The ugly numbers are finally in on the 2017 Trump tax rewrite

The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim he created the best economy ever until the pandemic.

The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man” and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

The figures in this story come from my annual analysis of IRS data known as Table 1.4. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns. I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect inflation of 4.1% between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).

This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year of the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.

High income households multiply

Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans. And, oh, do they benefit!

Prosperous and rich people, the data reveal, include half a million who are not even filing tax returns. Yet they are not being pursued as tax cheats, a separate report shows.

The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.

Who saves on taxes

The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.

Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of 1 percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.

Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.

Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.

Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings.

This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for most Americans, along with cuts in government services, it is surprising Trump enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000.

But realize none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.

Understating incomes

The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.

Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that the service cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The sharp decline in IRS auditing means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.

Trump ignores rich tax cheats

In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the treasury inspector general for Tax Administration reported May 29.

Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the inspector general wrote.

One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. DCReport’s five-part series last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.

Borrowing to help the rich

Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.

The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.

The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.

Curious anomaly

In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half a percent.

The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.

The new tax data also show a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks and have other sources of income from capital.

Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.

Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.

Infuriating fact

There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.

The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.

Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.

Help, I’m addicted to my Sodastream

First, I would like to thank the clerk at Staples for being unduly generous to a crazy woman during what is a hard time for everyone.

A couple months ago, because I’m secretly a Earth Day-loving hippie underneath my middle-aged punk exterior, I loaded up my bicycle with a couple of spent CO2 canisters for my Sodastream to take to the office supply chain, which has a service where one can exchange them for full canisters at a discounted price. But when I got there, the kind soul working the counter gently informed me that they were out of the canisters available for exchange, and had no idea when there would be more.

I have to imagine the flash of frustration that passed through my eyes — the only visible part of my face, due to the mask — was alarming, because he continued to reassure me that he understood and that, because of the pandemic, the exchange program had mysteriously halted. Abashed at his compassion in the face of my naked need for fizzy drinks in a time of great suffering and pain, I slunk out of the store and returned home.

Internet research quickly proved how right the Staples clerk was. Due to the pandemic, not only was Sodastream not making canisters available for trade-in, they were also running short on various flavors, like their Diet Dr. Pepper knock-off and their pink grapefruit soda, that we apparently consume in vast quantities in my house. Soon, we were out of not just CO2 but all our flavors, and facing a prospect that we hadn’t considered in the many years since we first bought our in-kitchen soda maker: Buying canned sodas from the grocery store.

Initially, it seemed like an adventure in a time when the bar has gotten incredibly low for what constitutes “fun.” My partner and I rented a Zipcar for an hour, loaded up a cart with what seemed like an impossibly huge number of 12 packs of both caffeinated sodas for daytime drinking and caffeine-free flavors to be drunk at night, with or without alcohol, and figured that would cover us for the long period of time needed to figure out how to make our now sad and useless Sodastream start flowing again.

Our stash lasted maybe two weeks.

It turns out that the Sodastream, which works by converting liters of water stored in the fridge into delicious, fizzy sodas of whatever flavor you choose, was effectively hiding from us the true and epic nature of our soda pop consumption. But now we were faced with the cold, hard evidence of how much soda we actually do drink, in the form of an overflowing recycling bin and the dawning realization that we were going to have to rent a Zipcar again. Staring at the pile of sad and folded cans, it occured to me that the only thing I probably have in common with Donald Trump, besides us both being carbon-based life forms, was an unabiding addiction to diet sodas.

This is the point in the tale where, because we live in a puritanical culture where constant self-improvement is the baseline expectation, I am supposed to declare that I saw the light and finally, after all these years, learned to cut back drastically on my soda consumption for the good of my own health and the planet.

But, dear readers, I have too much respect for you to play that game. I don’t regret how much soda I drink, and see no point in pretending otherwise. Diet sodas are as close to a guilt-free pleasure as you get in life, and frankly, the constant stream of overwrought articles about the theoretical dangers of artificial sweetners strike me as more the result of the American suspicion of pleasure than a genuine concern for our health born out of scientifically sound research.

On the contrary, like many people, what I’ve actually learned from this pandemic is to cherish those creature comforts of home, to really prioritize those little things that make being stuck at home all day every day a lot more bearable. It’s why there’s been a rush on skin care products, sweat pants, and bidets during this pandemic.

Still, it was unconscionable to keep throwing out all those cans, especially since the pandemic is interrupting recycling pick-up and so much of what is supposed to be recycled is probably going straight to the landfill. Nor was it really enhancing the stuck-at-home experience to have fewer soda options while still generating more trash I had to deal with. So finally I found an alternative service that allows customers to exchange CO2 canisters in the mail, which should work so long as Trump doesn’t completely destroy the mail service.

Truly, one of the most glorious things about having a Sodastream is that, because the syrups take up so little space, you can have a grocery store’s worth of flavors stashed in the closet. With that in mind, I will share with you, dear readers, a small sample of the various things having a kitchen counter fizzy drink maker has allowed us to consume.

Paloma: The classic grapefruit soda and tequila drink (with a squeeze of lime) that is like the hipster version of the margarita.

Gin and juice (ish): Basically, a paloma with gin instead of tequila. Serve with a side of ’90s hip-hop.

Amanda made it through another day: Same thing, but with cheap vodka.

Gin and tonic: Or diet tonic water without the gin, if you’re a weirdo whose English ancestry pokes through at times.

Diet Dr. Pete (the Sodastream version of Diet Dr. Pepper) with a splash of orange drops: Sounds weird, but a great non-alcoholic treat

Rum mules: Inspired by our executive editor, Erin Keane, these drinks are made with rum, ginger ale, lime, mint, and a splash of mole bitters

Whiskey gingers: A lazier version, with just ginger ale and whiskey

Wine spritzer: Sodastream can be used to make soda water, which in turn can be added to wine if you want a girly drink to go with all that skin care

Seltzer water: When you’re pretending your house is a restaurant and they’re bringing the fancy water out

Nearly two centuries ago, a QAnon-like conspiracy theory propelled candidates to Congress

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Republican congressional primary win in Georgia ensures, in all likelihood, that the heavily Republican district will be represented by a QAnon conspiracy theorist in the 117th Congress.

But Greene was just one of several primary candidates who embraced the conspiracy, which coincides with the trend of “Q” paraphernalia appearing at Republican rallies.

The conspiracy originated in 2017, when a mysterious poster named “Q” began posting to the internet message board 4chan. Q soon amassed a following, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that its popularity exploded. Q’s near-daily posts detail the existence of a satanic cabal of pedophiles that secretly control the government and other institutions. They promise that the enterprise, run by Democrats and celebrities, will soon be taken down by Trump.

This may sound like a new development — some might say a new low — in American politics. But it isn’t the first time candidates have promoted conspiracies as part of their platform to win seats in Congress.

In the 1820s, an anti-Masonic conspiracy theory dominated politics in the Northeast. It even birthed a political party, the Anti-Masonic Party, which ended up holding its own presidential convention and nominating the United States’ first third-party candidate.

A mysterious disappearance

The Freemasons was founded as an upper-class fraternal organization in early-18th century Britain. Membership quickly grew, and many influential American politicians and thinkers — including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Paul Revere — joined the ranks.

Its secretive nature, elaborate rituals and the wealth and power of its members made the Masons fodder for conspiracy theorists from the start. Because it often challenged the power of the church, conspiracies against the Masons have tended to frame the group as anti-Christian or even satanic.

In 1798, British author John Robison published a text arguing a secret cabal of Freemasons had formed a group called “the Illuminati,” which peddled a philosophy of “cosmo-politism” bent on subverting all religions and resisting state authority.

In the United States, anti-Masonic fervor took hold following the disappearance and presumed killing of a Mason, William Morgan, in the 1820s. Morgan had vowed to publish a book exposing Masonic secrets. Local members urged Morgan to stop the book project; when he refused, they had him arrested for a debt of under $3. After being released on bail, he was never seen again. It was widely believed that local Masons killed him to in order to prevent him from publishing their secret rituals.

Anger at the purported killing and cover-up led to widespread criticism of secret societies and to the formation of a new political party, the Anti-Masonic Party. Running on a platform against corruption, immorality and elitism, the party won 15 state legislative seats in 1827, and its ranks swelled thanks to an organized media campaign. At one point, party backers were publishing 35 weekly newspapers and dozens of party members were elected to Congress in the 1830s.

The movement was most popular in the Northeast, especially in areas that had been heavily impacted by evangelical revivals. Evangelicals were drawn to its critique of sinful behaviors, while members of the working class liked the party’s anti-elitist rhetoric.

During the presidential election of 1832, the Anti-Masonic Party opposed President Andrew Jackson, who was a Mason, and had planned to support his opponent, Henry Clay. But after members found out that Clay was also a Mason, the party went on to back a third-party candidate, William Wirt. The anti-Masons hosted their own convention, and Wirt received 8% of the presidential vote.

After the election, the Anti-Masonic Party merged with former Republicans to form the Whig Party, which would become a force in American politics for several decades. A number of prominent Whigs, from former President Millard Fillmore to former New York Gov. William Seward, were originally members of the Anti-Masonic Party.

Enter: Q

Investigative journalist Chip Berlet, who has written extensively about the spread of conspiracy theories, has pointed out that many of the conspiracies tied to American politics contain similar threads. Everyday Americans tend to be “held down by a secretive group of wealthy elites” who manipulate “corrupt politicians, mendacious journalists, propagandizing schoolteachers and nefarious bankers.”

Like the anti-Masonic conspiracies, QAnon followers believe that a secretive group of elites is secretly controlling social institutions for satanic ends. The conspiracy also portends a “Great Awakening,” during which the masses will finally grasp the existence of the depraved cabal and bring it to justice.

The Anti-Masonic Party understood the importance of leveraging the media in order to reach a wider audience. Likewise, QAnon adherents have used social media platforms as digital megaphones. Facebook and Twitter recently banned QAnon groups and content, but only after their platforms helped the movement grow exponentially. A recent study conducted by Facebook found that QAnon-affiliated groups on the platform had millions of members.

There’s an important difference between the two conspiracies, however. The Freemasons are actually a secret society. Their influence may have been overstated, but they nonetheless represented an actual group of people, many of whom have held positions of power.

The cabal described by QAnon loops in individuals who have long been targeted by conspiracy theorists, from George Soros to Jeffrey Epstein. Anyone, really, can be accused of being part of the satanic ring, and it becomes that much more difficult to argue with the conspiracies to either prove an individual’s innocence or disprove the conspiracy.

Media attention backfires

Political scientist Michael Barkun describes conspiracy theories as “stigmatized knowledge,” in which attempts to invalidate the claims only reinforce the beliefs among followers, who see these efforts as proof that those in power want the theories muzzled. This is the same impetus that no doubt helped transform the unsolved mystery of William Morgan’s disappearance into a nationwide political movement.

QAnon discussions frequently blame the mainstream media for intentionally discrediting them in order to prop up the cabal. Under a YouTube video explaining Q, one commenter wrote, “‘Conspiracy Theory’ is CIA-speak for ‘Uh-oh! They KNOW!'” A poster on “Q Research Forum” wondered “where is the journalist who will do a ‘what the [mainstream media] won’t tell you about Q’ story?”

A 2019 Emerson poll found that 5% of Americans believe in QAnon. This might seem like a small number. But elections can serve as important platforms to expand movements. At their most basic level, they expose more voters to individuals who hold certain beliefs and ideas.

Even a small group of motivated conpiracists can have an outsize effect on broader society, as in the anti-Masonic Party, and increasing representation in elected officials can end up legitimizing fringe beliefs. This is particularly true if those politicians, like Greene, are maligned by both the media and the political establishment.

Sophie Bjork-James, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Anthropology, Vanderbilt University

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

Civil rights groups request emergency injunction to stop Trump “sabotage” of 2020 Census

Civil rights organizations and local governments in California late Friday filed a request in a San Jose federal court for an emergency nationwide injunction against the Trump administration’s effort to end 2020 Census counting prematurely—a move critics warn is a blatant effort by the president and his Republican allies to “sabotage” the once-in-a-decade count for long-term political advantage.

“Trump seeks to sabotage the #2020Census by TERMINATING critical door knocking operations and other efforts one month early,” declared Kristen Clark, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, in a Friday night tweet. “Given the pandemic, this will undermine efforts to secure a full and fair count, especially of communities of color. We are in court TONIGHT fighting back!”

The groups behind the injunction request—which included the Lawyers Committee, the National Urban League, the League of Women Voters, and local governments including San Jose and Los Angeles—mobilized this week to prevent a truncated count by the Census Bureau after the release of an internal document (pdf) warned that a rushed census—itself would be a statutory violation—could create “serious errors” in the crucial data that helps determine allocation of federal resources and the drawing of legislative districts over the next ten years.

“For months, advocates have been sounding the alarm that an accurate census in every state is on the line,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in a statement earlier this week. “Census Bureau experts have been clear: rushing the 2020 Census will force the bureau to cut corners while counting people, processing data, and doing quality checks—forcing undercounts in communities across the country and skewing census data for a decade. There’s no reason not to give the Census Bureau the time and flexibility it requested to navigate COVID-19 and complete a high-quality census. An accurate 2020 Census is in Congress’ hands, and lawmakers have to act fast.”

During court proceedings carried out virtually Friday night, the attorney representing the various groups in California, Melissa Sherry, told U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh that an injunction was the only way to prevent the irreparable the Trump administration is on the verge of causing by ending door-to-door Census counting and other crucial operations.

“We need them to keep sending people out to houses, especially during the pandemic,” Sherry said to the judge. “Every day we lose, we’re not going to be able to get back.”

According to Bob Egelko at the The San Francisco Chronicle, “Koh expressed concern about the government’s changing explanations for its actions, but did not announce a decision at the end of the hearing” and “asked both sides to return to court on Tuesday.”

In a filing on behalf of the Trump administration, Justice Department attorney Alexander Sverdlov argued to the court that the injunction was “not warranted” and that the Trump administration’s decision-making around how it conducts the count amount to “unreviewable political questions.”

As Egelko reports:

The population count is crucial for states’ U.S. House representation and the distribution of $800 billion in federal aid each year. Separately, President Trump is seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census, an action challenged by California and other states in multiple lawsuits.

The Census Bureau announced Aug. 3 that it would end the nationwide survey on Sept. 30, a month ahead of the previous schedule, in order to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for submitting the data. The announcement brought protests and lawsuits from civil rights groups and local governments that fear short-counting in areas with large numbers of poor people, minorities and immigrants.

Named in the injunction is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, charged with overseeing the Census Bureau. In addition to the civil rights groups and local governments, nearly two dozen state attorneys general are backing the effort to make sure the Trump administration does not curtail or harm the count in any way.

“The Trump administration continues to show a blatant disregard for the federal government’s obligations under the Constitution, which includes properly compiling our nation’s population via the Census count,” said Michigan Attorney Dana Nessel, part of that state AG coalition, said Friday. “Fighting a pandemic is already a high hurdle to clear in obtaining an accurate count. It’s outrageous that we must also fight against an administration seeking to skew our population numbers.”

Counterculture memoirist Sharon Dukett on what we learned (and forgot) from the hippies

It’s been said that the United States hasn’t seen comparable social upheaval since the civil rights and anti-war struggles of the sixties and seventies. Yet as the racial justice protests of today make apparent, the civil rights movement of then was an unfinished project: indeed, we may not be in the situation we are now, the virus of racism still infecting our nation, if the counterculture movement had been as culturally and politically effective as we’d like to imagine.

What went wrong, and what went right, are key to understanding the future of any social struggle. And my generation and the adjacent one— meaning millennials and Zoomers — are the most apt to be politically active, by dint of how viciously our lives are affected by today’s political turmoil. Unfortunately, none of us were alive to witness what life was like back then, which makes it difficult to understand today’s social movements in historical context.

This is partly what makes Sharon Dukett’s memoir, “No Rules,” so engrossing. Dukett’s journey epitomized the mantra “tune in, turn on, drop out”: as a teenager, Dukett literally dropped out of high school, motivated by a rare chance to live on the other side of the country beyond the grip of her parents. She quickly became immersed in the free-spirited hippie world of protest, drugs, love and music. “No Rules,” like all great memoirs, grants the reader the feeling of time travel — immersing you in the body of someone who was there to witness a now-alien era. Though I’d like to think of myself an informal scholar of that era by virtue of my family’s background, Dukett’s honest and vivid book gave me the first real understanding of what life was like then for one of the hoi polloi: Dukett, a teenage runaway, couldn’t easily fly home if things went awry.

Thus, Dukett didn’t navigate the counterculture with considerable privilege. Men mistreat and abuse her and those in her vicinity, authority figures harass she and her friends, she observes evictions, experiences homelessness, and people in her circle even die. Hers is a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, view of the life of a young person then.

I spoke to Dukett over the phone about her memoir, and what lessons the counterculture movement has for youth political culture today. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

I always wondered what it would be like live back in the 1960s and 1970s, but most of the accounts you read are from the famous people of the time — people who have more power and agency than you did. I guess, like, Hunter Thompson or Joan Didion or something like that.

Yes, not just the average person-on-the-street kind of thing.

Exactly. I guess that’s one of the things I really I found so vivid and fascinating about the book. You weren’t somebody who was taking a lead role in, say, storming People’s Park or something. You were just living in the time, and the people you encountered and the music you saw and protests you attended were just a cross-section of the time period.

My daughter-in-law actually read it also — I had her proof read and she read it. She’s 28, and she had kind of the same reaction. Her and my son talked about it, and one of the things they talked about was how, first of all none of these things could happen today, just because of the way everything is so different. You couldn’t do this stuff, you couldn’t get away with these things. They found that really fascinating.

I agree. Although one thing I found surprising, that maybe hadn’t changed, is how you describe the gender relations between straight people in the book — the way that the men treated you, or often abuse you — it reminded me a lot of young men nowadays who are mistreat women or gaslight them. There’s something that hasn’t changed there that I thought was really telling and foreboding. Do you think that, maybe in some ways, things haven’t progressed?

I think it kind of comes and goes. In general I find, just judging from my sons and their friends and so forth, there’s a lot more of an open attitude towards what are the male and female roles and who does what, and all that sort of thing. I think that has changed to a certain degree, but I’m probably not in a position to judge from the perspective of sexuality how that has changed since it’s not part of my perspective. Although I did notice with my children growing up that a lot of things had changed. The one thing that I found amusing though was one of my sons said something about some girl giving him her phone number, and so he was going to call her, and he goes, “No, I’m going to wait for her to call me.” I was like, really? He’s like, “Oh yeah, they all call you now.” I found that sort of different.

It seems like a lot of your story starts with your parents’ expectations of you. They didn’t really want you go to college —

Right. They didn’t see the point.

Do you feel like that was something you were sort of working through, that may have led to your desire to run away from them?

It definitely influenced how things went. I’m a pretty intelligent person and, had I been going to college like some of the other people that I went to school with, I probably would have been more focused on staying in school. Of course at that point I wanted to [go to college] — my motivation around college was more to be out there with the people who were protesting and that kind of thing, where everything was going on. But nonetheless, people who did that still did manage to get an education at the same time. I did feel like I belonged in college, because a lot of my friends were college bound people. Then when it became clear to me that wasn’t where I was going, I kind of had a split with my parents.

From there, I lost motivation. I just didn’t see the point at that age. What was school going to get me? This life that was awful, that I didn’t want to live.

One of the other things in the book that I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around is this character you meet briefly, Steve, in the bar in Montreal. He seemed like he had PTSD. As you recount, he had been hitchhiking with his girlfriend, and rednecks had stopped them and beat him up and raped his girlfriend in front of him. The way you depict him he’s clearly dealing with the trauma from that.

What I found so shocking was the idea that somebody would be subject to so much violence simply because they look like a hippie. Nowadays, most discriminatory violence is either gendered, racial violence, homophobic, transphobic — but like, to think that someone would beat me up because I wear tie-dye…. it’s just hard for me to fathom someone looking at me and being like, “Oh, you’re wearing patchouli, I’m going to beat you.”

I mean, in a way you can see that nowadays if you think in terms of the extreme right and some of these people walking around with the AK-47s in the capital and stuff — like, who are calling liberals all sorts of horrible names. The only difference then is walking down the street you could tell who were liberals and the conservatives because they dressed differently, they looked different. Not with everyone I guess, but certainly if you were a hippie, you were pegged as liberal, and therefore you could be picked on as a hippie — versus if you had a crew cut. It was pretty clearly laid out who was who in that respect and a lot of that.

Where it got blurry was with the Vietnam vets returning. They tended to be more, what you would think of today, as a lot of people in the military — they tended to be more right-leaning, but still they kind of blurred in and mixed in with the hippies in a lot of cases. Not all cases but there was a number of them that did.

Of course it was different back then too because people in the military, a lot of them didn’t want to be in the military. They were there because of the draft, so you had all kinds of people in the military.

I guess the bigger question I’m leading to was to ask you about political differences between then and now. In some respects, it seems like the hippies won a lot of the cultural wars — say, in terms of pot being legal, and that multiculturalism is a normalized positive concept — but on the other hand, we’re a very divided country now. We don’t have a draft anymore, but we just use poverty as a draft. Likewise, I think Donald Trump and George W. Bush were both the antithesis of the ’60s sentiment as far as leaders go. I was wondering what you kind of thought about the unfinished cultural revolution of that era?

Yeah, it’s frustrating that a lot of the progress that seemed to be made during that time, in the beginning of things that became progress, seemed to have reversed. Abortion’s a real big one, too. One of the things that did start, I think especially among the back-to-the-land people, is the whole idea of food being organic, and getting chemicals out of the food, and all that sort of thing. That has taken a strong hold, and survived the culture and grown and gotten more significant.

It’s strange because I think our culture now, in a lot of ways, is much more liberal — and yet much more conservative. It was pretty polarized back then too. It was hugely polarized in a lot of ways.

Then we went through a period where things seemed to get more close and more progressive, and then now we’re going back towards polarization again. Well, not “back to” — we’re in the midst of it. One of the things I found interesting about that era is that among the hippies there weren’t any clear lines of economic breakdowns. Rich people and poor people could all be hanging out together — and while I didn’t commonly come across many black hippies, I know that depending on where you were, it wasn’t unusual for black people and white people to also all be hippies and be hanging out together, although maybe less so. Those kinds of lines were breaking down. But then it didn’t continue for people in the poorer classes, and I sense that in a lot of places people are still somewhat segregated today, too.

I was going to ask you about the class thing, too. You met so many people doing the same thing you were doing — hitchhiking and traveling across the US, and Canada. Did you get a sense that the people who were maybe hitchhiking on their own were from the less well-off families, or more conservative families had rejected them? Or did it just seem like there wasn’t really a logic to it?

Well, I think it depends. In the summertime, it was hard to tell because of course people were out of college or people were moving around and that kind of thing. When I lived in the commune three of the people who lived in the commune were Cornell graduates. The commune was near Cornell and it had kind of spun off from people who knew each other who had gone to Cornell. I was there and Jodi was there, and Jodi was a high school dropout at that point in time. Then there was another guy who came from a lower income, so it was really a mix of all kinds of economic backgrounds of people who were living in this commune. We kind of found that from place to place.

There’s a lot of scenes in here of you seeing the music of the time. Did you feel like musical culture has changed a bit now, or that you got to experience and be part of something special by the musical scene of that era?

Well, I think music [back then] really had a message in a lot of cases — and I don’t know if you have as much of that going on now. And plus, I think because there’s so much access to music now, there’s less concentration on certain bands, or whatever that are big names. It seems more … it’s very hard for me to even keep track of what new music is around, and it’s all out there which is great but I don’t know. I know it’s very hard for musicians. I follow David Crosby on Twitter and he talks a lot about how hard it is to make a living as a musician nowadays which is really unfortunate, even for him.

Do you feel like people are more politicized now? I’m thinking how, when I was in high school, I knew people who said “I’m not political.” I’m not sure anyone would say that now. What about then?

Yeah, because politics affected your life directly. Whether you were going to be drafted or not was huge. You couldn’t avoid it. Maybe if you were an older person — which I wasn’t — if you were in your thirties or something, maybe it was easier to feel that way where you didn’t have children who were of that age, and your children were little or something…. maybe then you could avoid thinking about those things.

What do you think made so many people of different creeds unite then, and feel such camaraderie? Was it partly the draft, in that it was a semi-universal experience, at least for anyone who was a young man or knew a draft-age man?

Yes, though I think a lot of that is going on right now — it’s just that, it’s not as focused. Certainly that’s the kind of thing you were seeing around the Bernie Sanders supporters, the younger people.

Maybe it’s just crisis that makes people unite — although oddly, this whole coronavirus thing is kind of strange, in that it started out with people being united, and now it’s turned into people splitting again. I think there are political powers working to make sure that happens. Unlike a situation, say, with 9/11, when the country was probably as united as it ever was.

Sharon Dukett’s memoir, “No Rules,” is out now from She Writes Press.

Montana GOP lawmakers made fortunes at tech giant Oracle — and became its best friends in D.C.

Montana Republicans Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte share a tight financial and legislative history with each other and with the tech giant Oracle that goes back years. That relationship has netted each of them several million dollars and made Gianforte one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

Both have also used their offices to support legislation and other initiatives for which Oracle spent significant time and money lobbying, and from which the company stood to gain financially — including through defense contracts.

Additionally, both are up for election this year: Daines is running for re-election to the Senate, in a tight race with current Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, while Gianforte is trying to move from the House — where he serves as the state’s lone representative — to the governor’s mansion.

Gianforte made his fortune from RightNow Technologies, a Bozeman-based tech company he co-founded with his wife in 1997, where Daines served as an executive for 12 years. In 2011, Gianforte sold the company to Oracle for $1.5 billion, at the time holding between 20% and 25% of the company’s stock, which was valued at between $300 million and $400 million, according to statements he made to the Billings Gazette.

That sale sent 100 jobs to Texas, according to a report in the Missoulan, but Gianforte stayed, working in a consulting capacity until March 2013, per his LinkedIn page.

The sale went a long way toward making Gianforte the wealthiest member of Congress, a title he held until last year when he was displaced by appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., whose husband is CEO of the New York Stock Exchange

The Gianforte Family Trust holds more than $190 million in assets, as of its 2018 tax filing, and supports a number of ultra-conservative organizations and efforts, including helping to build a creationist museum in Glendive, Montana, that depicts humans coexisting with dinosaurs.

Daines reported that between 2011 and 2012, when he stepped away from the company to run for Senate, RightNow and Oracle paid him a combined $550,882 in salary. He also reported earning between $2 million and $10 million over those two years, according to disclosures.

Since 1998, Daines and Gianforte, through their company Genesis Partners, have shared a stake in a Bozeman office complex called Genesis Business Park, which rented space to RightNow and subsequently Oracle. The complex currently hosts an Oracle campus, which Gianforte told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2015 had a 10-year lease, which is apparently set to expire next March.

Between 2015 dna 2018, Daines pulled in between $485,000 and $5.1 million per year in rent from the office park, and 2012 through 2014 earned between $100,001 and $1 million, according to his federal disclosure forms.

Gianforte reported earning between $50,000 and $100,000 from rent and capital gains through Genesis Partners, per his disclosures.

In fact, Daines officially filed his candidacy for Senate from the Oracle offices in Bozeman, which he had leased to the company. From the Missoula Independent:

Critics have since speculated that [Daines’] years at the company and the money netted by executives through the Oracle purchase were the springboard from which Daines launched his political career. In fact, according to a February 2014 article in the Billings Gazette, Daines officially filed his candidacy for the U.S. Senate from his iPhone while at the Bozeman offices of Oracle.

While in congress, Daines and Gianforte have pushed legislation that would benefit Oracle, including bills lobbied on by Oracle, federal reports show.

Daines introduced an amendment to a 2017 spending bill (SB 2943) that included spending to “ensure higher quality cybersecurity” for Department of Energy and Pentagon nuclear command and communication systems. Oracle had previously been awarded DOE contracts to do software work for the National Nuclear Security Administration, as well as DOD contracts for electronics and communications equipment.

Oracle reported that it lobbied on that bill for those specific issues, expending nearly $2 million on lobbying that quarter alone, government disclosures show.

The Montana legislative duo also supported billions of dollars in federal government procurement on which Oracle had lobbied.

Daines also voted to allocate billions of dollars for procurement as part of the fiscal 2016 and fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs), Gianforte effectively voted in favor of the 2017 and 2020 NDAAs, both of which Oracle lobbied on.

Specifically, Oracle lobbied on issues related to IT, cloud and cybersecurity procurement policies, spending nearly $2 million lobbying on both, according to disclosures.

Furthermore, Daines used committee markups in 2015 and 2016 to increase funding for cybersecurity measures by nearly $2 billion, while Oracle touted its cybersecurity work with the federal government — specifically the Pentagon.

Daines also worked to boost cybersecurity innovation in the private sector, introducing legislation to get cybersecurity interests a seat at the table of a Workforce Advisory Board.

Oracle, whose complete cloud services division took in about $27.4 billion per year, lobbied on “cloud computing issues” throughout Daines’ time in Congress.

Daines similarly supported millions of dollars in funding for artificial intelligence (AI) programs, which Oracle stood to benefit from substantially, as the company offered an array of products incorporating AI and machine learning.

Daines has routinely advocated for private sector advantages on those issues, while Oracle promoted its government collaborations and spent millions lobbying for spending increases, including nearly $2 million for AI.

Daines and Gianforte both supported rolling back net neutrality, which Oracle publicly supported — and though many tech companies share the same interests, Daines and Gianforte used their offices to oppose policies supported by Oracle competitors, most specifically Google.

One such measure was the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which held website operators liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. According to the Verge, Oracle publicly supported that bill in an effort to harm their competitors, specifically Google:

Why Oracle would come out so publicly in favor of the bill is less obvious, since the law lacks even a tenuous connection to their business model. However the company’s animosity towards Google is well-documented, from its $9 billion lawsuit over Android, to Oracle’s funding of the Google Transparency Project, which put out a report earlier this year claiming that Google had bought academic influence through grants. In a bizarre way, Google has become the favorite target of those who support SESTA.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported in 2015 that Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock had met with Oracle competitors Google and Facebook ahead of his 2016 re-election bid, apparently in an effort to lure more tech competitors to Montana’s Northern Rocky tech apparatus. Bullock defeated Gianforte in that election, and is now running against Daines in one of the nation’s most closely-watched Senate races.

Daines once sent a letter to Google voicing concerns about their personal health information protection mechanisms, requesting the company provide information on the subject. Coincidentally, Oracle also criticized its chief rival’s data collection, and played a key role in launching an Australian government probe into Google over its collection practices.

In 2017, Daines called on Oracle CEO Safra Catz to join a tech jobs summit that he hosted.

Gianforte co-sponsored and voted in favor of an Oracle-backed immigration bill, the Fairness For High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019, on which Oracle lobbied, according to federal disclosures.

Gianforte also supported intelligence authorization legislation that Oracle lobbied on, voting in favor of an intelligence authorization act in 2018, 2019 and 2020, per Senate records.

In addition to the millions of dollars that Daines and Gianforte made from their business relationships with Oracle, including ongoing rent, the company has contributed financially to the two lawmakers’ election campaigns.

Daines for his part has taken over $56,000 in campaign contributions from Oracle over his career, making the company one of his top 10 contributors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Oracle employees have contributed $10,700 to Gianforte over the course of his two congressional bids.

Daines currently appears to hold a lead over Bullock in this year’s Senate race, and President Trump is expected to easily carry Montana. But the state has a history of being politically unpredictable, and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester successfully held his seat in 2018.

Gianforte faces a tougher challenge against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mike Cooney, in a race currently rated as a “toss-up” in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.

Gianforte first won his House seat in a tight 2017 special election, after former Rep. Ryan Zinke joined Trump’s cabinet for his spectacularly scandal-studded stint as secretary of the Interior. On the eve of Gianforte’s election he made worldwide headlines for body-slamming Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, and was convicted of assault in Montana state court the next month (after winning the election). The judge handed down a fine and sentenced the representative-elect to community service and anger management therapy.

As a result of the terms of the settlement, Gianforte gave the Committee to Protect Journalists $50,000, about 1/4,000 of his total estimated net worth.

Lindsey Graham’s warning about Trump re-surfaces after report on president slurring fallen troops

A five-year-old tweet from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is getting renewed attention amid reports that President Donald Trump once disparaged dead American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.”

The tweet in question came shortly after Trump attacked the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for getting captured and tortured by enemy forces during the Vietnam War, and it slammed the future president for showing no appreciation for the sacrifices made by service members.

“At the heart of [Trump’s] statement is a lack of respect for those who have served,” he wrote. “A disqualifying characteristic to be president.”

In the years since the tweet, however, Graham has evolved to become one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, despite the fact that the president has continued attacking McCain even after his passing in 2018.

At the heart of @realDonaldTrump statement is a lack of respect for those who have served – a disqualifying characteristic to be president

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 18, 2015

What the shocking new report about Trump and the military reveals about the GOP

One of the most talked about articles of the week is Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell report in The Atlantic detailing President Donald Trump’s appalling insults against military heroes, who he reportedly dismissed as “losers” and “suckers.” Two Never Trump conservatives, Jennifer Rubin and Charlie Sykes, have responded to Goldberg’s article with articles of their own — and both of them contemplate how many Republicans will or won’t have the courage to call Trump out for insulting Americans who served in the military.

The Trump White House has flatly denied the allegations of Goldberg’s sources. Yet the type of anti-veteran insults those sources attribute to Trump are consistent with his comments about the late Sen. John McCain in 2015; Trump said of McCain, who was captured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong for five years during the Vietnam War, “I like people who weren’t captured.” And according to three of Goldberg’s sources, Trump had no interest in honoring McCain after he died in 2018 and said, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.”

Goldberg also reports that when Trump visited France in 2018, he insulted the American World War I veterans buried at Aisne-Marne Cemetery and said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The reporting in Goldberg’s article, according to Rubin, “seems entirely in character for Trump.” But she doesn’t expect a lot of Republicans to condemn Trump because of it. (Some Trump current and former officials denied aspects of the report on the record after it was published.)

Rubin argues that the senior officials quoted anonymously in Goldberg’s article should have had the courage to take a stand when Trump was insulting military veterans in their presence.

“The silence of these senior aides is really no different from the silence of virtually all elected Republicans,” Rubin writes. “They, along with intellectually corrupt right-wing pundits and media outlets, have denied, deflected, ignored or excused almost everything that has come out of Trump’s mouth. The so-called Republican hawks — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — have stuck with him through thick and thin. They did not condemn him when he first slandered POWs …. It seems there is no insult, lie or exaggeration about our troops too great to prompt these Republicans to declare Trump unfit to serve as commander in chief.”

Meantime, in The Bulwark, Sykes notes that although Republicans he describes as “anti-anti-Trumpers” have been expressing “skepticism” about Goldberg’s reporting, they “know that the accounts are most likely true because they’ve seen it so many times before.”

Sykes explains: “No one has forgotten how he mocked John McCain as a POW, or attacked Gold Star families. He has suggested that soldiers in Iraq were stealing money they were supposed to distribute…. But Republicans eventually accepted it all. The anti-anti-Trumpers found a way to look the other way.”

In his article, Sykes makes a distinction between “anti-anti-Trumpers” in the GOP and Trump’s “hardcore bootlickers” in the GOP. The “anti-anti-Trumpers,” Sykes argues, might privately cringe over things Trump says but won’t criticize him publicly, whereas the “hardcore bootlickers” genuinely adore him.

According to Sykes, “This is what distinguishes anti-anti-Trumpers from the hardcore bootlickers: the anti-antis generally have no illusions about the man’s character, and even remember the many times that he has lashed out viciously at women, minorities, the disabled and veterans. But they salve their consciences in various ways. Today, they would prefer to talk about Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon.”

This week, the right-wing media have been obsessing over Speaker Pelosi getting her hair done, which they insist, she wouldn’t have done if she took social distancing as seriously as she claims.

Goldberg’s article is “awkward” for Republicans, Sykes writes, “because it dramatically raises the ante. It causes a stirring in the place where their consciences have been hibernating. What if it is true that the commander-in-chief, who is seeking another four years in office, is a small, vicious and despicable man who dishonors everything he touches?”

The nation is not ready for a COVID-19 vaccine

Millions of Americans are counting on a COVID-19 vaccine to curb the global pandemic and return life to normal.

While one or more options could be available toward the end of this year or early next, the path to delivering vaccines to 330 million people remains unclear for the local health officials expected to carry out the work.

“We haven’t gotten a lot of information about how this is going to roll out,” said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of Texas’ Harris County Public Health department, which includes Houston.

In a four-page memo this summer, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told health departments across the country to draft vaccination plans by Oct. 1 “to coincide with the earliest possible release of COVID-19 vaccine.”

But health departments that have been underfunded for decades say they currently lack the staff, money and tools to educate people about vaccines and then to distribute, administer and track hundreds of millions of doses. Nor do they know when, or if, they’ll get federal aid to do that.

Dozens of doctors, nurses and health officials interviewed by KHN and The Associated Press expressed concern about the country’s readiness to conduct mass vaccinations, as well as frustration with months of inconsistent information from the federal government.

The gaps include figuring out how officials will keep track of who has gotten which doses and how they’ll keep the workers who give the shots safe, with enough protective gear and syringes to do their jobs.

With only about half of Americans saying they would get vaccinated, according to a poll from AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, it also will be crucial to educate people about the benefits of vaccination, said Molly Howell, who manages the North Dakota Department of Health’s immunization program.

The unprecedented pace of vaccine development has left many Americans skeptical about the safety of COVID-19 immunizations; others simply don’t trust the federal government.

“We’re in a very deep-red state,” said Ann Lewis, CEO of CareSouth Carolina, a group of community health centers that serve mostly low-income people in five rural counties in South Carolina. “The message that is coming out is not a message of trust and confidence in medical or scientific evidence.”

Paying for the rollout

The U.S. has committed more than $10 billion to develop new coronavirus vaccines but hasn’t allocated money specifically for distributing and administering vaccines.

And while states, territories and 154 large cities and counties received billions in congressional emergency funding, that money can be used for a variety of purposes, including testing and overtime pay.

An ongoing investigation by KHN and the AP has detailed how state and local public health departments across the U.S. have been starved for decades, leaving them underfunded and without adequate resources to confront the coronavirus pandemic. The investigation further found that federal coronavirus funds have been slow to reach public health departments, forcing some communities to cancel non-coronavirus vaccine clinics and other essential services.

States are allowed to use some of the federal money they’ve already received to prepare for immunizations. But KHN and the AP found that many health departments are so overwhelmed with the current costs of the pandemic — such as testing and contact tracing — that they can’t reserve money for the vaccine work to come. Health departments will need to hire people to administer the vaccines and systems to track them, and pay for supplies such as protective medical masks, gowns and gloves, as well as warehouses and refrigerator space.

CareSouth Carolina is collaborating with the state health department on testing and the pandemic response. They used federal funding to purchase $140,000 retrofitted vans for mobile testing that they plan to continue to use to keep vaccines cold and deliver them to residents when the time comes, said Lewis.

But most vaccine costs will be new.

Pima County, Arizona, for example, is already at least $30 million short of what health officials need to fight the pandemic, let alone plan for vaccines, said Dr. Francisco Garcia, deputy county administrator and chief medical officer.

Some federal funds will expire soon. The $150 billion that states and local governments received from a fund in the CARES Act, for example, covers only expenses made through the end of the year, said Gretchen Musicant, health commissioner in Minneapolis. That’s a problem, given vaccine distribution may not have even begun.

Although public health officials say they need more money, Congress left Washington for its summer recess without passing a new pandemic relief bill that would include additional funding for vaccine distribution.

“States are anxious to receive those funds as soon as possible, so they can do what they need to be prepared,” said Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of immunization education at the Immunization Action Coalition, a national vaccine education and advocacy organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota. “We can’t assume they can take existing funding and attempt the largest vaccination campaign in history.”

What’s the plan?

Then there’s the basic question of scale. The federally funded Vaccines for Children program immunizes 40 million children each year. In 2009 and 2010, the CDC scaled up to vaccinate 81 million people against pandemic H1N1 influenza. And last winter, the country distributed 175 million vaccines for seasonal influenza vaccine, according to the CDC.

But for the U.S. to reach herd immunity against the coronavirus, most experts say, the nation would likely need to vaccinate roughly 70% of Americans, which translates to 200 million people and — because the first vaccines will require two doses to be effective — 400 million shots.

Although the CDC has overseen immunization campaigns in the past, the Trump administration created a new program, Operation Warp Speed, to facilitate vaccine development and distribution. In August, the administration announced that McKesson Corp., which distributed H1N1 vaccines during that pandemic, will also distribute COVID-19 vaccines to doctors’ offices and clinics.

“With few exceptions, our commercial distribution partners will be responsible for handling all the vaccines,” Operation Warp Speed’s Paul Mango said in an email.

“We’re not going to have 300 million doses all at once,” said Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the Health and Human Services Department, despite earlier government pledges to have that many doses ready by the new year. “We believe we are maximizing our probability of success of having tens of millions of doses of vaccines by January 2021, which is our goal.”

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said it will take time for the vaccines to be widespread enough for life to return to what’s considered normal. “We have to be prepared to deal with this virus in the absence of significant vaccine-induced immunity for a period of maybe a year or longer,” Adalja said in August.

In preliminary guidance for state vaccine managers, the CDC said doses will be distributed free of charge from a central location. Health departments’ local vaccination plans may be reviewed by both the CDC and Operation Warp Speed.

The CDC spent two days working with vaccine planners in five locations — North Dakota, Florida, California, Minnesota and Philadelphia — to discuss potential obstacles and solutions. No actual vaccines were distributed during the planning sessions, which focused on how to get vaccines to people in places as different as urban Philadelphia, where pharmacies abound, and rural North Dakota, which has few chain drugstores but many clinics run by the federal Indian Health Service, said Kris Ehresmann, who directs infectious disease control at the Minnesota Department of Health.

Those planning sessions have made Ehresmann feel more confident about who’s in charge of distributing vaccines. “We are getting more specific guidance from CDC on planning now,” she said. “We feel better about the process, though there are still a lot of unknowns.”

Outdated technology could hamper response

Still, many public health departments will struggle to adequately track who has been vaccinated and when, because a lack of funding in recent decades has left them in the technological dark ages, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

In Mississippi, for example, health officials still rely on faxes, said the state’s health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs. “You can’t manually handle 1,200 faxes a day and expect anything efficient to happen,” he said.

When COVID-19 vaccines become available, health providers will need to track where and when patients receive their vaccines, said Moore, the medical director of Tennessee’s immunization plan during the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009 and 2010. And with many different shots in the works, they will need to know exactly which one each patient got, she said.

People will need to receive their second COVID-19 dose 21 or 28 days after the first, so health providers will need to remind patients to receive their second shot, Moore said, and ensure that the second dose is the same brand as the first.

The CDC will require vaccinators to provide “dose-level accounting and reporting” for immunizations, so that the agency knows where every dose of COVID-19 vaccine is “at any point in time,” Moore said. Although “the sophistication of these systems has improved dramatically” in the past decade, she said, “many states will still face major challenges meeting data tracking and reporting expectations.”

The CDC is developing an app called the Vaccine Administration Monitoring System for health departments whose data systems don’t meet standards for COVID-19 response, said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, a nonprofit based in Rockville, Maryland.

“Those standards haven’t been released,” Hannan said, “so health departments are waiting to invest in necessary IT enhancements.” The CDC needs to release standards and data expectations as quickly as possible, she added.

Meanwhile, health departments are dealing with what Minnesota’s Ehresmann described as “legacy” vaccine registries, sometimes dating to the late 1980s.

A historic task

Overwhelmed public health teams are already working long hours to test patients and trace their contacts, a time-consuming process that will need to continue even after vaccines become available.

When vaccines are ready, health departments will need more staffers to identify people at high risk for COVID-19, who should get the vaccine first, Moore said. Public health staff also will be needed to educate the public about the importance of vaccines and to administer shots, she said, as well as monitor patients and report serious side effects.

At an August meeting about vaccine distribution, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois’ health department, said her state will need to recruit additional health professionals to administer the shots, including nursing students, medical students, dentists, dental hygienists and even veterinarians. Such vaccinators will need medical-grade masks, gowns and gloves to keep those workers safe as they handle needles amid the contagious coronavirus.

Many health officials say they feel burned by the country’s struggle to provide hospitals with ventilators last spring, when states found themselves bidding against one another for a limited supply. Those concerns are amplified by the country’s continuing difficulties providing enough testing kits; supplying health workers with personal protective equipment; allocating drugs such as remdesivir; and recruiting contact tracers — who track down everyone with whom people diagnosed with COVID-19 have been in contact.

Although Ehresmann said she’s concerned Minnesota could run out of syringes, she said the CDC has assured her they will provide them.

Given that vaccines are far more complex than personal protective equipment and other medical supplies — one vaccine candidate must be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit — Plescia said people should be prepared for shortages, delays and mix-ups.

“It’s probably going to be even worse than the problems with testing and PPE,” Plescia said.

Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith and KHN Midwest correspondent Lauren Weber contributed to this report.>

High turnout by Trump’s base won’t be enough to get him re-elected

According to an analysis provided to the Washington Post, even if Donald Trump’s fanbase turns out in high numbers in November, that might not be enough for him to be re-elected.

Writing for the Post, Robert Griffin of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. claims the numbers don’t work out for the embattled president if he can’t expand his pool of potential voters.

Stating that the lead that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has over Trump has remained remarkably stable, Griffin wrote that those in the president’s camp who state turnout will be the key to his re-election are fooling themselves.

“Turnout-centric strategies have become the go-to move for underdog campaigns: Despite the polls, the argument goes, our candidate has a chance if a particular group turns out in droves. During the Democratic primary race, for example, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) claimed that an unprecedented wave of young and working-class voters would sweep their man to victory — a deluge that did not materialize,” he wrote before pointing out that, in a high turnout election, increases in voting groups are relative across the board.

“History tells us that it is unusual to see a substantial increase in turnout for just one specific group. Voters live in shared political environments that shape perceptions about an election’s importance. As such, it’s more common to see turnouts among different groups rise and fall together,” he explained. “Take the 2016 election. While the turnout rate of White voters without college degrees did go up by about three percentage points compared with 2012 — and this group disproportionately supported Trump — the increase was not far from the two-percentage-point rise among Hispanic, Asian and White college-educated voters.”

As he notes, the real battle id for so-called swing voters where the president is already faltering.

“While House Republicans won a narrow plurality of the vote in 2016, House Democrats won the national vote by almost nine points just two years later. An analysis by the Democratic data firm Catalist suggests that nearly 90 percent of the shift between those two elections was because people changed their minds,” he elaborated. “If Trump wins in November, it’s much more likely that he’ll have done so by strategically increasing turnout and winning over persuadable voters than by radically increasing turnout alone.

He then warned, “A huge surge in turnout among your favored candidate’s supporters is nice to think about. Just don’t bank on it.”

You can read more here.

Physics is stuck — and needs another Einstein to revolutionize it, physicist Avi Loeb says

Albert Einstein’s work so revolutionized physics that it is difficult to discuss him without slipping into hagiography. Indeed, his brilliance is so storied that his surname has become synonymous with “genius,” and his brain preserved for study.

And yet, while Einstein was undeniably a smart cookie, one cannot look back at the course of history without noticing that the dominoes were all there, set up, and waiting for someone like him to start toppling them. Part of Einstein’s brilliance was merely realizing this. Avi Loeb, a professor of physics at Harvard University with a regular a column in Scientific American, told me that he thinks that Einstein’s physics revelations would have been developed by others even if Einstein hadn’t been born. “It would take maybe a few more decades,” Loeb clarified. “Many of the things that Einstein personally was responsible for — there at least 10 touchstones in physics where each of them is a major intellectual achievement — you know, they would be discovered by different people, I think,” Loeb continued. “That illustrates his genius.”

Loeb is advising on a public project celebrating Einstein’s life and work at Hebrew University, which hosts an archive of Einstein’s documents. The project, “Einstein: Visualize the Impossible,” is slated to be an interactive online exhibition to engage the public with Einstein’s work. As a fellow physicist, Einstein’s work and his life have weighed on Loeb’s mind for years, which is why he was interested in helping curate.

In considering Einstein’s legacy, though, Loeb says we have to reckon with what has and hasn’t changed about the physics world. In the 1890s, when Einstein was in college, physics knowledge was a shell of what it is today. Quantum mechanics, dark matter, nuclear physics and most fundamental particles were unknown, and astronomers knew little about the nature of the universe — or even that there were other galaxies outside our own. Nowadays, many of the biggest physics discoveries happen by virtue of some of the largest and most expensive scientific instruments ever built: gravitational wave observatories, say, or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Given the landscape of physics today, could an Einstein-like physicist exist again — someone who, say, works in a patent office, quietly pondering the nature of space-time, yet whose revelations cause much of the field to be completely rethought?

Loeb thought so. “There are some dark clouds in physics,” Loeb told me. “People will tell you, ‘we just need to figure out which particles makes the dark matter, it’s just another particle. It has some weak interaction, and that’s pretty much it.’ But I think there is a very good chance that we are missing some very important ingredients that a brilliant person might recognize in the coming years.” Loeb even said the potential for a revolutionary physics breakthrough today “is not smaller — it’s actually bigger right now” than it was in Einstein’s time.

I spoke with Loeb via phone about Einstein’s legacy, and how physics has become “stuck” on certain problems; as always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

To start, let’s talk about some of Einstein’s contributions to science. What compelled you to help curate this celebration of Einstein’s legacy?

Well, to start, Einstein’s special theory of relativity revolutionized our notion of space and time. The fact that space and time are entities that are lumped together and that the speed of light is the ultimate speed, and, and that you can convert mass to energy, which is demonstrated by nuclear energy in particular. Then later on, he made the extremely important contributions to quantum mechanics, and of course developed the general theory of relativity that he published in November 1915, 105 years ago. And amazingly, exactly a hundred years later, in August, 2015, gravitational waves were detected by the LIGO experiment — and they demonstrated that not only do gravitational waves exist, which are ripples in space and time that Einstein’s theory forecasted, but also that the forces of these gravitational waves are black holes, which are also a prediction of Einstein’s theory.

Obviously Einstein was very visionary, but also in a sense, he had peers — people like Karl Schwarzchild and Edwin Hubble — who were doing work that would help him test and correlate his theories. I’ve wondered, say, if Einstein were born 30 years later, would someone else have figured out relativity, and the photoelectric effect, and so on?

That’s a good question. Physics is about nature, right? So we’re trying to learn about nature. We’re trying to understand nature and you know, so, in that sense, we collect data and eventually someone comes up with the right idea. The question is, how long does that take? What I’m saying is, I believe that the same ideas would have been developed. I don’t know how close to the time that Einstein and thought about them, but eventually. . . . it would take maybe a few more decades or something. But the most important thing is, I think it would have been fragmented. So, you know, many of the things that Einstein personally was responsible for — like there at least 10 touchstones in physics where each of them is a major intellectual achievement — they would be discovered by different people. So the fact that he came up with with all of them illustrates his genius.

But you know, if you look at people that got the Nobel prize, there are many people — examples of people that got it once for one major discovery, that’s pretty much what they did for their life. Either they did it early on in their life or late, but doesn’t matter. And that’s not true about Einstein. So he didn’t only deviate from the beaten path and, and come up with original ideas, but he did it multiple times. And by that, you know, it contributed to humanity. A great deal, I should say, like for example, his a general theory of relativity — this idea that space and time and gravity are connected.

It seems like physics has changed between Einstein’s day and now. Most of the underlying physical principles of our universe appear to have been well-defined and tested by now — say, the standard model of particle physics, or relativity and gravitation. And a lot of advances happen now because of data from huge teams working on government-funded instruments. Given the landscape of physics, is it actually possible that there could be somebody else like Einstein nowadays, someone who revolutionizes the whole field? Or do you think things have sort of fundamentally changed — both in terms of funding of experiments and of our understanding of the universe — so that such a thing is no longer possible?

I mean, we do have much bigger experiments as you said, and much more data in some fields. But we still need people that think about the blueprint of physics, that think about the fundamental assumptions that everyone else is making that might be wrong. We need critical thinking. And there are some dark clouds on the horizon, just as they were 150 years ago. You know, back then, back then it was the blackbody radiation. And people at the time thought, “well, we just need to clarify that dark cloud, and then we finish physics.” [Editor’s note: in the 1890s, the fact that objects glowed different colors as they heated up was one of the great mysteries of physics. It turned out to be related to quantum mechanics, the study of which prompted an ongoing revolution in physics.]

And right now there are some dark clouds, too, you know. Like, there is the nature of dark matter, or the nature of the cosmological constant, or that we don’t know where the vacuum gets its energy from. People will tell you, “oh, these are just minute details. You know, we just need to figure out which particles makes the dark matter, it’s just another particle. It has some weak interaction, and that’s pretty much it. And the dark energy, you know, it’s just the vacuum energy density, you know, for some reason it’s more maybe, because otherwise we wouldn’t exist here.” You know, we can give each other awards and celebrate the end of physics.

I think it’s pretty much similar [to the 19th century situation]. And I think there, there is a very good chance that we are missing some very important ingredients that a brilliant person might recognize in the coming years, in the coming decades.

What are some of the “dark clouds” in physics, as you say?

One of the challenges is unifying quantum mechanics and gravity. So you have this huge contingency of string theories that agree among themselves that they are leading the frontier, but nevertheless, they haven’t provided any concrete predictions that can be tested by experiments over the past 40 years. [Editor’s note: String theory unifies quantum mechanics and gravity, but it is, as Loeb mentions, not testable as far as anyone knows.]

[String theorists] are still advocating that they’re the smartest physicists — although they’re not doing physics, because in my book, physics is about testing your ideas against reality, with experiments. And, you know, I very much believe that put your theory to the guillotine of experimental data, and it may cut its head off. But if you don’t risk your theory by testing it, you can be very proud of yourself. The only way that you maintain your humility is by recognizing that there is something superior to your ideas, which is nature. And it’s a learning experience where you’re not supposed to know everything in advance.

And that’s unfortunately not popular these days. Today, it’s all about impressing each other. And that’s part of social media, you know, trying to impress other people to say things that look smart, that look very intelligent, that completely align with what everyone else is saying so that they will like you, that you would have more likes on Twitter. Okay. So that’s the motivation, so that you can get more awards, more grants so that you can get a tenure appointment and everyone would respect you.

That’s wrong. That was clearly not the motivation of Einstein. He was not trying to be liked, and that’s why he was working in a patent office. But his ideas happened to be right. And in a way he was naive in that sense, but that’s the right approach — you should be always learning.

So I would say there is the same potential — even greater now — because we are at a time when we recognize the success of physics. It has a huge impact on the economy, on politics, and so forth. So we recognize that — but if you look at the frontiers of physics, which is blue sky research, you know, it’s supposed to be open minded — but it’s not open-minded. There are groups of people, entrenched in ideas that will never be tested and they believe that they’re leading the frontier.

Right. So are you saying that the premise of the some of the major experiments might even be wrong? Like, all the prominent dark matter experiments are trying to find this weakly-interacting, supersymmetric particle, but even that assumption may be wrong?

So here is an example: Supersymmetry, you know, that was an idea advocated for decades now. [Editor’s note: Supersymmetry is the theory that for every fundamental particle, there is a “partner” particle; so for the electron, there would be a supersymmetric “selectron,” and for the top quark, there would be a supersymmetric “squark,” and so on. Dark matter is theorized to be made of one of these particles. Yet none of the supersymmetric particles have ever been observed.] And people celebrated this idea, and gave each other awards. The Large Hadron Collider in CERN was supposed to detect the lightest supersymmetric particles — and it didn’t. There’s no evidence for supersymmetry.

So obviously what people say is, “oh, maybe it’s around the corner.” But it’s already ruled out — the most natural versions of supersymmetry are ruled out. So here’s an idea that was celebrated as part of the mainstream — not only celebrated, but it was the foundation for string theory. So they put it as a building block: “We know it exists, put it as a brick at the bottom of the tower that we are building called string theory, called superstring theory. And let’s assume that we know it it’s completely trivial, experimentalists will eventually find it, we don’t even need to think about it — let’s put it as a building block of our tower.”

Doesn’t exist. LHD [Large Hadron Collider] didn’t find it. So then, people say, “okay, weakly interacting massive particles are dark matter — but for decades, they haven’t found anything. [Editor’s note: One prominent theory to explain dark matter is that it consists of particles that are heavy but rarely interact with normal matter, though they bounce off of themselves and have a gravitational interaction. Most of the major experiments searching for dark matter are attempting to find this type of weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP for short.]

And so I asked the experimentalists, “how long will you continue to search for WIMPs, these weakly interacting particles, since the limits are orders of magnitude below the expectation?” And he said, “I will continue to search for WIMPs as long as I get funding.”

So in the mainstream approach, there is this stubbornness — like, we stick to the ideas that we believe in. And then anyone that deviates from that will be sidelined. You know, anyone that considers any other theory for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity through string theory is sidelined, even though there is no reasonable evidence for string theory. So I would say the potential now for a breakthrough that will be really revolutionary is not smaller — it’s actually bigger right now [than it was in Einstein’s]. It’s just, the social pressure is stronger.

So we do need — we desperately need another Einstein. There is no doubt.

“How are we going to pay these bills?”: Losing income to the pandemic when medical catastrophe hits

Born in Honduras, Soledad Castillo, 27, endured sexual abuse and serious health challenges before migrating to the United States at age 14. After experiencing abuse in the foster care system and homelessness, she graduated from San Francisco State University and received her US citizenship. Soledad now works as a housing case manager for a nonprofit serving foster youth. She talked with Ela Banerjee several times over the last three months. Note: Soledad’s name was changed to protect her identity.

* * *

I usually work 40 hours a week, but in March my hours got cut in half. I get paid hourly, a couple of dollars more than San Francisco minimum wage. It was hard because my boyfriend Alexander’s hours also got cut. He works as a driver for San Francisco Paratransit and he was only working two hours a day. After my hours got cut, we started panicking. “Oh my God, how are we going to pay these bills?” Sometimes I’d go to sleep thinking about that. And then the next day: “How are we going to do this?” Thankfully, I have a friend who had some savings and she lent us some money. But can you imagine if we didn’t have her? We’re not prepared for this type of stuff. But how do you save when you live paycheck to paycheck?

I’m also sending money to support my family back in Honduras. My brother, my sister, and my stepfather—they all lost their jobs. I worry about them as well. I want to make sure that they have food to eat and that my mom has her medicines. Before the pandemic, I’d send money to my family once a month, but now I send money every 15 days. I’m the only one in my family who’s here in the U.S. and has the opportunity to work and make a little bit of money. Since I came here, I always feel the pressure to help them. I have to worry about myself, but at the end of the day, they’re my family and I really love them. I’m the only person that they can count on right now.

On March 17, my organization’s office closed and everyone started working from home. My job is usually very in-person and one-on-one. I do home visits, help clients with their resumes, help them apply for school. The CEO of our organization sent a memo to staff to say that from now on we have to do virtual meetings with the clients. But I work with people who are disadvantaged and homeless. They don’t have laptops, they sometimes don’t have phones. So it’s been really challenging for me to get in touch with those clients that don’t have access to those services.

The first week I was working a lot. I felt so stressed because all my clients were panicking and I was panicking, too. But I was trying to control myself at the same time, to help my clients and calm them down. I had a conversation with my supervisor and we were able to get my clients computers and prepaid phones for three months. And I’ve been cohosting virtual classes with my supervisor, like meditation, cooking and Zumba. I’m also emailing them resources from other organizations, like how to apply for food stamps and unemployment.

At the beginning of shelter in place, it was really tough to take care of myself. Right now it’s getting better, but I still have clients calling me at 9 p.m., 11 p.m. I had to put a stop to that. I told them, “OK, here are my office hours during the day, and you should only call me for emergencies.” It was hard to set and keep those boundaries. I remember being in that situation; I was homeless in San Francisco without knowing people for three years. For me, my only family were my case managers, my social worker, and my mentors in school. So I get that. It was hard for me to say no to my clients. But I told myself that in order to help them, I have to take care of myself as well.

All of March through now, I was trying to help with my clients, but I was also going through a lot of emotional and mental pain. Back in January, I found out that I was pregnant. I’d lost a baby while pregnant the year before, so this gave me hope and I was really happy. But in February, we went to the doctor and found out that the baby was sick. We didn’t know how sick. It was shocking for us because we were so excited and we didn’t want to go through the same thing that we went through last year. At the time, I was hiding that from everyone and just trying to be strong.

On April 7, the doctors told us that the baby was literally dying and that they had to take the baby out because I was starting to get sick, too. That’s not something you want to hear. I mean, this was my second baby that passed away. It was a really hard decision for me to make, because the baby was really sick, but his heart was still pumping and I didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy.

All of this was happening while we had less money and were going through the shelter in place. I was going to a lot of different hospitals, clinics, and special offices. Alexander used all his paid time off to take me to appointments. We were finding abnormalities on every test, so out of nowhere, we’d have to go to a different hospital right away after one appointment. I was at appointments almost every week and I was always alone, talking to doctors and having them tell me that the baby was dying. Alexander couldn’t come in with me, because of the coronavirus. I begged the doctor, “Please let him in. He’s the father.” I understood that they were trying to be safe, but at the same time, it was so hard, and I needed someone to be with me. I was heartbroken.

I was alone at the hospital the day of the surgery, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The surgery lasted for three and a half hours. They said that everything went well. When I woke up, the first thing I did was call Alexander. He’d been waiting outside the whole time in the hospital parking lot.

After the surgery, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was in so much pain and I isolated myself from people for a week. It’s weird—I needed to be alone, but at the same time, I needed support. And on the days that I needed support, I wasn’t able to be with anyone because of the shelter-in-place orders.

I really wanted to go see my family in Honduras, but with the virus, of course I wasn’t able to. My mom sends me WhatsApp messages every day, asking if I’m OK. Americans often talk about immigration, but we don’t often talk about the emotional damage that occurs when people are far away from their families. I think that not having my parents with me has affected my life a lot. I have difficulty putting myself together sometimes. Part of me is sometimes like, Wow, what would it be like if I actually had a family with me? And now with the pandemic, all Americans are facing similar issues. I’m not saying that it’s good it’s happening, but it’s just a way for people to understand how hard it is to be far from your family that you love.

Besides going through the emotional impact that the death of the baby has on us, now we have to deal with the financial impact as well. The doctors did special ultrasounds on the baby’s heart, lungs, and brain. Each ultrasound was like $9,000 and insurance doesn’t cover those types of tests. So I’m talking to the insurance company now, trying to see if I can get any assistance or plan to pay that off.

Alexander and I are just hanging in there now and hoping for things to get better. I’m having more contact with people. I’m getting my hours back at work. I’ve been walking seven days a week. It’s a newer thing for me. I like the smell of the trees, the smell of the flowers, the air on my face. Walking has been my therapy right now. I live in a studio apartment and it’s really small. I feel that sometimes I cannot even breathe.

Grill this barbecue chicken pizza to add extra smoky flavor

While barbecue chicken pizza isn’t necessarily a classic in the way that a traditional margherita or pepperoni pie is, it’s pretty ubiquitous at pizzerias across the country — a phenomenon that has ties to legendary chefs and is an emblem of the California pizza movement that they helped inspire.

By most accounts, the history of the California pizza — an extension of the Neapolitan pizza with thin, hand-formed crust — began with Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse in Berkeley, with its wood-burning pizza oven and regional toppings, like local goat cheese and greens. This was in the early 1980s, an era when “pizza toppings” meant pepperoni, sausage, onions and peppers.

Then came Ed LaDou, the pizza chef for Wolfgang Puck‘s Spago. He expanded the definition of what goes on a pizza, experimenting with items like eggplant, clams, mustard and pâté.

“Ed really set the tone for the pizza,” said Mark Peel, a former chef at Spago who now owns Campanile in Los Angeles. “Wolfgang had a great sense of taste, but he was not a pizza maker by any means. Ed was highly skilled, fast and clean. He was an intelligent guy who made a great, great crust. There are people who have built empires on less.”

LaDou, who died in 2008, is widely credited as the creator of the barbecue chicken pizza. He went on to help develop the menu for the national chain California Pizza Kitchen; his version of the barbecue chicken pizza is still on the menu, and I’ve recently enjoyed playing with making my own version on the grill.

Grilling pizza leads to a gorgeous crust — crisp, bubbly and a little blistered — and there’s the additional benefit of being able to use that same grill to give your toppings some additional dimensions of flavor.

For example, I’m not typically a chicken breast person (that’s something that Alton Brown and I agree on) but I will make an exception when it is slightly blackened, cubed, slathered in barbeque sauce and tossed on a pizza. Or red onions — they take on a sweet, smoky flavor after spending a little time over the grill.

Grilled Barbecue Chicken Pizza
One 10- to 12-inch pizza

Grilled Toppings

1 chicken breast, trimmed of any trimmable fat and dried on a paper towel
1 tablespoon of barbecue sauce
½ small red onion
2 teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil
Salt to taste

Pizza

4 teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil
½ pound prepared pizza dough, at room temperature
⅓ cup barbecue sauce
⅔ cup grated smoked gouda cheese
⅔ cup grated cheddar cheese
Cilantro for garnish

1. Brush a large bowl with 2 teaspoons of olive oil, and place the prepared pizza dough in it, set aside while preparing the grilled toppings. Clean and oil grill grates and preheat to a surface temperature of 450° to 500° (about medium-high on most grills).

2. Brush the chicken breast with your choice of barbecue sauce, and then brush your ½ onion with 2 teaspoons of olive oil, season with salt to taste, and then wrap it in a sheet of aluminum foil.

3. Place the chicken breast over direct heat and the aluminum onion packet over indirect heat. Flip the chicken about every 5 minutes — cook time will depend on the thickness of the chicken, ranging from 20 minutes for a thinner breast to 30 minutes for a thick breast. Before your last two flips, brush the chicken again with barbecue sauce.

4. Remove the chicken and aluminum foil packet — opening it to allow it to steam — from the grill, and set aside. Once slightly cooled, cube the chicken and chop the red onion into thin slices.

5. Remove your pizza dough from the oiled bowl and stretch it into a 10- to 12-inch circle. Lightly brush it with 2 teaspoons of olive oil and place it over direct heat for about 50 seconds (just long enough for the dough to stiffen). Flip it over to the other side and do the same.

6. Slide the pizza dough off direct heat and top with barbecue sauce, smoked gouda cheese, grated cheddar cheese, cubed chicken and red onion. Cover the grill and cook, rotating pizza once, until the crust is browned and cheese is melted, 8 to 10 minutes.

7. Remove the pizza from the grill and garnish with cilantro. Enjoy.

How climate change fuels California’s biggest fires

If it seems like the wildfire season is getting worse and worse with each passing year, that’s not just your perception. It’s still early in California’s wildfire season, yet 2020 has already become one of the state’s more devastating burn years. This month, more than 13,000 lightning strikes ignited hundreds of wildfires throughout the state, destroying around 1.4 million acres — more than 25 times the area burned by this time last year. Several people have died, thousands of structures have been damaged or destroyed, and 170,000 residents have been subject to evacuation orders. Quite literally adding fuel to these flames, is — what else? — climate change.

Climate change drives wildfires primarily by drying things out, allowing fires to burn hotter, faster and bigger; as temperatures rise, evaporation increases, leaving less water available for plants. Climate change is also decreasing the amount of moisture in the air, known as the vapor pressure deficit, further drying out vegetation. Daniel Swain, a wildfire and climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Grist that drier vegetation changes the character of wildfires, producing “all sorts of more extreme fire behavior, faster rates of fire spread, larger fires in general, making them harder to fight and having a different effect on ecosystems.”

It may be a while, however, before we know just how much of a role climate change played in this year’s fire season. Attribution — the sub-field of climate science that looks at the extent to which a particular weather event is made more likely or more severe by global warming — takes time to calculate. Wildfire attribution is particularly complicated, because unlike hurricane or flood events, direct human influence — including land management and accidental ignitions — is also a major contributing factor.

What’s more, attribution science moves much slower than the news cycle. “That’s the problem with attribution studies; if you do them carefully, they often don’t come out until well after the event in question is over and the cleanup has largely moved out of people’s minds,” said Swain. “So there is a bit of a disconnect or a time lag between when it’s maximally publicly visible in the news and when the science says, ‘Yeah, actually climate change played a big role in this.'” Swain and his colleagues just finished an attribution study on California’s wildfire season of 2018.

In the meantime, Swain and his colleagues use a strategy called “soft attribution.” Instead of focusing on specific events, like this month’s fires, they talk about climate’s general influence on a particular aspect of that event. For instance, Swain says that we know that climate change is driving the increase in the area burned by wildfires in general — in California that area has increased five-fold since 1972. “Even though we’re not talking about the specific fires this year, we know that summer fires are getting worse because of climate change,” he said.

The worst of 2020’s fire season may be yet to come. In some parts of the state, wildfires peak in autumn with the arrival of strong, dry winds. “That’s when we tend to see the biggest and the most severe, most dangerous fires,” says Swain. “We haven’t even gotten to that point in the calendar year yet.” Climate change is also shifting the timing of seasonal weather patterns, including delaying the state’s autumn rains, pushing the fire season later into the year. Swain says that the increasing overlap of summer dryness and fall winds represents the “worst of both worlds.”

As the world continues to warm and the fires rage hotter and bigger each year, California needs to figure better ways to live with and adapt to the fire season. That includes better forest management. Swain said part of the problem is the way fire was demonized during the 20th century, including low-intensity wildfires that naturally clear out the underbrush of ecosystems. By preventing all forest fires, including the good kind, states like California ended up exacerbating the dry brush problem we face today.

One way to adapt to a future with bigger, stronger fires might be, in fact, more fire: Indigenous Californians practiced prescribed and managed burns as a forest management technique for thousands of years. “We should probably take a page out of that book,” said Swain, “thinking how to fight fire with fire, and essentially recognizing in the wider sense that not all wildfire is inherently bad.”

“It’s blood memory”: Jurnee Smollett on how the horrors in “Lovecraft Country” are felt in real life

For “Lovecraft Country” star Jurnee Smollett, the concept of fighting for home is part of her own history. Smollett recalls hearing stories about her grandmother being among the first in her family to buy a home in South and the swell of pride connected with that, and the despair in losing it.

I did not ask her if she believes in haunted houses, but that’s irrelevant – her “Lovecraft Country” character Leti Lewis surely does. In the season’s third episode, “Holy Ghost,” Leti moves into a rundown Victorian mansion located in an all-white neighborhood and faces the demon within its walls – a peril more cleanly dealt with than her neighbors’ overt racism. That part of the story, sadly enough, is something with which Smollett has some familiarity.

She remembers waking up on the morning of the Million Man March to find one of her neighbors had left a dead fish on her family’s lawn, she told Salon recently. “When I was a kid there were derogatory slurs keyed into our car, you know – the N-word and another word about being Jewish, because my mom’s black and my dad was Jewish.”

Monsters, urban legends and local folklore are generally accepted to be fiction – stories made up to frighten and fascinate or as a warning for children. But haunted house stories are different, because they feel more plausible. If walls can absorb smoke, dusty and mildew, why not concentrated malevolence?

For a series like “Lovecraft Country” – which is to say, a show that embraces many types of horror themes within the context of a family drama – building an episode around a haunted house is as natural as assigning Leti to do battle with it.

Part of the drama’s appeal is in seeing Leti handling the heroics, even though the main character Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors), is a soldier. He’s good in a fight, certainly. But Leti has a lone wolf’s courage born out of being an outsider, and she’s also relentless and resilient, handy traits when it comes to fighting forces from Hell.

“Holy Ghost” not only shows the audience what Leti is capable of, but enables Smollett to take center stage. Much like the central role she played in “Underground,” where she first worked with “Lovecraft” creator Misha Green, Leti enables Smollett to wield her physical performance skills while showcasing her extensive acting range.

In a recent conversation with Salon, she talked about the experience of creating a series that’s not only entertaining but doubles as a metaphor for confronting the systemic racism that’s long been a part of America’s history. And to this lifelong social justice activist, Leti and Tic’s frightening adventures don’t feel entirely like fantasy – especially the ghost story in which she stars. “These stories, we know them,” she says. “They’re very personal for us.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One aspect of “Lovecraft Country” that struck me as I was watching is that it must have been interesting to be part of such a project at this moment in history. There’s been a lot of public interest in “Watchmen” and its role in contributing to conversations we’re having about race.

But “Watchmen” opens with an historical event that actually happened – the Tulsa massacre of 1921 – and that many people didn’t realize is fact, not fiction. “Lovecraft,” on the other hand, speaks to the experience of being Black in America metaphorically, through horror. That places the feelings of confronting racism in a fascinating visual context. We can talk about these experiences, but if someone hasn’t lived them, they might not fully believe what we’re telling them or understand. So I’m wondering how much you guys talked about that aspect, that quality of the story while you were in production.

For sure. We’re all aware of the lethal dangers that happen when our history is overlooked, when the truth is distorted, when our story is not told in its entirety. When textbooks in high schools don’t teach it, except for maybe one month out of the year.

So when you talk about “The Green Book” or you talk about sundown towns, or you talk about redlining and the systemic oppression that happens when Black Americans are trying to just buy a home, how there were real estate policies and banking policies that restricted Black people from being able to just buy a home . . . when you talk about Black Americans in 2020 owning homes at a lower rate than their white counterparts, it’s because we weren’t able to buy and the access to intergenerational wealth was stifled, suffocated, literally killed.

As artists, in approaching a story like this, it is personal for us. We actually don’t have to sit down and really analyze it because we know it. We live it. It’s blood memory, it’s familiar, it’s ancestral.

So what’s it like for you to witness these episodes debuting at a time when people are not just kind of open to talking about systemic racism, but actively engaging with its impact? It’s interesting to have this in a context of horror and fantasy when these stories are at their essence a reflection of reality.

I mean, one thing Misha [Green, “Lovecraft Country” series creator] talks about a lot is how the horror of Black safety is very real. Driving while Black is terrifying sometimes. Being the only Black family in an all-white neighborhood is terrifying. It’s something I know.

. . . This series is being released as the world is confronting a great awakening and we’re having to reckon with the fact we’re not just fighting COVID-19. There’s another pandemic we’re fighting, and that’s systemic racism.

There’s something that happens when you’re forced to bear witness. You can’t unsee it. You can no longer say you don’t know, because you saw that eight minutes, almost nine minutes of a video of a man losing his life. We as Black Americans, we live it, we know it. And the history, it unfortunately repeats itself. You know, Emmett Till is Trayvon Martin. And I think one thing about “Lovecraft Country” is that yes, it’s a very ancestral story is a story about our heroes going on a quest to bring down white supremacy. But we’re still on that quest in 2020.

Did you know that much about H.P. Lovecraft before this show?

What I knew about Lovecraft is I knew about the influence he had on the genre, I knew that he was a master of terror. I didn’t know he was a racist, honestly, until I read the script. Then I read “Lovecraft Country,” the book by Matt Ruff, and then did a deeper dive.

You know, it’s a little disappointing when you find out things about people who are held up on such a pedestal. But as a lover of history, I think it’s important for us to preserve history and tell it in its entirety.

We need to know the full scope of who these thinkers are or were – who were the founding fathers, truly? Who are the philosophers, when you talk about influence or nation building or a genre building? What was the perspective that they had in building this? When you deconstruct that and demystify it, you can understand it on a deeper level because you need to understand the entirety of the truth.

Let’s talk about the production itself. People know you from playing Rosalee in Misha’s previous project “Underground.” Both that and your role in “Birds of Prey” provided opportunities to embrace the action side of you talents.

But I think there’s another significance in your “Lovecraft Country” part in that each episode allows the characters to have adventures in genres that on film at least have traditionally starred white people. So you get to have like a little bit of Indiana Jones, a bit of conspiracy thriller drama, some “Twilight Zone” themes. Did the significance of that ever strike you while you were in production?

I mean, I gotta say it’s like you’re a kid in a candy store. Because in my career I felt for sure shut out from some of these genres and so many stories. So for Misha to do a real radical reimagining of it, just to have an Indiana Jones adventure type thing – that’s one of my favorite rides at Disneyland, by the way. That was the closest I ever got to experience Indiana Jones was to go on a ride, before “Lovecraft Country”! I think as an artist, you want to be able to expand your imagination. You want to be able to access muscles inside of you, whether it’s physically or mentally or spiritually, and you don’t always get to do that in the roles that they typically write for Black American kids, and then Black females. Or, like, women of all kinds. We typically don’t get to participate in the fun.

But that’s why it’s important for more people to be behind the cameras, owning these narratives because they have been for so long told by cis-straight white men . . . So it’s incredibly exciting to be a part of a project where you have people like Misha just allowing you to expand your imagination and play.

You know, I can watch this as a Black woman and appreciate the cultural and historical references and I can also watch this purely from a horror perspective or an action perspective, and those can be very discrete experiences. Are are you hoping that people who may not be familiar with the specific social or historical cues might explore some of that in the course of watching “Lovecraft Country”?

If they are curious enough to go and educate themselves more about it, fine. There’s just so much you can accomplish in 10 episodes. We just tell the truth, you know? Leti may walk through the world completely different than [her sister] Ruby. Why is that? They’re both fighting the patriarchy and white supremacy. Yet in 1955, there’s also other elements that they’re fighting . . . And then they resent each other because their choices are so different. But yeah, I’m excited about the conversation it will start, you know, because there are a lot of things that we explore that are really taboo to talk about.

And I don’t think that would have been possible to do something like this on TV before – or maybe, not that it wasn’t possible, but people seem to be more open to taking in these stories now. Perhaps I’m wrong.

We’ll see. But frankly, I don’t give a damn if they’re open to it or not. I mean, honestly, it’s not our job to pacify them, right? Sometimes we’ve got to go to ugly places and we just can’t apologize for showing the ugly truth. It’s the truth!

“Lovecraft Country” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO. Here’s a sneak peek of the Sunday, Sept. 6 episode:

It's winner takes all.

Watch a new episode of #LovecraftCountry with us Sunday at 9PM (or stream now on @HBOMax). pic.twitter.com/Jm1dlV0yRW

— Lovecraft Country (@LovecraftHBO) September 4, 2020

Trump’s foreign policy is still “America First” — what does that mean, exactly?

At the Republican National Convention, supporters of President Trump’s reelection bid have celebrated his attempts to build a Mexico border wall, his promise to “bring our troops home” and his pledge to end U.S. “reliance on China.”

All are components of the “America First” agenda Trump ran on in 2016. Back then, he promised to “shake the rust off America’s foreign policy.”

Four years later, it’s clearer what this looks like in practice. As a foreign policy analyst, I find Trump’s “America First” vision has had three primary strands: disengaging the U.S. from global politics, disdaining allies and befriending autocratic leaders.

1. Exiting the global stage

Early in Trump’s administration, the U.S. exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade alliance of mostly Asian countries, and the 2015 Paris climate accord. In May 2020, with the United States leading the world in COVID-19 infections, Trump cut funding for the World Health Organization, which is spearheading the global pandemic response.

Trump prefers bilateral deals, in which the U.S. usually is the stronger partner, to multilateral agreements in which its power is offset by many other nations.

His administration’s new U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement has moderate improvements over the original North American Free Trade Agreement, including stricter labor standards in Mexico. But other pledges to replace scrapped deals with better ones remain unfulfilled.

Trump has not yet come up with a “tougher” agreement to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, nor followed up on his pledge to “negotiate a far better” international climate deal.

As a result, the U.S. has sat on the sidelines of major world crises and international collaborations for the past three years.

New U.S. immigration policies like the Muslim immigration ban and refusal to grant admission to most asylum seekers, both very popular with his base and abhorred by Democrats, further isolate the country from the world.

In June, the administration even stopped issuing to immigrants most work visas and new green cards, claiming they were hurting American citizens on the job market during the pandemic. That angered major American companies like Microsoft and Apple, which depend on those international skilled workers.

2. Broken partnerships

“America First” has led to tense relations with the European Union, which Trump referred to as a trading “foe” during the 2016 election campaign. He further alienated America’s European allies when he repeatedly came out in support of Brexit — the disruptive British exit from the EU — and encouraged other EU countries to follow Britain’s lead.

In 2018 he told advisers on several occasions that he was considering withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization founded in 1949 to militarily protect European and U.S. interests.

These are huge divergences from the past. All Republican and Democratic presidents since World War II have expressed strong — and crucial — support for a united Europe and for NATO.

In Asia, relations with longstanding allies are likewise frayed. Trump asked South Korea and Japan to double or even quadruple their financial contributions to keep U.S. military bases on their soil, apparently failing to realize that these bases give the U.S. a strategic presence in a region dominated by China and North Korea.

America’s military presence in Asia helps the U.S. gather intelligence and respond quickly to, for instance, a North Korean nuclear attack.

3. Embracing dictators and autocrats

Trump believes his three meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2018 and 2019 — a landmark initiative of his administration — fixed the North Korea threat. But most analysts find North Korea was actually emboldened by American diplomatic engagement. It is now speeding up its nuclear program.

Conciliatory behavior toward Kim is part of a trend: Trump has embraced some of the world’s most notorious dictators and autocrats.

In Europe, Trump is on good terms only with the proudly undemocratic leaders of Hungary and Poland. He called Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el Sisi “my favorite dictator” and refused to punish Saudi Arabia after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was implicated in the brutal murder of the Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. Instead, the White House permitted two U.S. companies to share sensitive nuclear power information with the Saudis.

The administration’s relations with Russia, which surreptitiously aided Trump’s 2016 campaign, are unusual.

On the whole, his government has pursued a tough policy toward Russia, including imposing harsher sanctions and deploying new NATO forces to the Polish border to protect Eastern Europe.

But Trump has denied Russian interfered in the U.S. election, and he talks to Putin more frequently than he does to allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel or British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In June he pressed those leaders to invite Putin to a G-7 meeting in Washington. They rejected the idea; Russia was expelled from the club of elite nations after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, part of Ukraine.

Soon after, news broke that Moscow promised to pay Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump dismissed U.S. intelligence on the matter as “fake news.” Several former national security officials say that Trump wishes to avoid antagonizing Putin.

Election 2020

Trump has no such qualms with China, a clear bogeyman of his reelection campaign. Trump has been consistently critical of China, even retaliating against what he calls unfair trade practices with his own trade war.

Though tough on the U.S. economy, this stance has some bipartisan approval in Washington and among U.S. allies. China’s refusal to stop subsidizing many state-owned enterprises, grant greater market access to foreign firms and protect intellectual property rights are issues of great global concern, as is its increasingly assertive foreign policy. Still, many U.S. China experts believe Trump’s crude rhetorical attacks are unhelpful for finding a constructive way forward.

Even the administration’s most initially promising diplomatic initiatives — engaging North Korea, ending the war in Afghanistan and seeking to normalize Israel’s relationships with some of its Arab neighbors — have not resolved these chronic international crises.

Back in 2016, “America First” seemed to promise a clear defense of U.S. primacy in a changing world order. That appealed to many voters.

Today, the U.S. has all but abdicated its position as the world’s most globally engaged power. China and Russia are busily working to fill the vacuum.

Klaus W. Larres, Richard M. Krasno Distinguished Professor; Adjunct Professor of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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

“Now,” says AOC, “where’s his unaltered calendar?”: House Democrats subpoena USPS’ Louis DeJoy

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena on Wednesday requesting documents from U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—including unredacted copies of his official government calendar—as a way to compel the head of the USPS, also a major GOP and Trump donor, to come clean about possible conflicts of interest or communications with the White House related to controversial changes made under his leadership at the Postal Service in recent months.

BREAKING: Chair @RepMaloney subpoenas PMG Louis #DeJoy for docs he is withholding from Congress on widespread #postalservice delays. pic.twitter.com/vtP6ar9T4q

— Oversight Committee Democrats (@OversightDems) September 2, 2020

Accusing DeJoy of “withholding from Congress” the key documents it has requested as part of its oversight authority, the committee had made clear repeatedly that it would issue a subpoena if non-compliance continued.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the Oversight chair, has said failing to produce the documents was unacceptable. As CNN reported Monday:

During DeJoy’s testimony last week, the Committee on Oversight and Reform requested documents on the changes made to the postal service that caused widespread delays across the country by August 26. According to a statement from the committee, no documents were produced and two days after the deadline, DeJoy sent a letter to the committee that said, “I trust my August 24 testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Reform clarified any outstanding questions you had.”

The committee’s request include a lengthy schedule (pdf) of documents and information for DeJoy to hand over, including his “complete, unredacted calendar from June 15, 2020, to the present.”

During a hearing before the Oversight Committee on Aug. 24, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) grilled Dejoy over possible DeJoy’s meeting calendar—including whether it might contain records of any conflicts of interest—and the congresswoman remarked aloud about the possibility of a subpoena if the Postmaster General would not provide such information voluntarily:

Here's @AOC suggesting lawmakers subpoena Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over possible conflicts of interest. A subpoena was just issued by the House Oversight Committee. pic.twitter.com/Fjf0MOHvXv

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) September 2, 2020

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said on social media that DeJoy, given adequate and repeated warnings, had no reason to be surprised the subpoena was issued:

If the USPS is surprised we are issuing a subpoena, it’s because they weren’t listening.

I said directly in the hearing that if DeJoy didn’t quickly hand over documents, we should issue a subpoena.

They knew the consequences of stalling. Now, where‘s his unaltered calendar? https://t.co/raNrSytmz6

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 2, 2020

“They knew the consequences of stalling,” she stated. “Now, where’s his unaltered calendar?”

New Guinea singing dogs, renowned for their ethereal howls, are no longer believed to be extinct

Human activity on Earth has led to a surge in extinctions, which is what makes it so exciting that the New Guinea Singing Dog, which scientists have thought for decades only survived in captivity, may still survive in the wild after all. The singing dogs, which can breed with domesticated dogs and are closely related to Dingos, are beloved for their ethereal, choral howls.

The study, which was published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the genetic material of a population of canids known as highland wild dogs that were discovered in the New Guinea highlands. These dogs howled in ways that sounded an awful lot like the New Guinea Singing Dogs of the past, even though the species has not been seen outside of inbred zoo populations and the occasional exotic pet collection since the 1950s. Scientists became intrigued in 2012 after an ecotourism guide photographed an animal that looked like a New Guinea Singing Dog and, by 2018, a researcher was able to collect DNA samples from three specimens (two temporarily trapped dogs and a third one that had died).

The DNA results came back, and provided scientists with good news: These were not ordinary village dogs that had wandered away from their homes, but were direct relatives of New Guinea Singing Dogs. To be exact, the wild dogs shared a 72 percent genetic similarity with New Guinea Singing Dogs that are held in captivity — and that genetic diversity among the wild dogs is probably a good thing, since all of the captive dogs are descended from seven or eight wild ancestors.

This news has major implications for how scientists and the general public can understand dogs.

“These dogs form a group with Dingos that appear to have separated from the ancestors of the average breed dog long before breeds were created,” Dr. Heidi G. Parker, a co-author of the study who works at the Dog Genome Project for the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, told Salon by email. “They may represent one of the earliest forms of dogs.”

She added that our new information about New Guinea Singing Dogs may shed new light on the domesticated dog breeds that so many people know and love.

“Studying this group of dogs may help us establish a timeline for the development of the modern breed types that are so popular now,” Parker explained. “Not when the breeds were created but when the modern types of dogs became abundant.”

Parker expressed cautious hope that the New Guinea Singing Dogs could be revived.

“We don’t know enough right now about the size of the remaining population and how diverse it is. We hope that this will increase interest in these dogs and in preserving them,” Parker told Salon.

Salon also spoke with James McIntyre, director of field research at the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, who conducted all of the field research involved in the study. He explained that New Guinea Singing Dogs are very different from the domesticated variety to which so many of us have grown accustomed.

“if you looked at it from a relative distance, you would say, ‘Oh, that’s a dog,’ but if you were to get a little bit closer, there’s something very unique about it,” McIntyre told Salon. “And you would probably ask somebody, ‘Hey, what kind of dog is that?’ Because there is something that is unique to them that you don’t see and haven’t seen. And a lot of it is the way their eyes are set and that all these dogs are extremely intelligent, athletic, flexible. They have a very strong predatory urge.”

After noting that it takes a “special kind of person” to keep one of these dogs in their home, McIntyre elaborated that “they don’t come when they’re called. And like I said, they’re very predatory, so you don’t want to have a little Shih Tzu or your cat out when this dog gets out. It’s just their nature. They’re highly predatory. They’re more cat-like in their intelligence and disposition than they are like a dog, and in their athletic ability they’re almost somewhere between a monkey and a cat than they would be a dog. They’re extremely agile.”

Study co-author Dr. Elaine Ostrander told Salon that scientists had believed that the dogs were extinct in the wild for half a century.

“So the punchline is that people thought New Guinea Singing Dogs were extinct in the wild and this study shows that they, in fact, are not,” Ostrander, an American geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, told Salon by email. “This changes what we thought about dogs. We know that New Guinea Singing Dogs have not been seen in the wild for over 50 years. The only ones that we knew existed are in conservation centers and are derived from very small numbers of founders many decades ago. Those dogs are losing genetic diversity.”

Ostrander said the discovery of a wild population gives hope that the species can be prevented from suffering a genetic bottleneck, both in the wild and in captivity. “The discovery that the Highland Wild Dogs are the original New Guinea Singing Dog give us hope that we can restore the breed/species to its previous genetic status and diversity,” Ostrander said.

There have been other intriguing studies of canid genetics to come out in 2020. A study in June published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B revealed that London foxes could be unintentionally self-domesticating because of their close proximity to human beings. The physical signs included urban foxes having wider snout tips and smaller brain cases. Later that same month, a study published in the journal Science found that sled dogs like Alaskan Malamutes, Siberian Huskies and Greenland sledge dogs are genetically connected to an Arctic dog from roughly 9,500 years ago. This more than tripled the length of time that scientists believed sled dogs had been around.

Polling place bottleneck delays could begin soon after they open

For the estimated 50 million Americans who will vote at a polling place this fall, delays and long lines will likely surface sooner than in past presidential elections—America’s highest turnout elections—because of challenges due to COVID-19, according to election logistics experts.

“When do bottlenecks occur?” asked Charles Stewart III, the MIT director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, after noting that 50 million voters would likely cast ballots at polling places this fall. “There comes a point, it’s when you reach 80-to-90 percent of [what] the theoretical capacity is, that the lines just go through the roof.”

Stewart was speaking at a Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) briefing that sought to promote new planning tools that local election officials could still use to try to prevent bottlenecks this fall. While 80 million or more voters will likely cast mailed-out ballots, those voting in person will face COVID-related constraints that will slow down the process when it gets busy.

“Bottlenecks appear for a variety of reasons,” Stewart said. “Sometimes they appear because you’ve had emergencies… There are three big parameters. How fast do people arrive? How long does it take to serve people? How many places can you serve them?”

The pandemic has forced election officials to rethink how they handle polling place voting. Many have had to find new locations that are large enough to accommodate social distancing concerns and require fewer poll workers. That constraint has meant closing many longtime neighborhood precincts and opening voting centers in public schools and libraries, said Michael Vu, the registrar of voters in San Diego County, California.

Even though three-quarters of the county’s 1.8 million voters will vote with absentee ballots as they have in recent elections, Vu said that the pandemic forced his staff to consolidate its 1,600 neighborhood polling stations into 235 “super polls” and take other steps, such as doubling the drop-box locations for absentee ballots and having four consecutive days to vote in person that end on Election Day, November 3. These steps will be accompanied by “the most robust” public education campaign, he said. Still, Vu had worries.

“The biggest uncertainty is voters,” he said. “How will voters behave on Election Day? Will they vote their mail ballot in the high numbers that we need them to, to really not spread the virus if they go to their respective [in-person polling] location?”

Gretchen Macht, a University of Rhode Island mechanical, industrial, and systems engineering assistant professor, recommended that election officials use familiar polling places that are spacious—like public school gyms—if they can. She showed new precinct layout software that officials could use to map how voting equipment could be set up to accommodate voter traffic.

Juan Gilbert, the University of Florida chair of the computer and information science and engineering department, described a free ticketing software system that he created that could be easily used by poll workers to expedite the check-in process.

The BPC’s briefing was to alert election officials about new tools to configure polling places. That discussion revealed that the fall’s in-person voting would have a range of new elements for voters, which usually slows down the process. The experts cited other factors that could prompt bottlenecks akin to rush-hour traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere.

“We have examples like this, a recent executive order of the governor of Maine restricting in-person polling places in that state to no more than 50 people at any one time,” Stewart said. “We are going to have a substantial number of people voting in person. Those in-person voting places are going to be constrained. Officials managing polling places need a plan.”

The experts urged election officials to get specific with estimating how fast voters would arrive and how long it would take for checking voters in, ballot-marking, and preparation of the voting station for the next voter. They recommended having real voters take part in mock exercises.

But what emerged beyond the planning and tools discussed was a big warning for this fall’s in-person voters. They should expect delays, especially if they arrive during the highest-traffic periods, which tend to be before and after work.

The BPC briefing underscored that Michelle Obama was not exaggerating when she cautioned during the opening night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention that it may take longer to vote this fall, especially in person on Election Day—remarks that some officials said were a bit too dire. Obama also advised people to vote with an absentee ballot or to vote in person at an early voting site, thus making Election Day voting their last resort.

“We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received,” Obama said. “We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.”

Election 2020: Turning point for democracy — or horror-movie sequel about an unkillable demon?

Among the various inaccurate things my father told me about American politics was the truism that presidential campaigns began on Labor Day. If only, right? In our near-psychotic media dystopia, political campaigning never ends and, indeed, to a large degree has taken the place of actual governing, especially under President You Know Who.

Still, something feels different as we turn the corner into fall. To borrow a strange construction the New York Times used on Sunday, “the campaign enters an intense phase,” as if it were a natural phenomenon like a hurricane, moving and changing without human intervention. To put it another way, quoting the final hit song from the late Leonard Cohen, you want it darker?

I suppose the truism about no electioneering before Labor Day was a little bit true, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. In my dad’s version it was an inflexible article of the gentlemanly code of political combat, vaguely akin to the standing eight-count or the way boxers used to touch gloves before the final round. After the party conventions — according to my dad’s mythology — Americans took a break from politics in late summer, gathering at beach fronts or mountain getaways to soothe the national soul with Hamm’s beer and supermarket barbecue sauce. It was a tradition even scumbags and Republicans were obliged to observe.

My father didn’t live to see the advent of the two-year-long presidential campaign (conservatively speaking) or the endless regurgitation of political gossip on cable news, both of which I suspect he would have perceived as signs of tragic moral decay. In the last presidential campaign of his life, Michael Dukakis took the summer off, confident he had built an insurmountable lead over George H.W. Bush. That was surely the beginning of the end.

Even so, my dad couldn’t have imagined the election of a president who gleefully announced that there were no rules — in effect, that rules were for “losers” and “suckers” — and who was openly contemptuous of everything from the codes and norms of political discourse to the rule of law and the Constitution itself. If the world my dad was describing wasn’t exactly real, and had been conjured up to conceal certain uncomfortable truths about power and inequality, many Americans of his generation — and well after that — found its supposed rituals reassuring. That mid-century conception that politics was a manly, bare-knuckle brawl which nonetheless had clear rules of engagement is almost exactly what Joe Biden is selling in 2020.

Biden has clearly been counseled to stop talking about a return to “normalcy” or about Donald Trump’s presidency as an “aberrant moment” in the upbeat tale of American progress, but that’s evidently what he wants and what he believes. It would be nonsensical to claim that the Labor Day holiday, in this year of all years, marks any meaningful launch or relaunch of the presidential campaign: We have known who the two nominees would be since older Democratic voters rallied around Biden’s flailing campaign in early March, and since then the Trump-Biden contest has unfolded in dramatic and intensely symbolic fashion, across a spring and summer that has seen nearly 190,000 Americans die and the largest outbreak of urban protests and rioting since the late 1960s.

Nobody in America got much of a break this summer, from anything — I don’t know how much “summer” you had, but I feel like I barely noticed it coming or going. Nobody reading this who has kids anywhere from pre-K to grad school needs me to tell them that the normal rhythms of fall are completely disrupted as well. But as that Times blurb I cited above makes clear, Labor Day in 2020 still signals an unmistakable shift, with eight weeks to go till Election Day. It has turned up the dread, the feeling of being caught in a repeating nightmare you can’t escape. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it.

For a great many Americans, probably close to a majority, this entire campaign has been driven by alternating currents of hope and fear. There is the hope that the corruption, incompetence, bigotry and unfocused evil of the Trump presidency can be replaced by something better, or at least by something less dire. There is the fear that an awful, gibbering darkness has been unleashed at the heart of our nation, and that the entire American experiment is being sucked into a downward spiral toward autocracy and self-destruction.

I could try to tell you — and in fact I believe this — that the choice between Trump and Biden in November probably isn’t the world-historical turning point it appears to be. (Either way, immense damage has been done that cannot be repaired anytime soon.) I can try to tell you — as I have previously argued, and still believe — that Trump is almost certainly doomed, and his recent behavior indicates that he knows that, after his own limited fashion. No incumbent president can plausibly survive this much bad news in anything close to a fair election, and if standard Republican-style vote-suppression tactics aren’t enough, Trump has neither the courage nor the institutional support to stage a full-on coup.

But dispassionate analysis aside, I won’t try to convince you that I don’t feel the dread, born of PTSD from the 2016 election and the reasonable or unreasonable terror — bordering on nightmare-scenario certainty — that it will happen again. The dread is real and it’s all around us, getting thicker with every twitch and flutter of the Pennsylvania polls and the London betting markets. Reason and logic cannot dispel it, both because dread by definition is impervious to those things and also because it was never reasonable or logical that Donald Trump would be elected president in the first place, and that event seemed to snap the tether that connected us to empirical reality.

In this fear-disordered view of the universe, Donald Trump does not appear to be a creature subject to reason or logic. He’s more like the demonic entity in a horror narrative — Cthulhu or Candyman or Freddy Krueger or Vigo the Carpathian — who gains more power over you, and becomes more real, the more you think about him.

If those fictional creations have cultural or psychological or perhaps even metaphysical explanations, so does Donald Trump. If they are best understood as bits and pieces of leftover diabolical theology, or as metaphors for mental illness — well, so is Donald Trump.

There is no question that Trump feeds on attention, positive or negative, and delights in the anguish and anxiety of his enemies. That’s been obvious from the beginning, when he rode down that now-legendary escalator and launched a campaign that was always more about speaking the unspeakable than about any specific ideas or proposals. But no one has been able to resist his hypnotic allure, and it does no good to blame “the media” or to claim that if the news networks hadn’t begun airing his campaign rallies live, the entire Trump enterprise would have dried up and blown away.

That was also a circular, “Call of Cthulhu” phenomenon, with no beginning, no ending and a magical, self-reinforcing quality. Media focused on Trump because the audience wanted more Trump, and in defiance of all known laws of the media universe, the more Trump they delivered, the more the audience wanted. Salon’s core readership officially despises Trump, of course, and I can testify after years of back-and-forth experimentation that it remains challenging to persuade them (sorry, that would be you) to read about anything else.

I’m not claiming that Trump does not exist, or that there’s no mathematical possibility he could be re-elected. If his 2016 campaign “drew to an inside straight,” to use the poker metaphor I’ve heard many times, and won an election in statistically improbable fashion, that unlikely event is no less likely the second time around.

I’m saying that Trump’s demonic power does not exist, or to be more precise that it’s something we invented — all of us, the media and the public, his fans and his haters — and vested in him, for mysterious but deeply troubling reasons. We have known from the beginning that Trump was a showman and a con man, doing a transparent act that all of us could see through, in different ways and from different perspectives. (His supporters delight in his performance, to be sure, but I have always believed it’s a profound categorical error to conclude that they’re a bunch of ignorant rubes who take the things he says literally.)

If Trump’s act “worked,” in the sense that he successfully devoured an inbred and decrepit political party and won a flukish, “inside straight” election, that happened because some of us desperately wanted it to and the rest of us desperately feared it might. That’s the Candyman-Cthulhu effect in action, or an illustration of the psychological truism that every fear hides a wish. The really difficult question America must answer, not just right now but over the long haul, is not whether or how we can make Donald Trump go away. The answer to that is obvious. The real question is why we needed him in the first place.

Big Pharma insists it can police itself on COVID-19 vaccine

Amid growing concerns that the Trump administration is moving to bypass normal and crucial safety protocols in a rush to approve a Covid-19 vaccine ahead of the November election, the CEO of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. is insisting that the American public can trust the for-profit drug industry to police itself when it comes to developing a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine.

In an interview with Axios that aired Monday night, Eli Lilly chairman and CEO David Ricks said the pharmaceutical industry is “not going to make something or we’re not going to sell it until we’ve proven to our own standards it’s safe and effective, subjected it to scientific scrutiny from the outside world”—a promise one watchdog group dismissed as “like the wolf saying he’ll guard the henhouse.”

“The revolving door between the drug industry and the Trump administration has been spinning so fast that it’s hard to see where the interests of one end and the other begins,” Eli Zupnick, spokesperson for Accountable Pharma, said in a statement. “The public needs to be able to trust that decisions for the vaccine development process are being based on science and public health, and drug company self-policing simply isn’t good enough.”

Ricks, who is also the chairman-elect of PhRMA—a massive pharmaceutical lobbying group—said it would indeed be “very concerning” if drug companies were making decisions about potential Covid-19 treatments and vaccines based on “non-medical or scientific” considerations. But Ricks denied that’s the case, even as public health experts are warning that the Trump White House is actively skirting safety regulations and politicizing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for electoral purposes.

“I think our industry has an interest in preserving that as an objective process,” said Ricks, whose company is currently working with—and receiving funding from—the federal government as the pharma giant runs a Phase 3 clinical trial for a potential coronavirus treatment.

Ricks’ remarks come days after FDA chief Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times that his agency would be willing to authorize a Covid-19 vaccine even prior to the completion of Phase 3 clinical trials—but insisted that it would not do so solely to appease the president.

As Common Dreams reported Monday, Hahn’s comments drew swift backlash from scientists and public health experts. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, tweeted that “we absolutely cannot tolerate or accept an emergency authorization for any Covid-19 vaccine without reliable safety and efficacy data from Phase 3 clinical trials.”

Bypassing established safety procedures in the interest of speed, warned Rasmussen, “would place huge numbers of people at risk for massive potential harm.”

“A world beyond fear”: Netflix’s “Away” questions the pull of Earthbound politics in space

The first American flag planted on the moon in 1969 may have been blown over by the Apollo 11 exhaust, but that visual, with the spaceman standing alongside, still stands tall in our imaginations. It inspired some of the first images shown during the birth of MTV and even the network’s award statuettes. It’s also an image that probably stuck in the craw of every country that wanted to get there first.

On Netflix’s space drama “Away,” astronaut Dr. Lu Wang (Vivian Wu) was slated to be that person for Mars. Although the Atlas mission is a joint initiative involving five countries, China had negotiated for Lu to step foot on Martian soil first, plant the country’s flag, and snap a photo of herself saluting it proudly. That would be the first picture sent back to Earth, an image of excellence and nationalism.

“We established from the first episode that she would be the first person on Mars and what she was carrying for her country and for the world because of that was something that I wanted to explore – the full weight of that,” series creator Andrew Hinderaker told Salon.

“Away” establishes how the pull of Earthbound politics is strong from the start, even when the show’s writers were sitting down to decide which countries to represent on the mission. Lu is the chemist from China, Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir) from Russia, Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh) from England, Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki) from India, and Emma Green (Hilary Swank) from the USA.

“Now, of course, the the idea of the U.S. and China working together right now is an impossibility and fraught, but the general consensus was if we’re ever going to go to Mars, the the most powerful space programs would have to find a way to work together,” said Hinderaker.

“And so that really means the most likely were the U.S., China, Russia, and ESA, the European Space Agency. And then India is gaining such a foothold in space and really becoming a powerful player in space. And of course we wanted to show that our international crew was . . . reflecting a larger diversity.”

The series, which was inspired by Chris Jones’ detailed article on space also titled “Away,” isn’t just science fiction because it imagines where spaceflight has yet to take us, but for also speculating on what happens when Earth politics are pushed aside, at least by five astronauts alone on a planet all to themselves. Over the course of 10 episodes and many potentially mission-ending mechanical difficulties, the crew of the Atlas come together just before touchdown, embracing what they once rejected in each other, whether it’s religion, sexuality, sentiment or even disability.

Misha’s eyesight began to fail – many astronauts on longterm flights experience visual impairment, among other issues – which he tried to hide initally, angering the crew for endangering their lives. Later however, as he adjusted to that visual deterioration by using his other senses, that inspired Lu to think of other ways to “see.” When Mission Control lost all communication with Pegasus, the capsule of essential supplies that was supposed to land on Mars ahead of them, she used the InSight rover’s seismometer to “see” with sound. A telltale sonic boom indicates that Pegasus had indeed breached Mars’ atmosphere, saving the mission.

In the end, China may have gotten the photo they wanted had they not at first stipulated that Lu’s reflective visor should be pulled down, hiding her face. “I do not exist. I only exit if the motherland exists,” Lu laments upon receiving the instructions. After trying and failing to use the promised photo as leverage to get her girlfriend reinstated at Mission Control, it was a foregone conclusion that Lu would rebel against orders in some way, especially after Misha commiserates with her.

“Motherland is just an idea. Borders don’t exist,” he says. “The only thing that matters is the people you love. What you owe them, you’ve already paid. And if they’re not proud of who you really are they’re just stupid fools.”

Encapsulating the new world order, at least for Mars, the photo Lu sends back shows her with her visor up, along with the four other astronauts all showing their smiling faces. No flag is present.

“That photo was inspired by when showrunner Jessica Goldberg, Chris Jones and I went to Jet Propulsion Laboratory watching InSight, which is not a rover as in the show, but a probe. We got to be there with the people who designed that probe watching in real time, and this this thing was going to either burn up or not,” said Hinderaker.

“There was the moment of the intensity of that the elation when it landed successfully, but then the moment when InSight sent back the first image, this dust-speckled image of a different planet, we all just started bursting into tears. Chris turned to me and said, ‘Now imagine if there had been people in it.’ And so I knew that it would end with a photo at that point. And then when writing the episode, I remember a light bulb moment of thinking, ‘Okay, I know what the photo is going to be.'”

Despite all the challenges the crew faced, Hinderaker always knew he wanted to get the Atlas to Mars by the end of the series.

“I knew that from the moment the show was pitched it would start with Emma looking back at Earth from the moon and end with her looking back at Earth from Mars,” he said. “I hope that we can have future seasons. But I wanted to approach it as, ‘What if this is all you get? What is the image you want to be the world?’ So the photograph they sent back is how I wanted it to end.”

All filming on “Away” had already completed by the time our world went on lockdown, so much of the editing and post-production occurred during quarantine. It’s too early to tell if “Away” will get another season, and even if it’s ordered, there’s no knowing when it could possibly start shooting safely. Although some of Hollywood has opened up, already one A-list actor had tested positive for coronavirus putting a halt to shooting.

Regardless, Hinderaker has already started thinking about what the future could hold for the crew of the Atlas. From Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” to Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” humanity has been fixated with the idea of establishing a life on the Red Planet for decades. A possible Season 2 – and beyond – holds many scientific and sociological possibilities.

“By going to Mars, not only might we discover where life came from or that life still exists, or how Mars became the way it became, and that will tell us what could happen to Earth, but it’s the idea that those might not even be the most important discoveries we make. That there are discoveries we can’t even fathom, that you’re participating in the kind of exploration that allows you to understand that the Earth isn’t flat – to most of us,” said Hinderaker.

“We ended the show with that image of the five of them, and it’s very conscious that there’s not a flag there. Kwesi gives a prayer before they go down that ends with, ‘Let us discover a world beyond fear.’

“What does that mean? What does that look like? What is this world that we need in many ways right now, a world that’s better in some fundamental way, a society that’s better? I think that’s something that is really exciting to think about that feels mythic.”

Trump hired an Obama impersonator to yell at and “fire,” according to Michael Cohen’s book

More revelations about Donald Trump continue to come out from Michael Cohen’s forthcoming book “Disloyal: A Memoir.”

On Saturday evening, The Washington Post revealed details from Cohen’s tell-all book after obtaining a copy. CNN also obtained a copy and reported on the portions discussing Trump’s fixation with President Barack Obama.

“Before Donald Trump ever sought the Oval Office, he was preoccupied by its occupant President Barack Obama, publicly questioning his birthplace and privately describing him as ‘a Manchurian candidate’ who obtained his Ivy League degrees only by way of affirmative action, according to a new book by Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen,” CNN reported.

CNN added a shocking detail, “Trump’s disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a ‘Faux-Bama’ to participate in a video in which Trump ‘ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him.'”

Cohen included a photo of the Obama impersonator in his book.

NEW: In upcoming book, Michael Cohen writes Donald Trump's disdain for Obama was so extreme he hired a "Faux-Bama" to participate in a video in which he "ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him." He includes this photo: https://t.co/LGrqsUUrY2 pic.twitter.com/otwYW8VSmQ

— Pervaiz Shallwani (@Pervaizistan) September 6, 2020

Remote learning is turning classrooms into police states

Think of your favorite teacher. Whenever I ask people to do this, they usually tell me about a teacher who saw them: the one who took them aside and encouraged them to pursue art or computer science, who helped counsel them through a personal issue, who attended their Quinceañera — who, ultimately, just cared. By connecting with us in meaningful ways, these teachers not only earned a permanent place in our memories, they also engaged, challenged, and inspired us. Today, our nation’s 56.6 million elementary and secondary students could all use teachers like this, to help shepherd them through the pandemic and into a better future. But even in the best of times, school structures are more conducive to punitive discipline than meaningful teacher-student relationships, especially in our least-resourced schools. Today, with the challenges of virtual learning and the urgent messaging around “COVID slide” – the learning loss students may have suffered while they were out of school – relationships in schools are under further threat, just when students need them most.

Across the U.S., the pandemic has put a strain on families and children, many of whom continue to suffer from food insecurity, job loss, or the death of loved ones to COVID-19. So as kids begin school this year, they require connection, understanding, and nurturance from their teachers. While positive relationships with significant adult figures like teachers help children cope with trauma, such relationships also facilitate better learning. When students have meaningful relationships with their teachers, they are more likely to engage in class, more likely to feel like they can complete their school work, more likely to grow and achieve academically and personally. This is because learning is profoundly social.

Although school should be a place to nurture social connections, especially between teachers and students, common policies and structures often undermine this. Budget cuts keep increasing class sizes, which makes it hard for teachers to see and know every student. The prevailing emphasis on standardized test scores often leads schools to prioritize control and punishment to keep students on task, instead of supporting their social and emotional development. Now, educators are feeling pressure to combat “COVID slide,” which will lead to more focus on test scores and control, particularly in schools serving students of color and those from low income backgrounds. And in many places, this schooling will happen remotely, eliminating most of the casual classroom interactions that bolster meaningful connections. Disciplinary actions may become the only individual interactions that some students have with their teachers, but better resourced schools with less test score pressure (most of which serve a predominantly white population) will have an advantage in maintaining meaningful connections.

When I spent two years studying how teacher education programs and schools approached teacher-student relationship development, I discovered two very different approaches. Only one of the models promoted truly meaningful relationships. It was a program anchored in a progressive independent school that I called Xanadu because it was far removed from public school realities like standardized tests, budget cuts, and large class sizes. On this pastoral campus, student teachers learned to cultivate relationships like precious flowers, learning about students’ hopes, family situations, strengths, fears, and interests so they could nurture the growth of each student through individualized instruction. The assistant director of the program told me that they aimed to treat “students as humans before treating them as students, thinking of them as whole beings who are forming and… are fragile no matter what they may show us.”

I followed two graduates from this program into large public middle schools in affluent suburbs and watched as they capably implemented what they learned. Both teachers spent the first couple weeks collectively establishing class norms through the ratification of a class compact and getting to know students through reflective assignments. They regularly conversed with individual students and delivered handwritten personalized cards to everyone on their birthday, which one student described as “the best birthday card I’ve ever seen.” Cooperative learning was the norm and throughout it, students boisterously engaged with peers to complete rigorous assignments. Silence was rare. If undesirable student behavior emerged, these teachers ignored it or addressed it through gentle conversations rather than punitive discipline. This made the students feel “safe” because they felt able to “speak your mind and have your ideas be respected.” And students told me they felt cared for, “not just in school, but like emotionally, too.” But it is worth noting, that all the teachers who learned about relationships at Xanadu chose to teach at mostly affluent and white schools where they had more resources and autonomy, and less pressure to boost test scores. This relational ideal is often reserved for already privileged students, who will likely continue to find this support amidst the pandemic.

Schools across the country that primarily serve students of color and those from low-income backgrounds often adopt an approach to learning that centers on standardized test scores and control. For example, the other teacher education program in my study was situated in a “no excuses” charter school, the most prominent type of urban charter school (think KIPP or Success Academy), which aim to efficiently improve the academic achievement of children of color from low income backgrounds by eliminating anything they feel might distract students from learning (e.g. colorful socks, poor posture, indirect eye contact, talking in hallways).

At schools like this, educators maintain that there is no valid excuse for children’s failure to learn or behave. The teacher education program grounded in this context approached relationships like a formula: applying a series of discrete moves to accumulate “professional relationship capital” with students to increase their behavioral compliance and academic achievement. The director explained, “I think the foundation of the relationship is that my job is to try to generate maximum effort in thinking from you. That’s my job. It’s not to be your friend.”

Again, I followed graduates of this program into their first year of teaching at no excuses middle schools that primarily served students of color. These teachers also began the year by faithfully applying what they had learned about connecting with and disciplining students. They walked around their classrooms with timers in hand, smoothly assigned merits and demerits for behavior, integrated “little nuggets” they had recalled about students into brief interactions with them, and conducted “rebuilding conversations” after removing students from their class for infractions. It was all very efficient and controlled. Students were often silent, and hoped this approach would help them “succeed.” But they did not feel truly seen or understood as human beings by their teachers. One student explained, “I don’t think any of the teachers [know us].” And by the end of the year, one of these teachers admitted, “I think a lot of the kids sort of feel like it’s run like a jail…They’re very smart kids, and they understand that some of our rules are unnecessary, and overly strict, and un-empathetic.” The urgent insistence on academic achievement and behavioral conformity in these schools not only eroded opportunities for nurturing teacher-student relationships, it also conditioned students for subservience. This might be why some research indicates no excuses schools improve student test scores, but not life outcomes.

No excuses schools are not alone in this approach, though, and it now seems to be extending to virtual school. Desperate to counteract COVID-slide, educators are implementing plans to monitor and control student behavior during virtual class, including their attire, location, camera-use, attentiveness, and snacking. This is unfortunate but not surprising, because whenever the focus of schooling turns to quantifiable educational outcomes like standardized test scores or budgetary efficiencies, students are treated like products that must be regulated. Of course, humans are not products, and we all have very good excuses not to be performing as others may want us to right now, but the forces that govern schools don’t seem to get that. Because affluent and white students are more likely to attend schools with the resources to support meaningful relationships and less likely to be penalized for virtual or in-person violations, students of color will bear the brunt of this coming “discipline crisis,” which is really a crisis for relationships. For while relationships connect children to teachers and schools, harsh discipline severs ties.

Despite common practice, academic rigor does not necessitate behavioral control; in fact, deeper learning – the kind of that helps students learn to solve complex problems, think for themselves, and understand who they are and who they want to be – is facilitated by supportive relationships and inclusive community. Like relationships, learning that is truly substantial often appears messy and chaotic rather than silent and efficient. So while it is tempting to use COVID as an excuse to implement more discipline and test prep, we must instead use it as an opportunity to dismantle systems that do disproportionate harm to students of color and replace them with new structures that center relationships and serve the whole child. Whether online or in-person, schools must support teachers to see and respond to all students as the unique multifaceted people they are. Because the only effective way to shepherd children through difficult times is by caring for them. In the long run, this will not only improve student learning, it will also prepare students to build a better society — in which everyone’s humanity is honored.