and data alone, she failed because Jim and Jenny knew they shouldn’t just trust whatever the pediatrician says. Long gone are the days of paternalism when the doctor knows best and a patient should simply listen and do what they’re told. Jim and Jenny are active in their own health care and that of their children.

What could Dr. Smith have done to convince Jenny to go ahead with vaccination? What can municipalities, neighbors, and friends do to help Jim and Jenny make better choices? Dr. Smith was operating from an information-deficit model. She believed that Jim and Jenny simply didn’t have enough information. However, Jim and Jenny have more than enough information. It’s just bad information. The bad information came from people whom Jim and Jenny trusted, friends and family. The good information came from an authority figure.

Imagine how this scenario would have played out if someone on the Measlton Moms Facebook group had stepped forward after that initial post to say “I had all three vaccinated, and they’re doing great.” Or if there had been another post with a picture of a smiling child with the caption “She just got her 24-month booster shots!” Perhaps if the sources that presented themselves when Jim and Jenny set out to do research had been better, they might have stopped themselves. Jim may have been directed to New Scientist, Scientific American, or another mostly reliable source, rather than to InfoWars and Natural News. Amazon’s algorithm may have directed Jenny to books by Paul Offit, rather than to books by vaccine denialists.

Jim and Jenny’s anti-vaccine stance arose in concert with many of the human tendencies, biases, and shortcuts of thinking that we’ve discussed before. People we know are more trustworthy than people we don’t know. Statistics are less convincing than stories. Establishment authorities, such as physicians and federal agencies, engender distrust. Chemicals and substances with long and unpronounceable names can be frightening. We fear that putting things that are not natural into our bodies will make us impure. How we view ourselves and how we appear to our peers informs what we view as good parenting. Now that Jim and Jenny have been convinced they’ve done the right thing, can their minds be changed? Has someone who was anti-vaccine ever changed their mind?

Taco Bell is ditching the Mexican Pizza soon, but here’s an easy homemade recipe

On the Taco Bell website, there are paragraphs dedicated to describing — or perhaps “romanticizing” is a more appropriate word — the dishes featured on their menu. Of the soft taco, the website says “it’s got a journal full of poetry about its feelings, and a 100% track record of crying during movies based on paperback novels with shirtless dudes on the cover,” while the grilled cheese burrito apparently “radiates con-queso confidence.”

Comparatively, the thesis of the multi-paragraph Mexican Pizza is pretty straightforward: “Who wants to live in a world with no Mexican Pizza? Spoiler alert, but the answer is no one.” But, alas, the world will soon have to adapt.

In a Sept. 3 press release, the 7,000-location chain announced that they would be discontinuing some of their most beloved items, including the 7-Layer Burrito, all the shredded chicken and potato options, Nachos Supreme, the Spicy Tostada. And yes, the Mexican Pizza.

That menu item, which is essentially a double-decker tostada topped with bubbling cheese, had a cult following — especially among vegetarians because it was one of the dishes that could be reliably adapted to be meat-free. It was this bizarre cultural mashup that seemed to revel in its inauthenticity, dripping in both drunken nostalgia and mild red enchilada sauce.

Taco Bell Quarterly, a literary magazine dedicated to writing about or featuring the fast-food chain, summarized the overwhelming response to the announcement of the product’s discontinuation with a play on the Arthur’s Fist meme, in which the children’s book character’s hand is clenched around a spork. “Me when I found out Taco Bell is cancelling the Mexican Pizza,” the caption reads.

While 2020 has been a rough year, this loss, however inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, feels like another blow. In a statement from the company, Taco Bell President and Global CEO Mike Grams said the company is constantly evaluating ways to provide more efficient restaurant experiences, and have already begun to see progress from streamlining the menu.

“While we know fans may be understandably sad to see some of their favorites go, this evolution of our menu truly paves the way for fresh new ideas,” Grams said. “The creativity and innovation in our kitchen hasn’t slowed down at all, and we look forward to rolling out new fan favorites.”

While they do that, we can still make a version of the Mexican Pizza at home. It’s simple and probably healthier than what you’d get in the drive-through (but don’t let that stop you from slathering it with any lingering packets of Taco Bell Fire Sauce you have stashed in your kitchen).

DIY Mexican Pizza
5 pizzas

½ pound of ground beef
½ packet of taco seasoning (you can actually buy packets of Taco Bell brand seasoning online)
2 tablespoons of oil
10 small white flour tortillas (look for the packages that say “taco size”)
8 ounces of refried beans
1 10-ounce can of red enchilada sauce
2 cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 roma tomato, chopped
2 scallions, chopped
Sour cream for serving

Fried Tortillas

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat. Once hot, cook tortillas one at a time until golden and slightly crisp on both sides, flipping halfway through — about four minutes total. Remove carefully from heat and drain on a paper towel.

Ground Beef

In a larger skillet, add the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil over medium heat. Add the ground beef and cook it, stirring often, until browned. Add the taco seasoning and cook according to packet directions.
Drain any grease and set aside.

Assemble the Mexican Pizzas

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Spoon 1 tablespoon of enchilada sauce on each tortilla. Then evenly divide the refried beans among the tortillas, followed by the beef.
Sprinkle cheese over the meat, then top it with a second tortilla.
Top that tortilla a second tablespoon of enchilada sauce, followed by more cheese.
Place the pizzas on a large sheet pan and bake them for about 10 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly.
Remove from the oven, and garnish with chopped tomato, scallions and sour cream.

Whale sharks’ huge bodies mean they’ve never really been cold-blooded

“Cold-blooded” has always been something of a misnomer. It’s convenient shorthand for animals that don’t hold their body temperature higher than the environment. Reptiles, insects, and fish are cold-blooded. But like many things in biology, the truth is more complicated than animals running either hot or cold.

One of those exceptions, according to a new paper in the Journal of Experiment Biology, is the whale shark. These huge tropical fish stay toasty warm even when they dive into cooler waters, raising new questions about their mysterious lives. (Whale sharks are quite aptly named, since like whales, they are enormous, filter-feeding, marine animals that, according to the study, are at least lukewarm-blooded.)

One of the twists in the cold-blooded vs. warm-blooded dichotomy is that some animals are simply so big that they take forever to cool down or warm up, a concept known as “gigantothermy.” Though many large, cold-blooded animals also show some behavioral thermoregulation — such as moving their limbs more in cold water — the body temperatures of animals like leatherback sea turtles and probably many dinosaurs is (was) stable largely because of thermal inertia. It’s the same reason why roasting a whole turkey takes longer to cook than some drumsticks, and why that big snowbank in the mall parking lot is still there months after the rest of the snow has melted away.

Itsumi Nakamura, assistant professor at Nagasaki University and lead author of the study, wanted to know how stable the body temperature of free-ranging whale sharks was, and what happened during their occasional, enigmatic tripsinto deep, dark, and cold waters.

The researchers attached data recorders and satellite tags to three free-ranging whale sharks, one wild and two recently released from long-term captivity at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. By matching up the water temperature and muscle temperature data, the team could calculate how well the sharks maintained their body temperatures as they moved through their environments.

Over email, Nakamura notes that attaching a data logger to a 23 foot (7 meter) long animal isn’t easy. He credits the “the aquarium staff’s excellent handling skills” for making it happen.

“Aquariums sometimes face criticism for keeping animals in captivity,” he says. “But without the co-operation of aquariums, it is difficult to learn about the biology of fish like whale sharks.”

Nakamura and his fellow researchers found that at the surface, whale shark muscle was the same temperature as the surface water, a balmy 27°C (81°F). The sharks occasionally dove for up to an hour and as deep as 1400 m (4593 ft), encountering frigid 4°C (39°F) temperatures. Despite all this, muscle temperature in this “cold-blooded” fish never dipped below 19°C (66°F)

Whale sharks have more thermal inertia than any other fish species examined – their body temperatures decreased less than 0.1°C per minute, even in water that was over 10 degrees cooler than their muscles.

They owe this astonishing thermal stability entirely to their massive size, as there was no indication that of any substantial internal heat production from the working muscles, as has been observed in some large, active fish like tunaand opah (also known as moonfish).

“Maintaining a warm body temperature even in the cold waters of the deep sea is thought to help maintain activity,” explained Nakamura. Indeed, whale shark tail beat frequency, an indicator of swimming activity, was slowest when the muscle was cool, reflecting the suppressive effect of cold water on metabolism and muscle function.

As it confirmed what had been suspected by zoologists for years, Nakamura noted that “the main result of this study, that larger bodies are less likely to change their body temperature, is expected and not surprising.”

Nakamura had previously shown that ocean sunfish, another large sea-faring creature, also seemed to benefit from the heat trapped in their hefty bodies when making deep dives.

While ocean sunfish likely dive to chase down a meal of jellyfish, the reason for the deep-water excursions of whale sharks, which typically feed on plankton near the surface, is murkier.

“It has been known for more than a decade that whale sharks dive over 1000 m [3280 feet], but their purpose is still unknown.”

The most commonly cited hypothesis is that whale sharks dive to forage. Nakmura has another idea: pest control. Like many large marine animals, wild whale sharks carry a horde of remoras, small fish that cling to their hosts with a specialized suction cup, wherever they go. Nakmura notes that “whale shark dives might have the purpose to remove the remoras.”

Nakamura’s next project is investigating the foraging ecology of whale sharks – and he teased that he “already had some interesting data.”

Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail

Oregon voters have long cast their ballots by mail in many types of elections, including for local, state and federal offices. They started doing so in 1987 — and have voted exclusively by mail in all elections since 1998.

For much of that time, I and others have studied how mail-in voting affects voter turnout, as well as the potential for partisan advantage or voter fraud.

Oregon’s experience shows that mail-in voting can be safe and secure, providing accurate and reliable results the public can be confident in. As more voters consider using mail-in voting than ever before, there are some lessons they — and their local and state election officials — can learn from Oregon, to help things move more smoothly.

Consider timing

Not everyone in the U.S. knows how to vote by mail. They’ll need help from state and local officials so they know what to do. Ideally this will start early, with instructions about how to get a mail-in ballot in advance of the actual ballots being sent out to voters.

In Oregon, all registered voters are automatically sent a ballot about three weeks before Election Day. This gives people plenty of time to receive their ballots, consider the options and mark and return the ballots. They also are less likely to skip voting because of unanticipated events like illness or inclement weather, or because of worries about making arrangements at work, getting to the polling place or waiting in long lines before being allowed to vote.

By accepting mail-in ballots in September or early October, states would get a good sense of how many people will be voting by mail. That would also give election officials and the postal system time to make plans to handle the additional traffic.

Teach voters what’s expected

In any state, when a voter receives the ballot, they must mark it, making their selections for candidates and their choices on referenda or other ballot questions.

In Oregon, after marking the ballot, the voter puts it into what’s called a “ballot secrecy envelope,” which contains no identifying information. This prevents election workers or others from knowing which person cast the ballot inside.

That secrecy envelope goes into a second envelope, which is what is delivered to election officials. Each voter must sign the outside of that second envelope. Then the voter can mail the ballot back to their local election office — in some places, postage is already paid, but in others voters need to put one or more stamps on it. Alternately, the voter can take the second envelope with its contents to one of several drop-off boxes set up around each community in the state. Many states are planning to set these up and have them regularly monitored by election officials, who collect the ballots.

When the ballots arrive at the local election office, the name and signature on the envelope are compared to the official registration records. If the signatures don’t match, the voter is notified by mail, and given the opportunity to correct or explain the discrepancy. Of course, such corrections take time, so this is a good reason for voters who are casting their ballots by mail to send in their votes early.

Let voters track their ballots

In Oregon, each outer envelope — the one the voter needs to sign — has a unique bar code printed on it. That lets voters track the status of their ballots after they have either mailed them or dropped them off.

Be clear about deadlines

Some voters will always wait until the last minute to make their choices. Drop-off sites are good ways to help people return their ballots on or just before Election Day and to save on postage.

In January 2020, Oregon set up a system where voters don’t need to buy postage for the ballot envelope. All ballots must be received at county election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day. So someone who is running late should probably avoid the mailbox and find a drop-off site instead.

Be ready for criticism

Mail-in voting is popular in Oregon, and, it seems, around the country.

But there are critics. Some are concerned that the system provides no guarantee of a secret ballot, but there has been no evidence that undue influence on voters — like bribes or threats — has been a problem in Oregon elections conducted by mail.

Others have falsely claimed there is more fraud with mail-in voting. Oregon has mailed out millions of ballots over the past three decades, with about a dozen cases of actual fraud. Most problems were unintentional errors involving signing the wrong mailing envelope or assuming that a voter could sign the mailing envelope for a family member.

My research, and that of others, has found that voting by mail boosts turnout modestly, especially in special elections and in years with presidential elections. Some people have raised more personal concerns about losing the ritual of going to the polls with other members of the community. It may be less social to vote at home, but more people’s voices are being heard.

Criticism is inevitable, but skeptics and supporters alike can look to the experience of Oregon for real answers. Perhaps the strongest evidence that the system is equitable, fair, reliable and safe is that in two statewide surveys I have conducted over the years, a nearly identical percentage of Oregon Republicans and Democrats strongly support voting by mail, and the same is true of elected officials in the state.

Priscilla Southwell, Professor Emerita of Political Science, University of Oregon

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

“Lovecraft Country” sorceress is America’s Next Top Karen, joining TV’s other ultimate Karens

In the summer of 1955 14-year-old Emmett Till journeyed to Mississippi from Chicago to visit relatives when a white woman named Carolyn Bryant accused him of making a lewd pass at her. In reaction, local white men kidnapped him from his aunt and uncle’s modest home, beat him and mutilated his body, shot him in the head, tied a 70-pound fan around his neck and tossed him into a local river. More than five decades later, Bryant reportedly admitted she fabricated much of the story that led to Till’s murder.

The action in “Holy Ghost,” the third episode of HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” also takes place in 1955, which is when Jurnee Smollett’s Letitia Lewis buys a rundown mansion with what she thinks is inherited money. Her new house is located in a white neighborhood populated with hostile forces, among the worst being the home’s demonic inhabitant.

Leti survives all of it, much to the great irritation of her actual benefactor: Christina Braithwaite (Abbey Lee), daughter of the now-deceased leader of an all-white secret society dedicated to consolidating supernatural power. Christina is a polished player – blonde, eerily placid, used to getting her way. She purports to be purely feminist in her aims. All she wants to do, she tells the story’s main hero Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), is have her power and talent acknowledged in a legacy that’s only granted respect and agency to men.

At the end of “Holy Ghost,” Tic attempts to scare Christina out of his and Leti’s lives by jamming a gun in her face. Tic is a powerfully built man, and a veteran of war. Christina doesn’t blink. She paralyzes him with her sorcery, calmly lecturing him about her family’s history and explaining why he should help her get what she wants: pages enabling her to translate the Book of Names, a spell book with the ability to give her ultimate power.

“Tic, really, you have to be smarter than this,” Christina coos at the end of her miniature TED Talk, serenely strolling by him and out the door. “You know you can’t just go around killing white women.”

If there were a pageant for fictional women who represent the worst of America in 2020, Christina would be a top contender for the title of America’s Next Top Karen.

Even Lee herself agrees with that assessment. “She’s ultimate Karen,” the actor behind Christina told Salon in a recent interview. “It’s that privileged white woman playing Monopoly with the lives of this Black family, all the while doing it with this air of like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not hurting them. I’m not using nasty terms.’ All the while she’s taking no accountability for it. She’s claiming ignorance to it . . . which is the ultimate Karen move, right?”

“Lovecraft Country” festers with slimy monsters, malevolent ghosts and other supernatural entities, but on the verge of the series’ fifth episode the deadliest threat may very well be Ms. Braithwaite. But wasn’t that obvious from the first time we saw her? After all, this year has been a banner one for the real world’s Karen brigade; why wouldn’t a television series respond to this by producing an avatar who oppresses her victims without having to waste a breath?

Before we go any further we should touch upon what, or who, constitutes a Karen. As many actual, headline-grabbing women have demonstrated, Karens weaponize their whiteness — and their tears — in order to assert their dominance in any given situation involving interactions with Black people.

We’re well aware of the recent all-star examples of Karen behavior: There was Amy Cooper, aka Central Park Karen, manufacturing a threat in a 911 phone call that could have resulted in a Black bird watcher being shot to death, for the simple crime of asking her to leash her dog, who was roaming in an area where no dogs were allowed.

There was Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis woman who joined her husband on her front lawn in pointing their firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters marching by their house. There was Jillian Wuestenberg, filmed as she aimed her gun at a mother and daughter outside of a Detroit-area Chipotle.

All of them acted with full acknowledgment that their white womanhood grants them a level of impunity, and in the aftermath of terrorizing Black people going about their business, were given public platforms to argue that actually, they’re the victims.

Those Karens and others we’ve come to know over the past nine months aren’t fictional creations, making them infinitely scarier. But if part of television’s service to history and culture is to render our sins in metaphor and project them back at us, then we should view what Ms. Braithwaite does with alarm.

And she’s far from the only fictional Karen on TV. Remember Elena? Reese Witherspoon’s nosy, accusatory, holier-than-thou suburban mom from hell in Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere”? Kerry Washington scored an Emmy nomination for her performance in the series, and part of the reason for that were the many opportunities for Washington’s character Mia to hold back explosions every time supposedly liberal Elena chastises Mia, a Black single mother, for pointing out Elena’s toxic white privilege. How dare she!

For seven seasons “Orange Is the New Black” got audiences to invest in the stories of Black and Brown women in prison by luring them into the series by following another Karen named Piper (Taylor Schilling), a white upper-middle class woman who, in last year’s finale, cheerily drove off to a semi-normal life with: “a clean sweep, clean living; a clean conscience.”

Meanwhile a number of Piper’s minority peers in prison ended up deported, slapped with heavier sentences and worse. Not Piper/Karen’s problem – she’s sweeping up a Starbucks now!

Hulu’s “PEN15” serves up adolescent Karens in the form of Anna (Anna Konkle) and Maya’s (Maya Erskine) rivals Heather (Anna Pniowsky) and Becca (Sami Rappaport), two of the most popular girls in school who are masters of middle school mean girl cruelty masked in kindness. Their names alone – Heather and Becca – announce them as predecessors to the Karens of today. (The fact that the characters are 13 in 2000 would put them at prime Karen age in 2020 if “PEN15” were to cook up a flashforward episode.)

Looking backward in TV history creates an endless list: Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena Joy of “The Handmaid’s Tale”? An authoritarian Karen who sells out her entire gender to live in the shadow of power.

Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) of “Downton Abbey”? Love her to death, but that lady’s a Karen. Ditto for Jessica Lange’s Constance Langdon on “American Horror Story” – only a Karen could be a grandmother to the anti-Christ. And there’s reality star Kate Gosselin, who may not necessarily deserve the Karen label (discuss!) but has the unfortunate honor of being the poster model for the breed’s signature “Let me speak to your manager” hairstyle.

But Christina Braithwaite is next level compared to most of these ladies because . . . hold on . . . she’s a magical Karen. And she knows it, which makes her even more aggravating. Manipulative in the extreme and full of advice for Leti and Tic, Christina’s secret weapon is the fact that she appears to most who see her as refined, delicate and harmless.

“You should think about making some friends. Not all us white folks are out to get you,” she purrs at Tic a few beats before her father tries to tear his soul out of him – which, she assures him in so many words, has nothing to do with her.

After deceiving Leti, she pulls a classic white feminist’s move and feints at gender allyship: “Don’t let the men fool you into thinking it’s always about them,” Christina tells her, right after a magical ward prevents her from strong-arming her way into Leti’s home.

Lee puts it best: “It’s like, ‘I wasn’t doing anything.’ But they know what they’re doing,” she emphasizes of her character, and Karens in general. “She’s a very sophisticated Karen.”

What, then, could be her weak spot? Aren’t we all asking that about the real Karens? Shame hasn’t altered their behavior in public spaces or made them think twice about being filmed. For her display of lethal aggression against unarmed citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, McCloskey and her husband received the thanks of grateful nationalists by being invited to speak at last month’s Republican convention.

In some fictional corners of the universe, at least, Karens receive their comeuppance; Elena loses her elegant home and her family’s respect in “Little Fires Everywhere.” In “Handmaid’s Tale” Serena Joy is psychologically and emotionally diminished, and loses a finger for aiming too high in the patriarchy whose foundations she laid.

And Ms. Braithwaite? Her future is about as unclear as her true intentions, but history is as full of her like as the modern era, adding an extra level of sickening sinister to her most mundane actions and the terror resulting from them.

“She really is a gorgeous depiction of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, which is something I’m quite fascinated [by],” Lee adds. “It’s universally a story that gets told over and over again, a really sick cycle that repeats.” If it weren’t based in something real, we might even dismiss her villainy as over the top. But many events past and present prove this isn’t so, and compel us to watch her closely.

“Lovecraft Country” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Federal judge blocks U.S. Postal Service from sending “patently false” mailers to voters

A federal judge late Saturday ordered the U.S. Postal Service to immediately stop sending mailers containing false voting information to Colorado residents, saying he is “deeply troubled” by the decision to distribute the misleading postcards to households across the nation.

“As a result of false information contained in the notice, some Colorado voters may not vote because they erroneously believe that: (1) they must request a ballot at least 15 days before the election; (2) they must mail their ballot at least seven days prior to the election; or (3) they may not vote if they lose their ballot,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge William Martínez in a 10-page ruling (pdf) granting Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s request for a temporary restraining order.

“In reality, Colorado voters do not need to request a ballot at any time. Voters who receive a ballot do not need to mail the ballot back at least seven days before the election; they may alternatively deposit that ballot at a drop-box or may choose to vote in person up to and including on Election Day,” Martínez continued, describing some of the information on the mailer “patently false.”

“The notice, if distributed, will sow confusion amongst voters by delivering a contradictory message,” the judge said.

The ruling came hours after Griswold sued Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to President Donald Trump—and other top USPS officials over the mailers, which have already arrived at households in Colorado and other states just weeks ahead of the November election.

While acknowledging the postcards “may have started off as a well-intentioned effort” to inform voters ahead of the election, Griswold tweeted late Friday that “confusing voters about mail ballots in the middle of a pandemic is unacceptable.”

As Common Dreams reported Saturday, election officials in California, Washington state, and Maryland have also publicly raised alarm about the postcards, which contain both broad advice on how to vote by mail as well as specific timelines that could mislead residents of states with different rules.

In an emailed statement Saturday as at least five additional states considered suing over the postcards, the USPS said the mailers are intended to provide “general, all-purpose guidance on the use of the mail, and not guidance on state election rules.”

“The mail-piece—which has already been delivered to most households and will reach every American residential mailing and P.O. Box address in the coming week—contains a single set of simple recommendations for voters throughout the nation, regardless of where they live and where they vote,” the Postal Service said. “At the same time, we are aware that each state has its own specific rules, deadlines and requirements, and the mail-piece acknowledges that fact.”

Griswold said Saturday that she urged the Postal Service not to send out the mailers in Colorado due to the misleading information, but her request was denied.

“As the chief election official of the state of Colorado, it’s my job to try to stop misinformation and any unnecessary election confusion,” said Griswold. “The importance of this election, combined with the fact it is being held amidst a national pandemic, further heightens the need to provide correct voting information to Coloradans.”

“I’m going to interrupt you”: Fox News’ Chris Wallace destroys Trump adviser’s talking points

Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes on Sunday downplayed the revelations that President Donald Trump misled the American people about the severity of novel coronavirus pandemic.

In an interview with Fox News, Cortes argued that Trump made the admission to journalist Bob Woodward in the “fog of war.”

“Why not level with the American people, Steve?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked.

“This was the fog of war, biological war,” Cortes insisted.

“I’m going to interrupt you right there,” Wallace interjected. “It wasn’t the fog of war. On January 28, the president got his presidential daily brief, the top intelligence in the Oval Office. And at that point, his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien said that this is the biggest challenge you’re going to face in your entire presidency.”

“So there was no fog of war there,” the Fox News host added. “The word that he was getting from his top intelligence and national security people was that this was a deadly pandemic. There was no fog here.”

“No, no, there was tremendous fog!” Cortes objected.

Watch the video clip below from Fox News.

Humans are destroying wildlife at an “unprecedented” rate, World Wildlife Fund report warns

A new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reveals that population sizes of “mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” are down by 68 percent since 1970, amounting to an “unprecedented” rate of destruction of Earth’s diverse range of species.

“Biodiversity is fundamental to human life on Earth, and the evidence is unequivocal – it is being destroyed by us at a rate unprecedented in history,” the WWF explains in its report. The authors cite a number of reasons for the massive loss of wildlife including the industrial revolution, human population growth, increases in global trade and consumption, urbanisation and climate change. The WWF argues that humans are overusing the planet’s biocapacity by at least 56 percent, in the process polluting most of our oceans, destroying 85 percent of the area of wetlands and significantly altering 75 percent of the planet’s ice-free land surface.

“Too few of our economic and financial decision-makers know how to interpret what we are hearing, or, even worse, they choose not to tune in at all,” the authors explain. “A key problem is the mismatch between the artificial ‘economic grammar’ which drives public and private policy and ‘nature’s syntax’ which determines how the real world operates.”

Salon spoke by email with Jeff Opperman, Global Freshwater Lead Scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, who co-authored the freshwater section of the new report. In that section, Opperman and his colleagues learned that freshwater species populations experienced the most dramatic population decline, with their population falling by 84 percent.

“Our planet is sending alarm signals between recent wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other extreme weather events,” Opperman told Salon. “We’re seeing our broken relationship with nature play out in our own backyards. The steep global decline of wildlife populations is a key indicator that ecosystems are in peril. Healthy ecosystems provide a range of benefits to humans like clean water, clean air, a stable climate, flood protection, and pollination of food crops. When populations decline and ecosystems begin to unravel so does nature’s ability to support human health and livelihoods.”

He argued that the situation, though dire, is not insurmountable.

“Scientific models show that we can ‘bend the curve’ to halt the loss of nature,” Opperman explained. “Modeling predicts that declining trends can be flattened and reversed with urgent and unprecedented actions. These actions include transforming how we produce food; aggressive movements to tackle climate change; and investments in nature-based solutions that provide direct benefits to society, like coastal protection. It is also imperative that we transform our economic systems to reflect the ‘natural capital’ that truly underpins our economic prosperity.”

He concluded, “In sum, the report urges world leaders to treat biodiversity conservation as a strategic investment to preserve human health, wealth, and security.”

Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon by email that the WWF’s report is one more sign that “profligate human consumption, extraction of resources, exploitation of ecosystems, and reckless polluters, are destroying this planet.” He argued that “we need far more extensive preservation and conservation policies, international agreements to protect key terrestrial and marine ecosystems, consequences for corporate polluters, and an ethic that values the preservation of life over the accumulation of wealth.”

The WWF’s report is not the only recent scientific study that indicates humanity is heading toward a mass extinction event. A paper published in Science found that the current pace of man-made global warming far exceeds any natural climate fluctuations as they have existed in the Cenozoic era, or the period that existed in the planet’s history since an asteroid hit Earth roughly 66 million years ago.

“This study reinforces the fact that we’re now impacting the climate — and the planet — in ways that are unprecedented even over geological timescales. It’s a warning shot over the bow if there ever was,” Mann wrote to Salon.

In response to the report, English broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough told the BBC that we live in a new geological period known as the Anthropocene, one in which human activity fundamentally alters the planet. He argued that this could be a period in which people achieve a balance with the natural world and become caretakers of our planet rather than destroyers of it.

“Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials,” Attenborough said. “But above all it will require a change in perspective. A change from viewing nature as something that’s optional or ‘nice to have’ to the single greatest ally we have in restoring balance to our world.”

What are the true goals of QAnon? It’s the 21st century’s ultimate catfish scheme

In the previous four installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Trump supporters known as QAnon. According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by the mortal enemies of Donald Trump. He insisted that when Trump is re-elected in November we can all look forward to the abolition of the income tax, the development of “free energy” for all and the public unveiling of thousands of grateful kidnapped children rescued by Trump’s private army of “white hats” from cages squirrelled away in these Satanist-controlled underground dungeons.

One of the pieces of so-called “evidence” provided by my friend was a YouTube documentary called “Out of Shadows,” which took the internet by storm in April. Perhaps the most impactful propaganda film of the past few years, “Out of Shadows” is a thinly-disguised QAnon recruitment video that mixes small slices of truth with a whole lot of lies to confuse the viewer into believing various bizarre theories promoted by QAnon. In this final installment, we conclude our analysis of “Out of Shadows,” delve into the Jeffrey Epstein mystery and explain why QAnon is the catfish scheme of all catfish schemes.

The strange case of Jeffrey Epstein is left for the very end of “Out of Shadows.” What the filmmakers choose to report regarding the Epstein affair is intriguing. Why does the documentary spend so much time talking about the known or alleged crimes of the convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail cell last year, but never mention that the name of Donald J. Trump appears in Epstein’s infamous little black book, alongside those of Bill and Hillary Clinton? (Trump’s name and contact information are listed on page 85.)

As you no doubt know, Epstein was a wealthy financier with endless connections to the rich and famous (including businessmen, politicians, scientists, Hollywood stars and royalty) who ran a child sex ring operation out of his luxurious “temple” in the Virgin Islands. On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested for trafficking underage girls in Florida and New York. On Aug. 10, while incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, Epstein won the “Most Improbable Suicide of the Year” Award after he was found dead in his cell under suspicious circumstances.

An informant who told New York Post reporters he had spent several months in the same “special housing unit” at the MCC where Epstein died claimed, “There’s no way that man could have killed himself. I’ve done too much time in those units. It’s an impossibility.” The informant said that the height from floor to ceiling in those cells “is like eight or nine feet. There’s no way for you to connect to anything. You have sheets, but they’re paper level, not strong enough. He (Epstein) was 200 pounds — it would never happen. … There’s a steel frame, but you can’t move it. There’s no light fixture. There’s no bars.”

Whatever really happened in that cell, there are a lot of powerful people in the world whose lives were made much easier the second Epstein checked out of existence. The real point, however, is this: Instead of focusing on real-world methods of preventing other Epsteins from torturing innocent children, Team QAnon wastes its time searching for Satanic, Illuminati-related symbols hidden in the décor of celebrities they dislike.

For example, in one episode of the aforementioned “Rick B2T” QAnon talk show, Rick’s anonymous buddy “Gene” flashes a photo of Ellen DeGeneres sitting on the set of her daily talk show. On the wall behind DeGeneres, to the right, one can see a series of horizontal lines; to the left is a mural that depicts a row of palm trees. “Gene” then flashes a photo of Epstein’s mosque-like temple, the walls of which are decorated with a series of horizontal lines. The temple is surrounded by palm trees. A horrified expression darkens the face of “Rick B2T,” immediately after which he snarls, “Can you believe that? Her set is Epstein Island! That is just sick!”

Horizontal lines.

Palm trees.

Based on these uncanny symbols, one can only conclude the obvious: Ellen DeGeneres is involved in sex trafficking, just like Epstein.

One wonders how Rick would react if he ever encountered a real Satanic symbol.

If these QAnon people could take a step back from their own weird neuroses, they might realize that there’s absolutely no evidence connecting Epstein to Satanism or the Illuminati. (In fact, there’s no evidence connecting the historical Illuminati to Satanism either.) The Epstein story is sordid enough without having to drag ancient secret societies into it. These are red herrings that merely deflect attention from the real story, which is that Epstein’s sex trafficking ring was being used to collect blackmail material against some of the most powerful people on the planet.

Here’s an excerpt from a Daily Mail article published on May 27:

Epstein’s victims have spoken in depth about his camera [surveillance] system and artist Maria Farmer has described how he had a room at the front of his $75 million Upper East Side mansion full of screens.

Court documents show that other victims told officials that Epstein had his private island in the Caribbean wired up too, as well as his mansion in Palm Beach.

Some have speculated that Epstein could have made his $650 million fortune by blackmailing his powerful friends, such as Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Among the others who Epstein knew were former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, magicians David Blaine and David Copperfield, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Michael Jackson.

And in an interview with New York Times journalist James B. Stewart, Epstein claimed to know a “great deal” about his powerful friends, some of his knowledge was “potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.”

How did Epstein get this complex operation up and running in the first place? Was this elaborate intelligence-gathering plot funded by the money he made as a hedge fund manager? If not, who gave Epstein the resources to get this show on the road in the first place? And how did these blackmail schemes affect the national policies enacted into law by the politicians mentioned in the article above?

QAnon as a form of MindWar

The sources upon which QAnon draws are relatively obscure. For example, the tall tales being spread by Team QAnon in YouTube videos like “Out of Shadows” and “The Underground War, Happening Now” sound suspiciously like the horror stories made up by Special Agent Richard Doty and his psychological warfare military cohorts in the 1980s and 1990s. The apparent purpose of those tales was to deflect the attention of a UFO researcher named Paul Bennewitz away from sensitive intelligence operations being deployed at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, as well as the adjacent Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility and Coyote Canyon Test Area. This long, complicated, and ultimately tragic story has been documented by Greg Bishop in his excellent 2005 book, “Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.”

The parallels between QAnon’s tales and Doty’s military-funded disinformation campaign — including such oddities as subterranean battles between the American military and otherworldly creatures — are remarkable. Are such cover stories endlessly recycled with slight new twists whenever necessary? After all, why dream up new cover stories when the old ones will do? Who even remembers these obscure details from the ’80s and ’90s?

Perhaps the real secret behind QAnon is connected to the identity of the one military official who has actually endorsed the anonymous “whistleblower” in public. That lone endorser is retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely. On Oct. 14, 2019, Vallely appeared on Mike Filip’s “AmeriCanuck Internet Radio of Canada” talk show and made this provocative statement:

QAnon is tied to information that comes out of a group called “The Army of Northern Virginia.” This is a group of military intelligence specialists, of over 800 people that advise the president. The president does not have a lot of confidence in the CIA or even the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] much anymore. So he relies on real operators, who are mostly special-operations type of people. This is where “Q” picks up some of his information.

Before you leap to the conclusion that Vallely is just some random nutjob flapping his lips on the radio, let’s refer to his official biography on the U.S. Army Pacific website:

Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely is a 1961 West Point graduate who retired as Deputy Commanding General for the US Army Pacific in 1991. A veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam, he is a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces as well as the Army War College.

Throughout his 32-year military career, Maj. Gen. Vallely served in many overseas theaters to include Europe and the Pacific Rim Countries. He has served on US security assistance missions on civilian-military relations to Europe, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Central America with in-country experience in Indonesia, Columbia, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras and Guatemala. …

Vallely commanded the 351st Civil Affairs Command from 1982-1986, including all Special Forces, Psychological Warfare, and Civil Military units in the Western US and Hawaii. He developed and designed the Host Nation Support Program in the Pacific for the Department of Defense and the State Department.

Since his retirement from the military, Vallely has served as a military analyst for the FOX News Channel and is a guest on many nationally syndicated radio talk shows. He co-authored the book Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror (2004).

A military officer of this caliber publicly endorsing at least “some” of QAnon’s information as being authentic, and flat-out stating that President Trump was forming his policy decisions on the same intelligence sources upon which QAnon’s posts are based, caused waves of excitement to ripple through the Q community. No longer did they have to rely on faith alone. Here, at least, was “proof” that QAnon was no mere hoaxer.

Yet how many of these QAnon devotees are aware of the fact that Vallely collaborated with Lt. Col. Michael Aquino on the very same “From PSYOP to MindWar” paper quoted in “Out of Shadows”?

In the film, Kevin Shipp is quoted as saying that Aquino “wrote a paper called ‘MindWar,’ and ‘MindWar’ was about psychological operations against populations, including the American domestic population, using Satanist techniques and tools.” At that moment, the filmmakers flash the title page of the paper on the screen. One can clearly see Paul Vallely’s name listed above Aquino’s name (though it’s misspelled as “Paul E. Valley”). Is it not curious that the filmmakers don’t point out that the one former high-ranking military officer who has endorsed QAnon as authentic is in fact the same military officer who commissioned Aquino to write “From PSYOP to MindWar” in the first place?

In November of 2003, Michael Aquino wrote a new introduction to his paper:

In the later 1970s, Psychological Operations (PSYOP) doctrine in the U.S. Army had yet to emerge from the disappointment and frustration of the Vietnam War. Thus it was that in 1980 Colonel Vallely, Commander of the 7th PSYOP Group, asked me, as his Headquarters PSYOP Research & Analysis (FA) Team Leader, to draft a paper that would encourage some future thought within the PSYOP community. He did not want a Vietnam postmortem, but rather some fresh and innovative ideas concerning PSYOP’s evolution and application.

I prepared an initial draft, which Colonel Vallely reviewed and annotated, which resulted in revised drafts and critiques until he was satisfied, and the result of that was this paper: From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.

Colonel Vallely sent copies of it to various government offices, agencies, commands, and publications involved or interested in PSYOP. He intended it not as an article for publication, but simply as a “talking paper” to stimulate dialogue. In this it was quite successful, judging by the extensive and lively letters he received concerning it over the next several months.

That should have been the end of MindWar: a minor “staff study” which had done its modest job.

With the arising of the Internet in the 1980s, however, MindWar received an entirely unexpected — and somewhat comic — resurrection. Allusions to it gradually proliferated, with its “sinister” title quickly winning it the most lurid, conspiracy-theory reputation. The rumor mill soon had it transformed into an Orwellian blueprint for Manchurian Candidate mind control and world domination. My own image as an occult personality added fuel to the wildfire: MindWar was now touted by the lunatic fringe as conclusive proof that the Pentagon was awash in Black Magic and Devil-worship.

Now that this absurdly comic opera has at least somewhat subsided, I thought that it might be interesting to make a complete and accurate copy of the paper available, together with an Introduction and some historical-hindsight annotations to place it in reasonable context. After all it did — and perhaps still does — have something worthwhile to say.

I agree with Aquino. His and Vallely’s blueprint does indeed have something important to say. Let’s return to their original paper for a moment:

… the MindWar operative must know that he speaks the truth, and he must be personally committed to it. What he says is only a part of MindWar; the rest — and the test of its effectiveness — lies in the conviction he projects to his audience, in the rapport he establishes with it. And this is not something which can be easily faked, if in fact it can be faked at all. “Rapport,” which the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms defines as “unconstrained relations of mutual confidence,” approaches the subliminal; some researchers have suggested that it is itself a subconscious and perhaps even ESP-based “accent” to an overt exchange of information. Why does one believe one television newsman more than another, even though both may report the same headlines? The answer is that there is rapport in the former case; and it is a rapport which is recognized and cultivated by the most successful broadcasters …. For the mind to believe its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion. Coercive measures used by the MindWar operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means.

Consider this: “Out of Shadows” strategically creates a special rapport with its targeted audience by first presenting accurate — though relatively little known — information about such real-life government conspiracies as Project Paperclip and MK-ULTRA. Then it begins to push all the fear buttons to which any devoted evangelical Christian is likely to respond (i.e., accusations of Satanism in public schools, Hollywood movies and U.S. intelligence agencies), leaving out any information that would connect Trump or QAnon supporter Paul Vallely to the “black hats” (i.e., Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Aquino, respectively), and caps all that off by ramming home the obvious conclusion: Despite what the mainstream media says, QAnon has been right all along.

The final punchline goes unsaid because, after all, the viewer’s mind “must feel that it made [its decision] without coercion.” But the decision is inevitable: If QAnon is right, who must you vote for in November of 2020?

In other words, if it’s not already clear to you, “Out of Shadows” employs the very same “MindWar” PSYOP techniques supposedly reviled by the filmmakers themselves. That same statement applies just as much to all the other related QAnon material I’ve cited here. As mentioned earlier, the true warrior accuses his opponent of the offenses he himself is enthusiastically committing.

In his May 27 Daily Grail article entitled “Civil War Psy-Op: An Alternative Narrative of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” Greg Taylor wrote:

Seeing as the dominant QAnon narrative — that Q drops are a secret way of informing the public that Trump is the literal savior of the world, taking down the evil cabal of Satanist paedophiles that currently run the show — is based on only tidbits of suggestive evidence and links, I thought I’d put forward a counter-narrative — similarly backed by just suggestive evidence and links, because hey if that’s the standard of proof needed ….

What if there is a secret, far-right group consisting of an association of white supremacists, Nazis, mobbed up millionaires, and generally fascist-leaning RWNJs [Rightwing Nutjobs] — and QAnon is a psy-op they created to build an army of useful idiots, who would help spread their message so that eventually a large portion of the population would be compliant when the American putsch goes down?

This “alternative narrative” might not be quite as fanciful as Taylor suggests. In fact, the evidence for the preceding scenario is infinitely stronger than the evidence that Donald Trump has literally saved Americans from being eaten by underground demons.

When I emailed my friend a brief, gently worded but highly skeptical analysis of the QAnon material he had sent me, he responded by sending me an image of an eagle soaring through a fiery Q accompanied by a single sentence: “God Bless America, Where We Go One We Go All.” This is a quote from John F. Kennedy that has been appropriated by QAnon as an all-purpose motto, slogan and battle cry. (JFK might be the only Democrat in history considered untainted enough to quote among the QAnon crowd. Ironically, if JFK hadn’t been assassinated in 1963, QAnon would now be accusing him of worshipping Satan and having sex with children in some random D.C. pizza joint.)

The fact that my friend — unable to counter my arguments with anything remotely based on rationality — felt it necessary to respond to my message with nothing more than an empty slogan preselected by QAnon tells you almost everything you need to know about the cult-like qualities of this new American religion.

This reminded me of a telltale moment during a 2000 primary-season debate among the Republican presidential candidates. At one point, the candidates were asked to name a particular book that had changed their lives or somehow informed their point of view. Every candidate gave an intelligent, reasoned response — except George W. Bush, that is. This is what he came up with (I am paraphrasing): “The Holy Bible! Yes, sir! I can’t explain my personal philosophy any better than that. There’s nothin’ I can say to explain my heart to all of you if you don’t feel the Word of God in your own heart.”

In other words, Bush had no intelligent answer to offer, so he fell back on invoking the Bible merely to avoid using his gray matter to formulate a semi-reasonable response. To claim that these words were mere “platitudes” would be an understatement. Bush’s response was nothing more than a clumsy attempt to deflect attention away from his obvious ignorance and illiteracy. As we know now, that didn’t stop him from winning the nomination and then the presidency (thanks of course to the Supreme Court). Why not? As Buckminster Fuller once observed, “Human beings will always do the intelligent thing, after they’ve exhausted all the stupid alternatives.” Bush was just another in a long line of stupid alternatives. QAnon is the latest one, perhaps the stupidest of the lot.

The same people who wait on the edge of the seat for the next “Q” message to drop have probably watched the popular reality TV show “Catfish” and laughed at the unwitting dupes who find themselves falling in love with an online phantom too good to be true. Urban Dictionary defines the word “catfish” as: “A fake or stolen online identity created or used for the purposes of beginning a deceptive relationship.”

What better word could be used to describe QAnon’s relationship with his/her/their followers? If divine intervention allowed these devout, evangelical Christians to see who was actually posting these “Q” messages, they would no doubt vomit into their Wheaties in the morning. Would they still hang on Q’s every word if they could suddenly teleport into a glass-lined office building — perhaps on Madison Avenue or in the Virginia suburbs — filled with a team of tattooed, hipster-aged “influencers” hired by the Trump campaign to comb through decades-worth of obscure conspiracy theories and rebrand them as ultra-right-wing horror stories aimed at the gullible and downtrodden? I doubt it.

In the final analysis, based on almost 30 years of experience researching conspiracy theories, I can only conclude that QAnon is the ultimate catfish scheme for the 21st century.

P.T. Barnum uttered some wise words in this context. (Maybe you’ve heard them.)

Media manipulation has spilled out well beyond the borders of Hollywood. The real battleground for the minds of Americans is Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, 8kun, etc. That’s why we’re now seeing books and documentaries (like “Out of Shadows”) that claim to reveal the influence of Hollywood. Hollywood now borders on the obsolete. People are more entertained by cat videos on TikTok. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: When something is rendered obsolete, it becomes an art form. Rather than producing art, Hollywood itself is the art form. Grist for the conspiracy mill. That’s why I subtitled my first book “Conspiracy Theory as Art Form.” Conspiracy theories are an art form, and they’re now being used to create elaborate fictions deployed to support those in power.

We’re told this is a free country. If so, everyone has the right to vote for whoever they want in this year’s election. If your informed research leads you to vote for Donald Trump, feel free. I would suggest, however, that if you vote for Trump for any of the following reasons, you’ve been had:

Because you think he’s a devout, Satanist-exterminating Christian;
Because you think he’s going to screw over a secret cabal of cultish “black hats” by abolishing the income tax;
Because you think he’s going to reveal the existence of Tesla-derived free energy to the world at some point after November of 2020;
Because you think he’s liberating thousands of sexually abused children locked up in Illuminati conclaves hidden within or below U.S. military bases;
Because you think he’s going to save your flesh from being masticated by the blood-spattered fangs of subterranean beasts.

I may not know much, and there aren’t too many words I could ever utter that one might actually take to the bank, but I can guarantee you this:

President Donald J. Trump is not going to prevent you from being eaten by demons.

“We sent 500 tests. They don’t answer calls”: Inside ICE’s coronavirus testing disaster

Kathy Kunkel, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Health, was frustrated.

She was getting reports the first week of May of horrifying conditions at the Otero County Processing Center, one of three U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the state. Detainees were responsible for disinfecting their own living spaces but weren’t getting adequate cleaning supplies. Their sheets hadn’t been washed for a month. Social distancing was impossible inside housing units shared by dozens of men.

Kunkel’s staff had been calling the center repeatedly. She wanted to stop new transfers to Otero from other states to reduce the risk of a coronavirus outbreak. She didn’t know where to turn.

So she pulled out her iPhone and typed a message to Dr. Alexander L. Eastman, the senior medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security. “Can you help me in this? We sent 500 tests. They don’t answer calls.”

She hit send. Eastman previously had told her that it was “iffy” whether he had any authority to step in because Otero, 30 miles north of downtown El Paso, Texas, is run by a private prison operator, Management and Training Corp. After reading her latest note, he changed his tune: “Have escalated to ICE top leadership. Will circle back.”

It was too late. Otero has since become one of the ICE facilities hardest hit by the pandemic, despite the fact that New Mexico’s public health experts repeatedly offered their help and expertise to slow the spread of COVID-19.

View reported COVID-19 cases at all ICE facilities here

Internal emails obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting provide a behind-the-scenes look at the frustration that built up over months within the New Mexico Department of Health as officials with ICE or its contractors failed to test detainees exposed to the virus – or turned down vital testing assistance. State officials sought to control the spread of the virus at detention centers – including county jails and ICE facilities – worried that a COVID-19 outbreak in a correctional setting could spread into the community.

Kunkel, 69, is straightforward, avoiding the government jargon that leaders often fall back on in times of crisis. She began her career as a pediatric social worker at the University of New Mexico. After getting her law degree, she joined the state attorney general’s office, going on to become general counsel and then deputy director for the Department of Health. Last year, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Kunkel as health secretary.

Now Kunkel is managing the state’s pandemic response from a command center at the dining table in her Albuquerque home. She’s led an aggressive effort to test, trace and contain burgeoning outbreaks across businesses, schools, child care centers, hospitals, nursing homes and corrections facilities. The effort is one piece of the assertive response to COVID-19 in New Mexico, where officials closed schools early and rapidly organized free testing. The result: As of early August, New Mexico’s positivity rate of 1 in 30 tests was much lower than in neighboring states such as Texas, where 1 in 6 tests were coming back positive, and Arizona, where the rate was 1 in 4. New Mexico is also among the states with the lowest number of cases per capita.

But ICE repeatedly stonewalled the health department’s efforts. ICE continued detainee transfers, despite warnings from Kunkel’s staff that such movement could spread the virus. And as Kunkel rolled out a state plan to test every person in detention, ICE officials failed to return the department’s calls – or secure enough of their own test kits.

In the early days of the pandemic, any positive COVID-19 test result was a threat, Kunkel told Reveal.

“We wanted to respond quickly and provide support as time went on. We needed their cooperation to do it more effectively and to cooperate with us,” she said of ICE. “That, unfortunately, didn’t always happen.”

ICE disputed the version of events chronicled in state records obtained by Reveal. The agency declined to comment on detainee transfers, citing a pending lawsuit against the agency. But in a statement, an agency spokesperson said medical personnel at Otero “maintained open lines of communication” with the health department during the “collection and processing of COVID-19 tests during the voluntary saturation testing of all detainees at the facility.”

But a New Mexico Department of Health spokesperson disagreed: “ICE has not maintained open channels of communication with DOH,” Jodi McGinnis Porter told Reveal in an email.

Kunkel only could look on from the outside as COVID-19 cases slipped out of control at Otero. At a time when testing kits were scarce, health department staff had no idea whether the 500 they sent to Otero had even been used.

Kunkel, state Corrections Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero and Dr. Chad Smelser, the state’s lead COVID-19 epidemiologist, described ICE as slow to track and control the coronavirus and reluctant to accept the state’s help.

“We have to be concerned about every person in New Mexico, every single person,” Tafoya Lucero said. “It continues to be a source of frustration to feel like, and to see, that these people who really should be on board with us enthusiastically – to protect the population that we serve in an institution – that they’re not following through.”

Emails show that wardens and health administrators for Management and Training Corp. and CoreCivic, the other private contractor running ICE facilities in New Mexico, mostly responded to health department inquiries. The resistance came from ICE, which over a period of months failed to return phone calls and comply with the state’s plan to conduct testing at all detention facilities, officials told Reveal.

ICE has maintained that it is safely managing the coronavirus risk. “ICE is firmly committed to ensuring the health and safety of individuals in its custody, its employees, contractors, and the general public,” one top ICE official, Henry Lucero, told Congress in June.

According to Lucero and other statements issued by ICE, the agency has been following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, providing detainees with sanitizer and soap, and reducing the population in detention centers to promote social distancing. Detainees who test positive, the agency says, “receive appropriate medical care.”

Yet according to public health experts, detainees live and sleep in cramped quarters where social distancing is impossible. ICE has refused to free many immigrants who qualify for release, either through bond or parole. More than 5,000 detainees have tested positive since the start of the pandemic, ICE figures show. So have 1,000 employees, according to recent congressional testimony. About 600 detainees are currently positive for COVID-19 within ICE’s detention network, which currently holds more than 20,000. Six detainees and at least two guards have died from the virus.

And those are just the outbreaks ICE has publicly acknowledged. Researchers say the agency’s official tally of COVID-19 cases is almost certainly a vast undercount because so few detainees have been tested. When the Vera Institute of Justice, a social justice advocacy nonprofit, modeled the behavior of COVID-19 on the ICE detention system, it found the true case total “may be up to 15 times higher than the figures reported by ICE as of mid-May.”

The records that Reveal obtained from New Mexico and a handful of other states underscore the likelihood of an undercount: ICE isn’t testing. The federal government provides ICE with 5,000 test kits a month, but officials say most of those are used for screening detainees as they enter the system and before they board deportation flights, rather than on regularly testing the people in detention. ICE contractors source additional tests for their own facilities, but the net result is a huge shortfall. At Otero, Kunkel said, staff said the facility would get very few tests without the state’s help. As of July, 415 detainees were being held at Otero.

View reported COVID-19 cases at all ICE facilities here

ICE’s failure to comprehensively test, combined with its continued practice of transferring detainees, has fueled new outbreaks all over the country. Immigration Centers of America, which runs a detention center in Farmville, Virginia, initially turned down the state’s offer to help with testing “without an explanation,” said Dr. Robert Nash, regional director for the Virginia Department of Health. Detainees in Farmville have experienced the worst outbreak of any ICE facility in the country, with 339 detainees testing positive so far. In early August, the Associated Press reported that 259 of Farmville’s 298 detainees had the virus.

At the Mesa Verde ICE detention center in Bakersfield, California, emails disclosed in a court case suggest that ICE rejected a medical contractor’s plan to test all its detainees because the agency wouldn’t have room to isolate everyone who tested positive.

Inside one of ICE’S biggest outbreaks

The Otero County Processing Center just outside Chaparral, New Mexico, can house just over 1,000 people. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez for Reveal

The Otero County Processing Center opened its doors in 2008 just outside the small town of Chaparral, New Mexico. It can house just over 1,000 people and is overseen by a staff of about 300. The building blends into the desert around it, wrapped in khaki-colored corrugated siding. It is surrounded by a double wall of chain-link fence and concertina wire and fronted by a covered walkway built with detainee labor.

The facility is part of a 15-acre complex that is also home to the Otero County Prison Facility, which holds up to 1,400 federal and state prisoners. Both facilities are operated by Management and Training Corp., a Utah-based prison contractor.

Although a sign outside describes Otero as an ICE facility, day-to-day decisions are made by Management and Training Corp. It’s the same across the ICE detention network, with the agency relying on private companies and local jails to house detainees.

One of those detainees landed in Otero in early April. The government had held him in El Paso for a week, from March 27 to April 4, before sending him 30 miles away to Otero.

Within two days, the new detainee had developed a fever, cough and sore throat. On April 7, the detainee was tested for COVID-19. He appears to be the first confirmed case of the virus in a New Mexico ICE facility.

Otero officials placed him in isolation in the medical unit. But by then, he’d already come in contact with at least 74 other detainees. Rather than test them all immediately, the facility placed them under quarantine for 14 days.

This practice, called cohorting, has become standard ICE practice during the pandemic. Ada Rivera, medical director for the ICE Health Service Corps, told Congress in June that cohorting “is recommended by CDC guidelines.” But those guidelines actually say that “cohorting should only be practiced if there are no other available options.” As Mother Jones reported, cohorting without testing can be dangerous because people without symptoms can easily spread the virus to others in their quarantine unit. Only testing and isolation can prevent that.

After the detainees had been quarantined for more than a week, Otero health services administrator Guillermo Contreras decided he wanted help to test more widely. He called one of the state health department’s epidemiologists, Sandra Melman.

On April 15, Melman wrote details of the call for Kunkel and other colleagues. “They would now like to test them all and are asking for our assistance to do so. They do not have enough testing capacity.”

The department responded by sending 500 to 600 tests, officials say.

One week later, 25 detainees arrived at Otero. One of them, records show, had come from the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. He had developed a cough, body aches and congestion days earlier and was awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test.

Hours after the detainee arrived, Contreras received word that the test had come back positive. He wrote again to the health department with the bad news.

A day after Contreras’ email, Kunkel got another update on the transfer, this time from Smelser, the acting state epidemiologist.

Smelser told Reveal that he has been advocating for more than a decade for ICE to monitor detainees being transferred into and out of New Mexico for infectious diseases such as chickenpox and measles. Now, in his message to Kunkel, he wondered why ICE would want to further strain a facility struggling to contain an outbreak by adding more possibly contagious people to the mix.

“I have never understood the reasons or protocols for these transfers,” he wrote. “Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this? Could we get a senator to complain?”

Warnings of an ‘alarming situation’

The outbreak already was brewing at Otero. On May 8, a member of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s staff forwarded Kunkel an email from an advocate, warning of an “alarming situation” there. Margaret Brown Vega, a volunteer who supports people detained by ICE, wrote that Otero detainees with COVID-19 symptoms still had not been tested.

“It is unclear to what degree, or how, the state or county health departments are overseeing what is happening,” Brown Vega wrote.

Kunkel quickly wrote two messages to her staff from her iPhone. In one, she asked a staff member to call and get more information. In the other, she decided to go higher up the chain at ICE. She said she wanted to stop transfers from other states:

“I called dr Alex Eastman in this last week and he said USDHS authority “iffy” due to contractor manager. We continue to call daily to medical director. Sent over 500 test kits. We are trying to get in there; also want to stop transfer if detainees from other state. Continue to work it”

Kunkel had met Eastman, the top medical official for the Department of Homeland Security, the previous year when he was working with states as asylum seekers were arriving in record numbers.

Eastman told Kunkel in an email that he had flagged the issue for top ICE leadership. But she said he also warned her that the response “was not going to be very strong.” The agency would not make Eastman available for an interview.

It wasn’t just Otero. On May 18, in response to an email from Kunkel ordering her staff to contact county detention facilities for testing, state surveillance officer David Selvage wrote:

“All 3 ICE facilities are a challenge… As of last week when I spoke to Warden Chad Miller at (Torrance County Detention Facility, managed by CoreCivic), he was adamant that his company would not permit universal testing of the ICE and US Marshal holds. I think that they all need to be tested, but that is my opinion. I believe that the US Marshal holds have a fairly high infection rate.”

A CoreCivic spokesperson said in a statement that leadership at the Torrance facility and the Cibola County Correctional Center, the other ICE facility CoreCivic runs in New Mexico, have been “in frequent communication” with health department officials, including Selvage. “We have rigorously followed the guidance of local, state and federal health authorities, as well as our government partners.”

State officials’ struggles to get through to ICE would continue in the coming months.

Appeal from the governor

In June, Lujan Grisham assigned Tafoya Lucero, the corrections secretary, to establish a line of communication with ICE. At first, the agency appeared open to finally cooperating. As Tafoya Lucero recalled, “Suddenly, the leadership from ICE, they were returning my phone calls.”

But two weeks later, when the secretary asked ICE to provide its own test kits and stop transfers in and out of Otero, the officials went silent, Tafoya Lucero said.

In mid-July, Scott Marquardt, president and CEO of Management and Training Corp., which runs Otero, was called to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee. Marquardt held up the widespread testing at Otero as a mark of his company’s commitment to containing COVID-19.

“We have administered multiple rounds of extensive testing for the 467 individuals in the facility, administering 794 tests,” he said.

But beyond saying that “MTC has worked closely with ICE and state and local health departments,” he didn’t acknowledge that New Mexico had provided the bulk of those tests. The company declined to answer Reveal’s questions about its testing at Otero.

Today, the health department says ICE still is not testing detainees inside Otero at the level it recommends.

After the aggressive intervention from Kunkel and her health department, the outbreak at Otero has apparently died down. In all, 150 detainees contracted COVID-19 there. As of Sept. 9, there were no active cases at the facility. But with continued transfers from other facilities and a lack of tests to keep monitoring the population, another outbreak remains possible.

Tafoya Lucero said her calls to ICE still go unreturned. She says it disturbs her that the welfare of so many people in custody in her state are out of the health department’s reach.

“My concern is,” she said, “are they endangering people?”

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Esther Kaplan and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

In Chloe Zhao’s wandering “Nomadland,” Frances McDormand journeys to an Oscar-worthy performance

“I’m not homeless, I’m just . . . houseless. Not the same thing,” Fern (Frances McDormand) insists early on in “Nomadland,” writer/director Chloé Zhao’s elegiac drama, based on Jessica Bruder’s book. The film (out now on Hulu) had premiered recently at the Toronto Film Festival in tandem with the canceled Telluride Film Festival and in solidarity with the Venice Film Festival (where it just won the Golden Lion). It will also be a centerpiece selection at the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Fern is first seen loading her van, named “Vanguard,” and taking seasonal work at Amazon. She parks in an RV community with Linda May (playing herself), another woman who has taken to life on the road. In a heartfelt speech, Linda May describes contemplating suicide, and explains she can’t get by on the benefits of early retirement. Fern has her own story of economic hardship; she lived in Empire, Nevada with her late husband until the U.S. Gypsum Corporation plant shut down in 2011 and the zip code was discontinued.

“Nomadland” is certainly about the impact of the Great Recession and there are points made about being in debt, the “tyranny of the dollar,” and the freedom of living life on your own terms. Zhao thankfully, never gets too didactic, though the film is best when Fern is in motion. (Oddly, this drama feels like a mashup of “The Lady in the Van,” Alan Bennett’s memoir about his bond with a transient woman who parked in his driveway for 15 years; “Nickel and Dimed,” Barbara Ehrenreich‘s investigation of unskilled labor in America; and Cheryl Strayed‘s “Wild.”)

When Fern heads to Arizona and a camp run by Bob Wells (as himself), she hears stories from other “nomads”: a vet with PTSD; a woman on a “healing journey,” after losing both her parents to cancer; and a worker from corporate America who retired early so as not waste a moment of her life. These tales are sad and earnest and explain why some individuals want to eschew social norms, reconnect to nature, and become a part of this “tribe.” But the real people playing themselves have conviction. And for some of them — as is the case with Fern — this life is more a necessity than a true desire. Fern’s purpose for her nomadic life becomes clear late in the film. It is almost disappointing that this is revealed. It is as if Zhao does not trust the audience to determine the root of her restlessness from what is presented.

“Nomadland” deftly captures the community of these salt-of-the-earth folks who swap items, and value only a few sentimental possessions. (Fern’s are a set of dishes). They sit around campfires, sometimes go dancing, and help each other out, as when someone gets a flat tire, wants a cigarette or needs medical assistance.

The drama is kept to a minimum. Zhao takes an almost anthropological approach, much like she did in her previous features, “The Rider,” and “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” to show what daily life is like for the characters. They work menial jobs, like cleaning restrooms, and cook in their vans. But then Zhao features shots of Fern driving through a mountainous region, floating naked in a clear river, or walking through a field at sunset, or admiring trees in a forest. Ludovico Einaudi’s piano music creates a sense of poignancy during these moments but his score sounds like he has been listening to too much George Winston. Moreover, these glorious images don’t quite jibe with the hardscrabble lives. The film falters whenever it slips into sentiment.

At one point Fern has a meet-cute with Dave (David Strathairn) over a can opener and they become friendly, reconnecting later in the Badlands of South Dakota. They have an easygoing friendship, and Dave obviously wants it to become romantic. Fern, however, is fiercely independent, and at times abrupt with him. After they both take jobs working at Wall Drugs, Dave is soon pulled in one direction by his son, which drives Fern to go back on the road.

There is little tension about if Fern ever settles back down because that is not the point. “Nomadland” handles this elegantly and eloquently in what is arguably the film’s most moving exchange between Fern and her sister, Dolly (Melissa Smith). But Fern is just as impassioned telling someone that she sees value in how she built out her van, or when she refuses to take a bed in a church on a cold night, and those moments reveal much about her character.

Fern may often be alone, but she never comes across as lonely. She is seen reading in a laundromat, celebrating New Year’s Eve with a sparkler, and inexplicably playing a flute in her van. McDormand, who is in every scene, makes Fern as tough at the plant she named for in that she adapts and survives. The actress gives a committed performance that will likely garner her an Oscar nomination. Her weathered face shows her grit and fortitude, and she communicates her emotions in the way she knits her brow or darts her eyes. But Fern is also open and friendly, and she has some lovely scenes with Swankie (playing herself), a fellow nomad.

“Nomadland” is certainly well-crafted. The cinematography by Joshua James Richards is exquisite. But somehow, the film does not quite deliver the emotional impact Zhao is likely striving to achieve. Then again, perhaps the point is that there is no there there.

“Nomadland” is now streaming on Hulu.