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Doctor retweeted by President Trump asks Dr. Fauci for urine sample, warns of having sex with demons

President Donald Trump shared a video Monday featuring a Houston doctor who has claimed that some reproductive disorders are caused by dream sex with demons and witches, doctors use alien DNA to treat patients and scientists are developing a vaccine to destroy a gene in our brains that makes people become religious.

The doctor, Stella Immanuel, claimed in a phone call with Salon that she had met Tuesday with senators on Capitol Hill. She declined to reveal names, saying: “It’s not for publication. If it had been for publication, they would have told people.”

Salon’s calls to multiple Senate press offices went unreturned.

Speaking from the steps of the Supreme Court in the viral video, Immanuel declared that unproven anti-malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine, which Trump hawked for months as a so-called miracle cure, was so effective against COVID-19 that “you don’t need a mask.”

Immanuel also claimed in the video that the federal government, including top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, had maligned the drug — which at one point the president said he took daily — specifically to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.

“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure,” Immanuel said, falsely.

Immanuel earned her medical degree in Nigeria and is a registered physician in Texas. She founded Rehoboth Medical Services 11 months ago, which she runs in a suburban Houston strip mall next to her church, Firepower Ministries.

In a Facebook ad promoting her clinic, Immanuel asked all patients to cover their faces before entering. “Wear a mask, or a scarf or anything to cover your face,” she said.

Nonetheless, the viral video outperformed the coronavirus conspiracy precursor “Plandemic,” racking up tens of millions of views and catapulting Immanuel to MAGA-world internet fame.

Donald Trump Jr. shared the “must watch” video, followed by a separate retweet from the president. The videos were later removed from social media, and Twitter suspended the president’s eldest son for violating its rules about posting coronavirus misinformation.

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported Tuesday that Immanuel has a history of pushing fringe beliefs far more bizarre than these. In YouTube sermons, self-published books and articles on her website, Immanuel has pushed a number of outlandish, unscientific claims.

She says reproductive disorders, such as endometriosis, impotence, infertility and miscarriages, are consequences of sex with evil “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives,” biblical characters turned demons and witches who transform into humans and have sex with people in their dreams.

“They are responsible for serious gynecological problems,” Immanuel said in a 2013 sermon. “We call them all kinds of names — endometriosis. We call them molar pregnancies. We call them fibroids. We call them cysts. But most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband. They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence — men that can’t get it up.”

“They turn into a woman, and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” she added. “Then they turn into the man, and they sleep with a man, and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”

Immanuel theorizes that people sometimes might believe they are having sex in their dreams with a demonic spirit, when in reality they are having sex with a human witch.

“There are those that are called astral sex,” she said. “That means this person is not really a demon being or a nephilim. It’s just a human being that’s a witch, and they astral project and sleep with people.”

Immanuel claimed in another sermon that year that scientists had discovered what she characterized as some sort of gene in the brain that makes people religious — and were developing a vaccine to destroy it.

“They found the gene in somebody’s mind that makes you religious, so they can vaccinate against it,” Immanuel said.

In a 2015 sermon, Immanuel attempts to describe a unified theory about a global Illuminati takeover, which includes such claims as:

  • a witch wants to destroy the world through abortion and gay marriage;
  • doctors use DNA from space aliens as a medical treatment;
  • popular books and TV shows are part of a plot to indoctrinate children with witchcraft — such as Pokémon’s “Eastern demons” and Hannah Montana’s “alter ego,” which suggested the Disney show is a portal to hell; 
  • and the Magic 8-Ball is a trick to get children to practice dark arts.

That sermon also proposes a belief popular among fringe conspiracy theorists: that “reptilians” run parts of the government. She supports this by claiming to have spoken with a “half-human, half-E.T.” spirit.

The video’s widespread backlash did not cow Immanuel, who publicly “double dog dared” CNN anchors and Fauci to provide her with urine samples to prove they weren’t taking hydroxychloroquine.

Immanuel warned that Jesus Christ would take down Facebook in a tweet, which as of this writing has more than 18,000 likes.

The strip-mall minister-physician has not let her flash of fame pass her by. In addition to scheduling the alleged Senate meetings, shortly before midnight Monday she pitched the president on a White House meeting.

Are protesters getting sprayed with expired tear gas? If so, that’s not good

As federal law enforcement officers dispatched to Portland continue to spray protesters with tear gas, activists and observers have gained insight into the specific types of tear gas being used to harm them. It turns out that some of the tear gas being used comes from expired cans, or contains chemicals that some allege cause reproductive health problems. 

Indeed, reports abound of expired tear gas canisters discovered by activists, everywhere from Portland, Ore. to Cary, N.C. Experts are concerned that the gas may become more potent or dangerous if used after an expiration date, and note that little scientific testing has been done on expired gas.

“The fact that they have expiration dates makes it deeply concerning that they’re using expired tear gas,” Dr. Rohini J. Haar, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health who focuses on human rights issues, told Salon. “It’s really difficult to know what the breakdown products are because manufacturers are not transparent about what exactly is in those canisters — the solvent, the combustibles and all of that.” After noting that there is no evidence about whether expired tear gas is more or less dangerous, Haar argued that the bigger problem is that we do not know what is in the canisters in the first place.

“I think some transparency about what chemicals are in there would give us some insight into how they break down and what the degradation products are. We don’t have that information,” Haar explained.

Anecdotal evidence from those exposed to tear gas suggest that it might cause reproductive health problems for people with uteruses, including missed periods and even miscarriages. A health group associated with the Portland protests recently posted stories protesters experiencing reproductive health problems after exposure to tear gas. A report in Teen Vogue chronicled a number of cases in which people with uteruses claimed to menstruate after being exposed to tear gas, regardless of when their first period occurred. The people making these claims include members of the trans community who said that this happened despite taking testosterone, and an Ohio protester named Charlie Stewart whose period was so severe that they could not go to work.

Writing in The Nation in 2014, Michelle Golberg noted that Chile temporarily suspended the use of tear gas in 2011 “after a University of Chile study linked it to miscarriage and fetal harm.” She added: “Investigating the use of tear gas in Bahrain in 2012, Physicians for Human Rights found that local doctors were reporting increased numbers of miscarriages in exposed areas. And UN officials have connected tear gas to miscarriages in the Palestinian territories.”

Previously, Scientific American interviewed a Duke University professor of anesthesiology who claimed that more miscarriages were reported among pregnant women exposed to tear gas during the Arab Spring. Rewire News reported that some protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest claimed not to have gotten their period for an entire year after being gassed multiple times. 

Yet the consensus among the scientific and medical community is that the relationship between tear gas and reproductive health is under-researched. Indeed, two doctors who spoke to Salon expressed cautious skepticism about the potential reproductive consequences of tear gas exposure.

“While there are well-documented severe injuries and deaths from chemical irritants, there is scant rigorous experimental or epidemiological research into the impacts of tear gas on pregnancy-related outcomes,” Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights and professor of public health and internal medicine at University of Michigan, told Salon in a written statement. “That being said, despite the lack of research, we know that tear gas is inherently indiscriminate and law enforcement should only use this crowd-control weapon as an absolute last resort, when all methods of peaceful resolution have been exhausted. Pregnant women, as well as anyone with underlying health conditions, should also exercise caution in situations where chemical irritants may be deployed.”

Haar expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think it’s really important to hear women’s voices and listen to what they’re reporting about their own experiences, but there is scant medical evidence to prove that,” Haar told Salon when asked about the concerns about reproductive health issues. “I’d be concerned about saying anything else because there are significant risks to making these kinds of claims without really justifying them, particularly if you’re a woman and especially in other countries, or if if you’re not totally liberated and women are being intimidated away from protesting.”

“Frontline: United States of Conspiracy” shows how Alex Jones conquered the truth

It is more likely that you know an Alex Jones true believer in 2020 than might have been the case in 2016. The really scary part is, that person might not even consider him or herself a Jones fan despite believing in a lie, or several, that Jones is responsible for hurling into the larger public sphere.

But thanks to Jones and people like him, large portions of the public refuse to believe in basic facts. They will, however, believe him and the people who parrot his lies and illogic, including our country’s current president and his political enablers. A Pew Research Center survey conducted from March 10-16, 2020, backs this up: nearly 30% of Americans believe the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab.

“United States of Conspiracy,” the latest “Frontline” hour from filmmaker Michael Kirk, could have been about any number of kooks or groups like QAnon responsible for injecting dangerous, unsubstantiated claims into the realm of mainstream discourse. In Jones, however, Kirk and his co-writer Michael Wiser have a personification of the insidious nature of channeling fringe belief into political weaponry.

Through InfoWars, Jones’ multimedia fear factory dedicating to chunking out endless crackpottery by way of podcasts, videos, and written hokum, Jones has a hand in blasting so many conspiracy theories far and wide and with such frequency that there’s simply no telling how many of them started with him.

Many didn’t but some of the most dangerous and harmful did, foremost among them being that notions that the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which took the lives of 20 children aged 6 and 7 in addition to six adult staffers, was faked. Mourning families appearing on camera to talk about their horrific loss were branded “crisis actors” by Jones, and his fans took that poisoned ball and ran with it.

How about the notion that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Or did you hear the one about Hillary Clinton being a pedophile trafficking children out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.? Jones was delighted to tell whoever would listen all about it. One man believed in the conspiracy theory that became known as “Pizzagate” so completely that he drove to the restaurant with an automatic weapon, intending to free the child captives that never in existed held in a basement that wasn’t there.

Within its concise 53 minutes the “Frontline” episode explains how Jones came to have such an outsized influence on American politics and how, with ample assistance from political operative cartoon-villain-come-to-life Roger Stone, he effectively took over the Republican party and infected all three branches of government. Stone was convicted in former special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation for lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.

A wide range of experts and people close to Jones help the filmmakers build the explanation of how this happened and more importantly the why of it, including his ex-wife Kelly Rebecca Nichols, former InfoWars video editor Rob Jacobson — and Stone, whose prison sentence was recently commuted by Donald Trump.

And really, the why is easy to explain in one word: fear.

“United States of Conspiracy” opens with a scene from an InfoWars episode at the moment the 2016 presidential election was decided, with Stone and Jones at the host’s desk getting drunk on champagne. From there it takes a brief look at Jones’ origins in Austin, Texas, where he was considered in the 1990s to be a part of the local color – just a hometown nutbar that nobody really took seriously, as Salon’s politics reporter Amanda Marcotte explained in a 2016 story published days before Trump was elected president.

Jones’ profile grew after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the blame for which Jones assigned to the United States government, as he did the Oklahoma City bombings and eventually the tragedy at Sandy Hook.

The ramifications of this heartless nonsense are still being experienced by the bereaved parents of these children – including Lenny Pozner, who lost his child Noah and who was harassed and threatened into hiding by Jones’ listeners. Despite remaining in danger to this day he appears in the hour, but hidden in shadow.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the seeds of these lies originally were planted by Jones, some loony 8chan poster, a white supremacist’s social media account or some poor soul muttering to himself on a street corner. We are living with the effects of his baseless rants because of Jones’ outsized influence, and Fox News hosts such as Steve Doocy or Trump are repeating them to cable audiences or on the White House lawn.

Jones stopped being a mere menace many years ago, but “United States of Conspiracy” turns up the volume on the alarm alerting us as to why it’s no longer enough to simply ignore him or the people who spout his lunacy.  It has moved from the fringe into the heart of our democracy. If you’ve been afraid to go to the grocery store for fear of encountering some defiantly unmasked mouth-breather lording over the produce section, rest assured that Jones has a hand in promoting that person’s behavior. Conspiracy theory is the pandemic that made the COVID-19 pandemic possible.

Politicians are all too happy to serve the bizarre brand of crazy that Jones concocts to minions looking for reasons to explain their unreasonable animus for policies and, more likely these days, people they don’t agree with or simply hate. Jones’ fabrications first found purchase with far right members the Congress and then the president himself, and for similar reasons. All of them are tapping into white male rage, general insecurities concerning their place in an evolving economy and old-fashioned racism and xenophobia. Jones is doing it to make money; politicians are doing it to stay in office and consolidate power.

An already wide distrust of the media has devolved in journalism containing inconvenient or unpleasant truths being branded as fake news. Natural disasters, mass shootings or acts of domestic terrorism are explained as “false flag” operations. Science is no longer trustworthy, and yet Jones has enough people believing in what he tells him that some will purchase supplements and toothpaste that he claims “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range.”

Four years ago we could have said, and indeed did say, that Alex Jones appeals to the worst parts of society. The fact that the worst of society is now front and center in the battle for our democracy makes “United States of Conspiracy” necessary and utterly sobering election season viewing.

“United States of Conspiracy” premieres Tuesday, July 28 at 10 p.m. on PBS member stations, or stream on PBS.org/frontline, on the PBS Video App and on YouTube.

“Last Chance U” director on Coach Beam’s “Yoda-like” wisdom & the Oakland team’s sacrifices

“Last Chance U,” the Netflix docuseries that takes an in-depth look at the challenges and victories of junior college (or JUCO) football players both on and off the field, has returned for a fifth and final season. 

Past seasons have gone inside programs at small schools in Scooba, Mississippi, and Independence, Kansas. But this season, creator and director Greg Whiteley — who also created and produced the fan-favorite series “Cheer” — introduces viewers to the football program at Laney College in Oakland, California. Playing in the rapidly gentrifying city presents unique challenges for the players, none of whom have on-campus housing or meal plans. 

To compensate, many work minimum wage jobs and live hours away from the practice field (or in their cars) to make ends meet in pursuit of their dreams — a stark contrast to day-to-day lives of student athletes who play for Division I schools. 

“I can tell you, having done this show for five years, I think that there is a sacrifice that is being made by student athletes that is both inspiring and heartbreaking,” Whiteley told Salon. 

He spoke with Salon about the emphasis on mental health stigma in the new season, Coach John Beam’s “Yoda-like” wisdom, and what’s coming next for the “Last Chance U” franchise. 

One of the things that I appreciate about “Last Chance U” — and then we saw this in “Cheer,” as well — is that you present the cities where these college programs are located as characters. As you set up in the series, Oakland is already something of a character in our culture, but could you talk some about the practical or real-life ways being in Oakland, with the ongoing gentrification, affects the players? 

So, according to the rules of the state of California, which, you know, Laney is a junior college football team that is part of the California JUCO system, they can’t provide any benefits to a student athlete that isn’t also available to non-student athletes. So if you’re just a student that isn’t playing a sport, you would receive any benefit that would be given to a football player or a basketball player, et cetera. 

So that means that all of the players we were filming — and this is the first time we’ve done this in five years — none of them had student housing. They weren’t living in dorms and they didn’t have any kind of a meal plan that was provided by the team. In previous years, practice would end and we would follow players back to their dorms, right? And we’d spend a lot of time there just filming them interacting with each other, doing what they do during off-football hours. At Laney, we spent a lot of time driving to where they live. 

And you hit upon it in your question. One of the other issues that was unique to this season was, because of the recent gentrification and development of the city of Oakland, a lot of the players, if not all the players that we were filming, could not afford to live near campus. So we were filming them taking the BART, borrowing a car, carpooling, driving an hour and a half or two hours to get to practice and get to school — and then an hour and a half or two hours getting home at night. While that was a unique challenge for us logistically, it was also something we were anxious to document as we’d never filmed the players having to make that kind of sacrifice before. 

I had read an interview wherein you talked about the levels of access you had to the coaches in the past seasons of “Last Chance U.” And you said of Coach Jason Brown from Independence Community College. “There was never a time in which I asked if we could film and he said no.” I was curious how John Beam compared with regards to level of access? How open was he to being filmed? 

He was the same. I can’t remember a single time in which he asked us not to film.

Oh, that’s great. Speaking of Independence Community College, that was a school where, when we’re introduced to the program, there weren’t a lot of expectations. Laney, however, was the No. 1 ranked junior college team in the country the year before you started filming. Did that impact what kind of stories you wanted to explore coming into this season? 

Well, with junior college, you lose all, or a lot, of your players every year. If you were the team that was one of the top teams in the nation last year, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be the top team in the nation this year. So, it really didn’t have much relevance with which players we would follow, which stories we would do. Every year that we’ve done this, it’s like you take a dry erase marker and you just sort of start from scratch — at least from a wins and losses perspective. 

Sure, that makes sense. There was this quote that John Beam had in the second or third episode, “Let’s find the hard way to win until we can find the easy way to win.” I feel like that kind of became a guiding principle for the season. Do you think that quote is indicative of who he is as a coach? 

I’m so glad that you highlighted that quote. I think you’re exactly right. That probably belongs on a poster. 

It totally does. I feel like I need to stick it above my desktop. 

Well, and it takes you awhile to think about, what does he mean by that? I think Coach Beam has been around long enough and he’s been coaching young men long enough that he recognizes the right buttons to push. He knows when to apply the gas pedal and when to maybe apply the brake. And I think Coach Buddy Stevens [from Season 1 and 2] and Jason Brown [from Season 3 and 4], they each had their strengths and weaknesses as coaches. But one of the differences with Coach Beam is just his experience. We filmed him in his 40th year of coaching and for somebody that’s been doing it for long, he has a remarkable degree of energy. I think there’s also a wily caginess to him — but I think it’s been born out of experience.

He’s just full of Yoda-like wisdom, just like that quote, that we saw him apply to kids week in and week out when we were filming. 

Speaking of his interactions with the kids, there are a lot of complex relationships highlighted in this season, but RJ and Coach Beam’s relationship was really interesting to me. I feel like there was this mutual desire for respect, but there was also a lot of palpable tension between them. What did you make of that tension? 

I never figured that one out. I asked both of them, what was up, and I’m not sure I ever got a satisfactory answer from either of them, but I noticed the same thing; it was impossible not to. It’s a head-scratcher to me. I don’t understand it. 

That’s interesting. Something else that really struck me this season was a thread throughout the third episode. It starts with Nu’u and Carlissa Harris, a social worker who works with the players. And she mentions therapy, and he responds, “Therapy, I never thought it was something real.” And then we hear from additional figures on the team — from Coach Beam to Dior — about mental health and therapy. Did you go into this season intentionally wanting to examine mental health stigma in sports? 

No, it just sort of presented itself and it was interesting. Coach Beam’s wife is a therapist, and so for Coach Beam, it’s a topic and a resource for him that he calls upon a lot. There’s a great scene in Season 5 in which one of our main players starts to have an anxiety attack. It’s perfectly understandable because he is living under a lot of pressure, and Coach Beam uses some techniques that his wife has given him and even, in one instance, puts the player on the phone with his wife just so she could offer some sort of comfort. 

It’s something we’ve never really explored quite in that way. I wonder if it is partly because in California, they’re probably more open to those kinds of resources in a way that in other parts of the country they might be reticent. You know, I think in Seasons 1 and 2, Brittany Wagner was kind of that person for a lot of the players we were filming. And I think in Seasons 3 and 4, Jason Brown was trying to be — other teachers were trying their hands at it, as well.

But it’s a volatile age, and so I think someone’s mental health is always part of the subtext. But you’re right, it came up a lot in Season 5, and it’s not something we would have anticipated. 

I really appreciated it. And something else that I appreciated as well is there is this scene where Nu’u is in Coach Beam’s office and the question comes up whether he’s afraid to leave Oakland if he ends up being recruited by a bigger, Division I program. Like his wife and kids and their entire support system is in Oakland, and it would mean totally starting over — and you kind of see his performance on the field flagging. Was this something you came across a lot while filming this series? 

You know, it’s funny, LaTonya Pinkard brings that up in Season 3 with a couple of players that she believes were self-sabotaging. They were right on the verge of some really great success that they have been waiting their whole lives for, and they were making some very curious decisions given all that they had at stake. And she wondered, and we wondered as a film crew, if that’s what was happening. 

I’m not a trained psychologist. So I’m just guessing. But Nu’u was interesting because there were plays that he would look All-World, and there were other times where he looked visibly distracted. I wouldn’t ever say uninterested, just less focused, less intense. There could be a lot of reasons for that, absolutely. I wish I knew more about the field so I could answer more intelligently, but it was just super interesting. 

Another choice that I really liked in this season is that midway through, we’re introduced to Laney’s rival team in San Francisco, and there’s this great segment where we pull back for a moment and everyone — from players to coaches to school faculty — gives their take on San Francisco versus Oakland as cities. Why was this something you wanted to explore as fully as you did? 

I did it because it felt so important to the players and the coaches. You know, if you’re not from Northern California, those two cities are almost indistinguishable. You’re just like, “It’s Northern California. I don’t understand.” 

But if you’re from that area, being from the town versus the city is a big deal. It means something to everybody that lives there. So, I think it’s just part of our job as storytellers and documentarians to try to capture the character of that city, and this helped us to illustrate that. What is Oakland? In many ways, it’s what is not San Francisco. I think San Francisco would say the same thing. 

Also, it was just a fun topic. Those two schools, the rivalry that those two cities have — and we just happened to get there when the Golden State Warriors had just uprooted to move from Oakland to San Francisco. And, of course, you have the gentrification happening in Oakland because so many people are moving out of San Francisco into Oakland. There’s tension that comes as a result of that. 

So, looking towards the future — it’s been announced that you’re turning the lens away from football and that “Last Chance U: Basketball” is on the horizon. What led to that decision and why did you choose to leave the series with Laney? 

I don’t think we gave it a ton of thought to be honest. I don’t think anybody was going, “Well, it’s our last year, so we better choose Laney.” I think it was a function of we had been to two rural parts of the country, one in the deep South and one in the Midwest, and I think in an attempt to paint with a different brush, we thought going to Oakland or someplace urban would be interesting. 

And we couldn’t have been more pleased when we found Laney College and met Coach Beam, and then started to dig into what Oakland was all about. We just felt like it would be a great place to go next. I don’t think anybody was thinking, “Well, it’s where we’re going to go and it’s where the show will die.” It was just a function of it was where we were interested in going next. 

Speaking of new projects — “Cheer” was such a big success. Can fans look forward to a second season? 

Yeah, I don’t really have anything to say on that right now. But I’m flattered you’d ask and I wish I had something to give you right now. 

Final thing — for people who have watched “Last Chance: U” all the way through and the chapter is closing on the football narrative, what are some things you hope they take from the show and this season in particular?

I’m asked this question a lot and initially, I didn’t quite know what to say. And I suddenly realized that my job as a documentarian in this field is to tell this story with a cold eye and a warm heart. I feel very strongly if I do that, there will be all kinds of themes and lessons and morals that will pop up organically for individual viewers, and it depends on who’s watching what they get from it. 

But I believe my job is to just be the messenger of these incredible stories. I try as best as I can to let the audience draw whatever conclusions and whatever lessons they’re going to draw from it themselves. So we really go out of our way to avoid being too didactic. We don’t want to lead our audiences by the nose, like “That is what this means,” and “This is what this important moment is.” We’re even particular about the kind of music we select because we want to make sure that we’re not sending some sort of message, or imposing an agenda as filmmakers. 

But I can tell you, having done this show for five years, I think that there is a sacrifice that is being made by student athletes that is both inspiring and heartbreaking. I think I would hope that there would be at least some people in positions of power that would watch the show and think, “Maybe there is something I can do to make this road just a little bit easier.” 

And — I think I’ll just leave it at that. 

“Last Chance U” Season 5 “Laney” is currently streaming on Netflix.

GOP Sen. David Perdue’s campaign takes down “anti-Semitic” ad that enlarged Jewish opponent’s nose

The campaign of Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., took down an ad which appeared to have enlarged Democratic rival Jon Ossoff’s nose Tuesday after it was condemned as “anti-Semitic.”

The Facebook ad, which alleged that “Democrats are trying to buy Georgia,” featured the altered image of Ossoff alongside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Both men are Jewish. The ad was first flagged by The Forward. 

Blaming the “unintentional error” on the graphic design process, the Perdue campaign said it had removed the ad.

“In the graphic design process handled by an outside vendor, the photo was resized and a filter was applied, which appears to have caused an unintentional error that distorted the image,” a campaign spokesperson told The Forward. “Obviously, this was accidental, but to ensure there is absolutely no confusion, we have immediately removed the image from Facebook. Anybody who implies that this was anything other than an inadvertent error is intentionally misrepresenting Senator Perdue’s strong and consistent record of standing firmly against anti-Semitism and all forms of hate.”

The campaign also pointed to a statement from former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who praised Perdue as a person of “honor and high integrity” and called the anti-Semitism charges “simply false,” Politico reported.

Ossoff rejected the campaign’s explanation.

“Senator, literally no one believes your excuses,” he said on Twitter.

Ossoff argued that the ad intentionally “distorted my face to enlarge and extend my nose.”

“This is the oldest, most obvious, least original anti-Semitic trope in history,” he added.

At a later news conference, Ossoff said the ad was “offensive and shocking.” He called on Perdue to apologize and donate any proceeds raised from its use.

“This was an ad that was seen by thousands of Georgians. It was a fundraising ad,” Ossoff said Tuesday. “I call upon Sen. Perdue to take the money that he raised using this manipulated image of my face and donate that money to groups that promote community healing and community unity and tolerance. Because after these last four years, that’s what we need here in this country now as much as ever.”

Jewish Democratic groups also condemned the ad.

“As Trump amplifies, espouses, and normalizes bigotry & hatred, others in the @GOP continue to follow,” Halie Soifer, who heads the Jewish Democratic Council of America, tweeted.

“A President accusing American Jews of disloyalty. A House Republican Leader tweeting anti-Semitic tropes. And now a Senator running an ad in which his Jewish opponent’s nose is manipulated to look bigger,” Dylan Williams, the senior vice president of the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, wrote. “How much more right-wing hate must we endure?”

Ossoff, an investigative journalist who previously unsuccessfully ran in the most expensive House race in history in 2017, is locked in a tight contest with Perdue, a vulnerable first-term senator. The Cook Political Report recently shifted the race from “Lean Republican” to “toss-up.”

The Georgia Democratic Party called for Perdue to apologize and fire the vendor who produced the ad.

“This anti-Semitic attack against Jon Ossoff from Senator Perdue’s flailing campaign has no place in our politics,” state party chairwoman Nikema Williams said in a statement. “Now more than ever, we have to combat the ugly hatred we’ve seen continue to rear its head in this country.”

Mitch McConnell faces backlash from fellow Republicans after unveiling coronavirus relief proposal

 

After unveiling their latest coronavirus aid package which slashes the federal benefit from $600 per week in addition to state unemployment to $200, Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans are finding themselves on the receiving end of backlash from members of their own party, Reuters reports.

While Democrats have rejected the package, saying that it falls short, some Republicans also offered their own criticisms, calling the plan too costly.

“I’m not for borrowing another trillion dollars,” GOP Senator Rand Paul told reporters.

“I’m very concerned about the amount of money we’re talking about,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said according to POLITICO. “What I don’t want to do is bail out the states. That’s wrong.”

Also upsetting Republicans is a provision in the bill that allocates nearly $2 billion in funding for the construction of a new FBI headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said it “was kind of a strange addition,” while Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) said he was “a little surprised by” the provision.

When asked about the provision, Graham said that it “makes no sense to me.”

DNC platform committee votes to reject Medicare for All despite overwhelming support from voters

The Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee on Monday blocked Medicare for All from the party’s draft platform despite polls showing overwhelming support for the proposal from voters.

The Platform Committee voted 125-36 to reject the single-payer plan during a virtual meeting. The panel also rejected separate proposals to expand Medicare to children and all people over 55, as well as a proposal calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Polls have shown that the majority of voters, including more than 85% of Democrats, support Medicare for All. Exit polls during the primaries consistently showed that even most voters who backed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., want a Medicare for All system. Multiple studies have found that switching to a single-payer system would greatly reduce the amount of money the country spends on health care.

Sanders supporters planned a strong push to include Medicare for All, or other provisions that would expand Medicare, but were unsuccessful.

The platform, which is largely symbolic but serves as an official marker for the party’s priorities, will still be voted on by nearly 4,000 Democratic delegates by mail ahead of the virtual Democratic National Convention next month. More than 600 delegates have vowed to oppose any platform that does not include Medicare for all, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Opponents of Medicare for All argued that the platform was heavily based on the draft produced by a joint task force of Biden and Sanders supporters.

“This language that we supported in the Biden-Sanders unity task force was agreed by all members,” Chris Jennings, a former aide of Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who served on the health care task force, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a part of the strongest health care language in the Democratic Party’s history.”

But Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the platform did not go far enough on health and other issues, such as racial disparities and shifting funding from the police to social services.

“Can any of you here truly stand up and say, ‘My party is the party of the principles?'” Cullors asked during the meeting. “The Democratic Party of today will be remembered as the party of complicity. The party that refused to sacrifice its own creature comforts and material securities to ensure it walked the walk.”

Though Sanders’ signature issue was blocked from the draft platform, the Vermont senator reasserted his vow to support Biden during a call with delegates last week.

“There is no more important issue than coming together — all of us — to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Joe Biden as our next president,” he said on the call. “Now, I understand we do not agree with Joe Biden on all of the issues. Believe me, I know that. I ran against Joe Biden. But, at this moment, what we need to do is engage in coalition politics with the goal of defeating Trump.”

Sanders supporter Judith Whitmer, the chair of the Nevada delegation, is leading an effort to vote down the platform over its exclusion of Medicare for All. However, she acknowledged that the move was unlikely to succeed.

“I will be honest with you: It’s not that we expect we are going to be able to stop the DNC from doing what they want to do,” she told The Journal. “We want to make a statement about how important this issue is to the majority of national delegates and to the people that we represent.”

Other Sanders supporters condemned the panel for voting down the amendment on Twitter.

“I can’t even imagine went on in the heads of those 125 [DNC] platform committee members who voted #MedicareForAll down. Today. Now. When the country is in the deathgrip of a global pandemic and people are dying because they can’t afford to the upkeep of their sick-care,” Winnie Wong, a former Sanders adviser, wrote. “Shameful.”

Progressive groups like Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction.org are circulating a petition urging delegates to vote against the platform.

“The sea change that’s underway could swell as a result of this initiative,” Norman Solomon, who heads RootsAction.org and serves as a Sanders delegate from California, told Politico. “It’s a reasonable hope that historians will look back at the next couple of weeks as a time when hundreds of delegates stepped forward and said, ‘This is a red line for a humane society, and we’re not going to stop saying so.'”

Solomon said the intraparty fight has nothing to do with Biden’s candidacy.

“We’re going to fight like hell for Biden,” he said. “And there’s no contradiction between doing that and supporting this pledge.”

“Watchmen” starts on top with 26 Emmy Award nominations, “Mrs. Maisel” leads all comedy series

Though the “Game of Thrones” era is now behind us, HBO remains a dominate force heading into this year’s prime-time Emmy Awards. With a total of 26 nominations, the limited series “Watchmen” leads all other contenders. The super feat for the super hero saga, which is a confrontation of white supremacy and an indictment of denial, comes amid America’s real-life reckoning with systemic racism.

With a handful of new streaming providers such as Apple TV+ (with its noteworthy broadcast news drama “The Morning Show”), HBO Max (with the snubbed “Run,” which feels like the closest match to the quirkily endearing comedy winner of yore, “Fleabag”), and Disney+ (Baby Yoda, anyone?) — this year’s pickings were robust. 

In spite of the new platforms, the leaders of the pack are not all too surprising. “Watchmen” was followed by Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” with 20 nominations. The Roy and Byrde families of “Succession” and “Ozark” came in with 18 nods each (still not topping the 32 total nominations for “Game of Thrones” last year). Netflix starts out on top with 160 total nominations to HBO’s 107 nods.

Art imitating life, the TV academy dialed back its typical live broadcast. Streamed online Tuesday morning, the nominations were hosted by Leslie Jones. The “SNL” star was joined by Josh Gad, Tatiana Maslany and Laverne Cox, who scored a nomination for outstanding guest actress in a drama series.

On March 27, the organization pushed back its regular timeline for submissions and voting. The academy also updated some of its traditional guidelines. While most categories typically honored five nominees, the number is now determined by the total submissions. This, the academy said in a statement last month, will allow for “more inclusiveness in the recognition of excellence.”

And as CEO and Chairman Frank Scherma emphasized at Tuesday’s ceremony, “History is being made, and you will all tell the story.”

While other award shows, including the Oscars, have delayed their broadcasts or moved them online, the prime-time Emmy Awards — for now — are scheduled to proceed Sept. 20 at the Microsoft Theatre, aired by ABC.

Read on for the list of nominees in major categories. For the complete list of 2020 nominees, click here.

Outstanding Drama Series
“Succession,” HBO
“The Crown,” Netflix
“Ozark,” Netflix
“Better Call Saul,” AMC
“Killing Eve”
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hulu
“The Mandalorian,” Disney+
“Killing Eve,” BBC America
“Stranger Things,” Netflix

Outstanding Comedy Series
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Amazon Prime
“Schitt’s Creek,” Pop TV
“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” HBO
“The Good Place,” NBC
“Dead to Me,” Netflix
“Insecure,” HBO
“What We Do In The Shadows,” FX
“The Kominsky Method,” Netflix

Outstanding Limited Series
“Watchmen,” HBO
“Mrs. America,” FX on Hulu
“Unbelievable,” Netflix
“Unorthodox,” Netflix
“Little Fires Everywhere,” Hulu

Outstanding Drama Actor
Jason Bateman, “Ozark” (Netflix)
Brian Cox, “Succession” (HBO)
Sterling K. Brown, “This Is Us” (NBC)
Billy Porter, “Pose” (FX) 
Steve Carell, “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+)

Outstanding Drama Actress
Jennifer Aniston, “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+)
Olivia Colman, “The Crown” (Netflix)
Laura Linney, “Ozark” (Netflix)
Jodie Comer, “Killing Eve” (AMC)
Sandra Oh, “Killing Eve” (AMC)
Zendaya, “Euphoria” (HBO)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Kieran Culkin, “Succession” (HBO)
Giancarlo Esposito, “Better Call Saul” (AMC)
Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+)
Matthew Macfadyen, “Succession” (HBO)
Bradley Whitford, “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu)
Nicholas Braun, “Succession” (HBO)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Meryl Streep, “Big Little Lies” (HBO)
Helena Bonham Carter, “The Crown” (Netflix)
Julia Garner, “Ozark” (Netflix)
Laura Dern, “Big Little Lies” (HBO)
Fiona Shaw, “Killing Eve”
Sarah Snook, “Succession” (HBO)
Samira Wiley, “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu)
Thandie Newton, “Westworld” (HBO)

Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series
Andrew Scott, “Black Mirror: Smithereens” (Netflix)
Ron Cephas Jones, “This Is Us” (NBC)
Jason Bateman, “The Outsider” (NBC)
James Cromwell, “Succession” (HBO)
Giancarlo Esposito, “The Mandalorian” (Disney+)
Martin Short, “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+)

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series
Cicely Tyson, “How to Get Away with Murder” (ABC)
Harriet Walter, “Succession” (HBO)
Alexis Bledel, “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu)
Laverne Cox, “Orange is the New Black” (Netflix)
Phylicia Rashad, “This Is Us” (NBC)
Cherry Jones, “Succession” (HBO)

Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
“Homeland,” “Prisoners of War” (Showtime)
“Ozark,” “Fire Pink” (Netflix)
“Ozark,” Su Casa Es Mi Casa” (Netflix)
“Succession,” “Hunting” (HBO)
“Succession,” “This Is Not For Tears” (HBO)
“The Crown,” “Aberfan” (Netflix)
“The Crown,” “Cri de Coeur” (Netflix)
“The Morning Show,” “The Interview” (Apple TV+)

Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
“Better Call Saul,” “Bad Choice Road” (AMC)
“Better Call Saul,” “Bagman” (AMC)
“Ozark,” “Boss Fight” (Netflix)
“Ozark,” “Fire Pink” (Netflix)
“Ozark,” “All In” (Netflix)
“Succession,” “This Is Not For Tears” (HBO)
“The Crown,” “Aberfan” (Netflix)

Outstanding Comedy Actor
Don Cheadle, “Black Monday” (Showtime)
Ramy Youssef, “Ramy” (Hulu)
Ted Danson, “The Good Place” (NBC)
Anthony Anderson, “Black-ish” (ABC)
Eugene Levy, “Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV)
Michael Douglas, “The Kominsky Method” (Netflix)

Outstanding Comedy Actress
Tracee Ellis Ross, “Black-ish” (ABC)
Linda Cardellini, “Dead to Me” (Netflix)
Catherine O’Hara, “Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV)
Christina Applegate, “Dead to Me” (Netflix)
Issa Rae, “Insecure” (HBO)
Rachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Andre Braugher, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” (Fox)
Kenan Thompon, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
William Jackson Harper, “The Good Place” (NBC)
Sterling K. Brown, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)
Mahershala Ali, “Ramy” (Hulu)
Daniel Levy, “Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV)
Alan Arkin, “The Kominsky Method” (Netflix)
Tony Shalhoub, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Betty Gilpin, “GLOW” (Netflix)
Cecily Strong, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Annie Murphy, “Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV)
Alex Borstein, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)
Yvonne Orji, “Insecure” (HBO)
Kate McKinnon, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
D’Arcy Carden, “The Good Place” (NBC)
Marin Hinkle, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)

Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
Fred Willard, “Modern Family” (NBC)
Adam Driver, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Brad Pitt, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Dev Patel, “Modern Love” (Amazon Prime)
Eddie Murphy, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Luke Kirby, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
Angela Bassett, “A Black Lady Sketch Show” (HBO Max)
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Wanda Sykes, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime)
Maya Rudolph, “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Maya Rudolph, “The Good Place” (NBC)
Bette Midler, “The Politician” (Netflix)

Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series
“Modern Family,” “Finale Part 2” (ABC)
“Ramy,” “Miakhalifra.mov” (Hulu)
“Schitt’s Creek,” “Happy Ending” (Pop TV)
“The Great,” “The Great (Pilot)” (Hulu)
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “It’s Comedy or Cabbage” (Amazon Prime)
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Marvelous Radio” (Amazon Prime)
“Will and Grace,” “We Love Lucy” (NBC)

Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series
“Schitt’s Creek,” “Happy Ending” Pop TV
“Schitt’s Creek,” “The Presidential Suite” Pop TV
“The Good Place,” “Whenever You’re Ready” NBC
“The Great,” “The Great” Hulu
“What We Do In The Shadows,” “On The Run” (FX)
“What We Do In The Shadows,” “Collaboration” (FX)
“What We Do In The Shadows,” “Ghosts” (FX)

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series
Hugh Jackman, “Bad Education” (HBO)
Mark Ruffalo, “I Know This Much Is True” (HBO)
Jeremy Irons, “Watchmen” (HBO)
Jeremy Pope, “Hollywood” (Netflix)
Paul Mescal, “Normal People” (Hulu)

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series
Regina King, “Watchmen” (HBO)
Cate Blanchett, “Mrs. America” (FX on Hulu)
Kerry Washington, “Little Fires Everywhere” (Hulu)
Shira Haas, “Unorthodox” (Netflix)
Octavia Spencer, “Self-Made” (Netflix)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series
Dylan McDermott, “Hollywood” (Netflix)
Tituss Burgess, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (Netflix)
Jovan Adepo, “Watchmen” (HBO)
Jim Parsons, “Hollywood”  (Netflix)
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, “Watchmen”  (HBO)
Louis Gossett Jr., “Watchmen”  (HBO)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series
Holland Taylor, “Hollywood” (Netflix)
Margo Martindale, “Mrs. America” (FX on Hulu)
Toni Collette, “Unbelievable” (Netflix)
Uzo Aduba, “Mrs. America” (FX on Hulu)
Tracey Ullman, “Mrs. America” (FX on Hulu)
Jean Smart, “Watchmen” (HBO)

Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special
“Little Fires Everywhere,” “Find A Way” (Hulu)
“Normal People,” “Episode 5” (Hulu)
“Unorthodox,” (Netflix)
“Watchmen,” “It’s Summer And We’re Running Out Of Ice” (HBO)
“Watchmen,” “Little Fear Of Lightning” (HBO)
“Watchmen,” “This Extraordinary Being” (HBO)

Outstanding Television Movie
“American Son,” Netflix
“Bad Education,” HBO
“Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings: These Old Bones,” Netflix
“El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” (Netflix)
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend,” (Netflix)

Outstanding Variety Talk Series
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” HBO
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Hulu
“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” TBS on HBO Max
“The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” Comedy Central
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” ABC

Outstanding Variety Sketch Series
“A Black Lady Sketch Show,” HBO
“Drunk History,” Comedy Central
“Saturday Night Live,” NBC

Outstanding Variety Special “Live”
“73rd Annual Tony Awards,” CBS
“77th Annual Golden Globes Awards,” NBC
“Live In Front Of A Studio Audience: “All In The Family” And “Good Times,” ABC
“Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show Starting Jennifer Lopez And Shakira,” FOX
“The Oscars,” ABC

Outstanding Variety Special “Pre-recorded”
“Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones,” Netflix
“Dave Chappelle: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize For American Humor,” PBS
“Hannah Gadsby: Douglas,” Netflix
“Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours To Kill,” Netflix
“John Mulaney and The Sack Lunch Box,” Netflix
“Tiffany Haddish: Black Mitzvah,” Netflix

Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series
“A Black Lady Sketch Show,” “Born At Night, But Not Last Night” (HBO)
“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “Episode 629” (HBO)
“Saturday Night Live,” “Host: Eddie Murphy” (NBC)
“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” “Dr. Fauci Answers Trevor’s Questions About Coronavirus” (Comedy Central)
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Live Show; Chris Christie; Nathaniel Rateliff” (CBS)
“Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready,” “Flame Monroe” (Netflix)

Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series
“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” TBS
“Last Week Tonight With John,” HBO
“Late Night With Seth Meyers,” NBC
“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” Comedy Central
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” CBS

Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special
“62nd Grammy Awards,” CBS
“73rd Annual Tony Awards,” CBS
“Dave Chappelle: Stick and Stones,” Netflix
“Live in Front Of A Studio Audience: “All In The Family” And “Good Times,” ABC
“Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show Starring Jenniger Lopez And Shakira,” Fox

 

 

Students fear for their data privacy after University of California invests in private equity firm

College students within California’s premier research university system are wondering if their privacy is safe after learning that the University of California (UC) made a commitment to invest $200 million in an investment firm that has access to vast troves of student data through a subsidiary.

The private equity investment firm, Thoma Bravo, announcing that it was purchasing the educational software firm Instructure Inc. in December in an all-cash deal for roughly $2 billion, an acquisition that was completed in March. Instructure Inc. owns Canvas, a popular virtual classroom platform. Given the platform’s popularity within higher education institutions, Instructure has data on grades, lectures, tests, papers and more from tens of thousands of students.

Within a few weeks of the news announcement of Thoma Bravo’s acquisition, more than 50 people who work at colleges signed a public letter urging Thoma Bravo to issue a legally-binding statement promising that it would not abuse its newfound access to student data. Their primary concern was how the data acquired through Instructure’s learning management software Canvas would be used by the company.

“We request Instructure make clear statements be made as to how they intend to legally and ethically protect current student data, future student data, and access to both under the new ownership,” the letter explained. “While the Chief Legal Officer Matt Kaminer has expressed Instructure’s commitment to, and taken major steps towards ensuring ethical handling of student data, there are no guarantees that prevent the private equity firm from using student data in ways we didn’t intend.”

Instructure has made it clear through their own language that they view the student data they aggregated as one of their chief assets, although they have also insisted that they do not use that data improperly.

Yet an article published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, titled “Transparency and the Marketplace for Student Data,” pointed out that there is “an overall lack of transparency in the student information commercial marketplace and an absence of law to protect student information.” As such, some students at the University of California are concerned that — despite reassurances to the contrary — their institution’s new financial relationship with Thoma Bravo will mean their personal data can be sold or otherwise misused.

“It appears that the UC may be invested — however indirectly — in the monetization of data collected from their own students,” Mustafa Hussain, a PhD candidate in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, told Salon in a statement. He also said that he was unclear as to whether the college is “aware of Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of Instructure, whether they have seen it as cause for concern, how they have responded, and whether they are invested in the student data market in other ways. There’s a lack of transparency here, from the UC, Thoma Bravo, and Instructure, and I feel it’s cause for concern.”

Hussain’s views were echoed in a statement by graduate student workers Samiha Khalil and Jack Davies.

“As graduate student workers responsible for delivering 50% of all instructional hours in the University of California, we are very concerned by the persistent request that we use Canvas for our online instruction and to record our lectures,” Khalil and Davies explained.

After describing how the University of California failed to communicate their rights as students and teaching assistants and how the need for virtual learning has increased during the coronavirus pandemic, they added several other accusations. They claimed that “the UC weaponized Canvas to facilitate its repression of grad workers at UCSC [University of California, Santa Cruz] fighting for a cost of living adjustment, installing a tattle-bot to have undergraduates snitch on striking workers. The UC also hired IT experts to retrieve data on grade deletion from Canvas in order to punish strikers through the student code of conduct, since deleting grades is not a violation of our contract as workers.”

They concluded, “As the EdTech [educational technology] industry expands with the demand for online instruction, workers need to organize to resist universities, like the UC, as they seek to take advantage of this crisis to deepen worker exploitation and surveillance.”

The students’ concerns over surveillance and privacy are not unwarranted. Previously, the University of California used military surveillance technology to help quell the grad student strikes at UC Santa Cruz and other campuses, as Salon previously reported.

Salon reached out to the University of California, Thoma Bravo and Instructure about the alleged $200 million investment commitment and the accusations made by Khalil and Davies. The University of California issued a statement denying that the Canvas platform was favored or that student data had been abused that they were aware of. “While some campuses utilize the Canvas learning management system, it has neither been used in the manner you describe nor has the University of California hired IT experts as you suggest,” they wrote. Thoma Bravo and Instructure declined to comment for this story, although Instructure said that it was committed to protecting student privacy and data and referred to specific blog posts.

Private equity firms like Thoma Bravo are an innately controversial type of investment fund, which some thinkers like Robert Reich contend should be heavily regulated. Private equity firms generally purchase and restructure companies (often by laying off workers) in order to milk them for funds, often gutting them in the process and selling off their stripped assets later if or when they go bankrupt. Private equity firms are also infamous for inflating fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes. This means that private equities can ravage pension plans that have been invested in them or reap billions from investors through their fee arrangements. Because of the lack of oversight of private equity, the FBI has expressed concern that such firms could easily be used to launder money.

This type of investment fund has made the news in various unflattering ways. When Mitt Romney was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, his work at the private investment firm Bain Capital came under scrutiny, specifically Romney’s practice of charging companies millions in fees before loading them up with debt. Because the companies in Bain’s portfolio were often advised to fire large numbers of workers to pay off those debts, Romney effectively created situations where their businesses needed to fire workers specifically because of the debt that he created for them. This method is known as a “leveraged buyout”: Private equities find businesses with good cash flows that are experiencing problems, take over the company (either voluntarily or through a “hostile” method) with a small amount of its own money and the rest covered by bank loans and then charge large management fees for advice on who to fire in order to pay off the loans. The majority of leveraged buyouts are backed between 60 to 90 percent with loaned money. 

Last year Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposed legislation that would prohibit private equities from stripping the companies they take over of cash, real estate and other assets, as well as hold them for responsible for the debts they acquire in order to purchase them. Companies like Toys R Us, Friendly’s and HCR ManorCare all went bankrupt because of private equities.

“For far too long, Washington has looked the other way while private equity firms take over companies, load them with debt, strip them of their wealth, and walk away scot-free — leaving workers, consumers, and whole communities to pick up the pieces,” Warren said in a statement at the time.

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo to Valerie Jarrett: “I am a patriot”

Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, clashed with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo over alleged “spying” on the Trump 2016 campaign.

During an interview on her Fox Business program Mornings with Maria, Bartiromo berated Jarrett about whether Obama had directed the FBI to target then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

Bartiromo preemptively dismissed Russia’s “meddling” in U.S. elections on behalf of Trump.

“That’s been going on for decades as you know,” the Fox News host said. “I’ve gone to Russia many times and have been watching this happen for decades. So we all know that Russia has been trying to meddle.”

“But now we’re talking about a very serious situation,” Bartiromo opined, steering the interview away from Russia. “We have a criminal investigation underway. People could go to jail. Do you believe if [former FBI Director] Jim Comey knew that the dossier was fake and garbage and he kept going, re-upping warrants to spy on the Trump campaign that he should go to jail?”

“I have a high degree of confidence in our intelligence community, investigators comported themselves responsibly,” Jarrett replied. “Look, Lindsey Graham is the one that encouraged Sen. McCain to turn over the dossier in the first place to the FBI.”

“But I do know that it’s nearly four years ago and I don’t understand why our focus isn’t on what’s happening right now and today,” she added. “That’s the investigation I’d like to see.”

Bartiromo interrupted loudly: “What’s happening right now is we are learning the details of what took place and we are getting official confirmation that the FBI knew that the dossier was garbage and made up in a bar because the sub-source of the dossier told FBI officials in early January.”

“I was not involved in any of those conversations,” Jarrett revealed. “But the question I really want to put to you is, what are we doing today? If people want to have an investigation about what happened four years ago, they should do that. But aren’t you concerned about what’s going on right now? Aren’t you worried about the integrity of our upcoming elections? Aren’t you worried about how we’re going to have a safe and fair election?”

“Yes!” Bartiromo exclaimed. “That’s why I’m asking you this question. Because I am a patriot and do not want to see people in positions of power put their finger on the scale and make up a story that there’s collusion with a foreign power when there’s absolutely no evidence of that.”

“I want to make sure we do not have the powers in government spying on political campaigns because the other political campaign paid for it,” the Fox News host continued. “We know that Hillary Clinton paid for the dossier… You’ve got one campaign paying for dirt on another campaign. And you’ve got the amazing intelligence agencies of our government weaponized.”

“You’re saying you knew nothing about it?” Bartiromo demanded to know. “You were President Obama’s right hand. And a lot of people wonder how much President Obama directed this.”

“That’s not how it works,” Jarrett shot back. “We leave that to the intelligence community to bring forward information. And the dossier, I would imagine, would be one piece of a much bigger puzzle.”

“The Mueller report didn’t concluded that there wasn’t any wrongdoing,” the former Obama adviser pointed out. “He was explicit in saying quite the opposite. You’re making statements that actually haven’t been proven.”

You can watch the clip below via YouTube:

Why did Trump pick Portland? He’s following the lead of far-right groups, and the city’s history

Why did Donald Trump pick Portland? It’s a question worth asking. There are more than two dozen American cities bigger than Oregon’s largest, and of the Rose City’s 650,000 or so residents, fewer than 7% are Black. Nearly all the cities larger than Portland have more diverse populations, and most have had substantial, ongoing Black Lives Matter protests since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in late May. Yet Trump settled on Portland — not New York or L.A. or Atlanta, and not Minneapolis, where this all began — as the staging ground for his plan to flood a city with federal police in hopes of escalating violence, all in hopes of generating scary images to frighten Fox News viewers with. 

Portland wasn’t targeted for public safety reasons, obviously. Trump doesn’t care about people’s safety, for one thing. For another, the presence of federal police officers is very pointedly to reduce public safety and escalate the violence Trump wants for his campaign ads. It’s also a confusing choice, considering that Portland is one of the whitest large cities in the nation — a demographic reality visible on the ground among the protests — making it an odd choice for a nakedly racist president who is making a big public stink of his loathing for anti-racism activists. Trump is clearly expanding his war on cities to other places, but Portland was clearly picked for the rollout of this fascistic crackdown for a reason. 

So, again: Why Portland? As with many other things Trump does, it appears he’s following the lead of the various far-right, white supremacist and proto-fascist groups that have gained power in the years since his election. Groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and various others have descended on the city regularly since Trump’s election, generally for the purpose of starting street fights with leftists and creating a spectacle. By targeting Portland for an invasion of federal police geared up like members of an occupying army, Trump is modeling himself after the far-right fringe that has been harassing that city for years. 

“Far-right and white nationalist groups often plan rallies and events in areas where a majority of residents are politically and socially liberal, and where communities have reliably produced counter-demonstrations at such events,” Jared Holt, an investigative reporter for Right Wing Watch, told Salon. “In the mind of the extremist, they are engaged in a culture war and are choosing to bring the fight to enemy turf.”

Far-right groups regularly descend on Portland during the summer months — some years, the city has seen multiple rallies — often under the banner of “free speech” or protesting against antifa activists, but mostly in hopes of attracting counter-protesters and launching street brawls. 

As I reported back in 2017, when these groups first started heavily targeting Portland, members of these far-right groups will swap memes and encourage each other to beat the tar out of anyone they deem “antifa.” Some of these memes  can get violent and disturbing, with references to curb-stomping, stabbing and shooting opponents. Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was held out as a hero, mainly for his reported habit of murdering leftist opponents by throwing them out of helicopters. 

As Arun Gupta of the Intercept explained in an article last year, the far right saw Portland as the ideal city “to stage violent spectacles” they could then spread throughout social media “to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.”

Often, these far-right activists would try to justify this behavior by citing “self-defense” against “antifa,” but as Holt explained, it’s wise to have “a healthy sense of skepticism” about such claims, since far-right groups “plan their events in locations with the expectation there will be counter-demonstrators, and work to actively escalate tensions between opposing sides”

Trump is taking the model developed by the extreme right in recent years, and amplifying it dramatically by using taxpayer-funded resources, including the shadowy federal police agencies either created or vastly expanded during the post-9/11 campaign against terrorism. But the basic idea is the same: Target Portland for a right-wing show of force, knowing that this will likely provoke a strong response from leftist activists, and use that response as an excuse for increasing the violent repression  in a way that can be packaged and repackaged as sadistic propaganda designed to lure back wavering Trump voters or hypothetical suburban moderates. 

The most obvious reason why Portland is a target is, of course, its long history of leftist activism, which does indeed include a contingent — whether self-defined as antifa or anarchist or something else — that is entirely willing to engage in physical confrontation with far-right groups who trawl the streets looking for a fight.

Trump himself is following this same logic, knowing that while most leftists are responding to the federal police with peaceful resistance, some are willing to fight back. Granted, the street scene in Portland is probably nowhere near as violent as Trump would like — at most, he’s getting images of some people pulling down a fence, setting off fireworks and tagging some buildings — but it’s the same calculus that far-right groups are employing, which is that some protesters will get unruly and can be spun as “violent rioters” on Fox News. 

There’s an even deeper reason that Portland has been such a target for the far right and now for Trump, who as usual takes his political cues from the very worst people in America. This goes right back to the aforementioned fact that Portland is one of the whitest cities in the country. 

Portland may be known as a progressive city now, but like the entire state of Oregon, it has a long history of white supremacy. (Indeed, there are still a lot of openly white supremacist groups in rural eastern Oregon, who are sometimes visible among the far-right groups who regularly descend upon Portland.) In the 1920s, Oregon had the biggest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi, which isn’t surprising when you consider that the state effectively banned Black people from moving there until 1926. Portland was virtually an all-white city until World War II, and remains more than 75% white today. (Indeed, the city’s Black population appears to have declined since the 1990s, perhaps reflecting increased gentrification.) In any case, Portland’s whiteness is an artifact of decades of discrimination. 

Of course Portland’s politics have shifted sharply leftward in recent years. The far right’s specific loathing for Portland, then, is to some extent rooted in a sense of betrayal at a city that has turned away from its long history of reactionary and racist politics. The constant drumbeat of far-right rallies, which routinely turn into brawls, aren’t just about taking the fight to enemy turf. It’s about the far right symbolically trying to reclaim a city that they feel they’ve lost to the left. 

This subtext is often not far from the surface. Far-right activists routinely describe Portland’s progressives as if they were a stain or an occupying force, as if progressives are illegitimate members of the community who need to be expunged so the city can be restored to its true heritage. 

“The West Coast has slowly been infected with communist ideologies throughout our entire culture,” said Joey Gibson of the far-right group Patriot Prayer while promoting a 2017 rally, leaning hard into this “paradise lost” framing of the way cities like Portland have become progressive. (Gibson was arrested on a felony riot charge in 2019 after years of orchestrating events that descended into violence.) 

Patriot Prayer even billed its rallies as opportunities to “cleanse the streets of Portland” in 2018. One of the members of their Facebook group complained about the city’s “stench-covered and liberal-occupied streets.”

Trump and his acting Homeland Security secretary, Chad Wolf, have embraced this rhetoric that paints progressives in Oregon as an illegitimate power that needs to be overthrown with whatever level of force is necessary. 

Trump has repeatedly emphasized that the cities he’s attacking, especially Portland, are “run by very liberal Democrats,” as if it were self-evident that their leadership is illegitimate and therefore Trump is entitled to send in federal police against their explicit wishes. 

Wolf has defended the invasion in similar terms, claiming the administration was “forced” to invade because of “a lack of action from city officials.” That’s a more legalistic framing of the same argument, that the elected leaders of Portland aren’t legitimate and that the right is more entitled than “liberal” elected officials to decide what the law enforcement response to protests should look like. 

The fact that Trump is taking his cues from the far-right fringes is, sadly, no surprise. After all, he has recently promoted a conspiracy theory about the coronavirus apparently concocted by a far-right nut who believes reproductive health problems are caused by women having sex with demons. The far right is where Trump’s heart is, which is why his impulse after the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, was to describe the white supremacists who rampaged there as “very fine people.” 

That’s what happens when you elect a racist conspiracy theorist to the highest office in the land: Federal police are being deployed to imitate the tactics of proto-facist groups who glamorize violence and long for the white supremacist past. Portland has endured years of abuse from these far-right groups who treat the city as little more than a stage for their violent culture-war melodramas. Now the president of the United States is following suit. 

Fox & Friends hosts spin proposed benefit cut as generous: “Republicans are trying to do their best”

“Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy on Tuesday suggested that Republicans are being generous when they propose slashing federal unemployment benefits from $600 per week to $200 per week because it’s “in addition” to other state benefits.

During a segment about the fourth phase of a coronavirus relief package, Doocy attempted to spin the cut in benefits as a gift from Republican lawmakers.

“Businesses are closing down and that’s why Congress is trying to work on another relief package,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt reported. “If you’re single and you make less than $75,000 [per year], you’re getting a $1,200 check if this passes.”

“And then also in addition to that,” Doocy chimed in, “you know, the Republicans are trying to do their best to address the issue because politically it’s not good for them because the supplemental federal payment, which right now is $600 [per week] for people who have lost their jobs, it’s supposed to go away.”

“So what they’ve done,” he continued, “is they’ve come up with a new figure and the figure is $200.”

Doocy went on to argue that viewers should not be concerned about the loss in benefits.

“Now, when people hear it goes from 600 to 200, remember that is in addition to whatever state benefits you are getting,” he remarked. “So, you get your state unemployment and then for the last number of months you’ve been getting 600 bucks. But now it’s going to be reduced to $200 through September.”

“You combine your state benefit with your federal benefit and it will come up to 70% of what you’re making,” Doocy insisted.

Several Fox News viewers criticized Doocy’s appraisal of the new package.

You can watch the clip below via YouTube:

Twitter removes bogus coronavirus conspiracy video shared by Trump and restricts Don Jr.’s account

Twitter and other social networks removed a video of doctors making false claims about the coronavirus after President Donald Trump shared it Monday to his 84 million followers.

Twitter removed the video after Trump retweeted several versions of it and temporarily restricted Donald Trump Jr.’s account after he shared the same video.

The video, which was published by the far-right outlet Breitbart, shows people wearing lab coats and calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” in a press conference inexplicably held in front of the Supreme Court.

One woman, who says she is a doctor, argues that “you don’t need masks” to contain the spread of the coronavirus, despite the advice of every leading medical body in the world, and baselessly claims that recent studies showing hydroxychloroquine to be ineffective were “fake science.”

“This virus has a cure — it’s called hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Zithromax,” the woman falsely claims. “You don’t need masks — there is a cure.”

The Centers for Disease Control and other medical bodies all recommend the use of face coverings to prevent the spread of the virus.

“If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I think in four, six, eight weeks we could bring this epidemic under control,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said earlier this month.

The Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine after it determined last month that it was ineffective in treating the coronavirus, despite Trump’s hype, based on a growing body of scientific evidence. The FDA warned earlier this month that the drug had been shown to cause “serious heart rhythm problems, kidney injuries and other safety issues.”

The World Health Organization also discontinued its trial of the drug after finding it does “not reduce mortality for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.” The National Institutes of Health scrapped its trial of the drug, as well, after finding it provided “no benefit.”

Studies from Brazil, Spain, the United Kingdom, the University of Minnesota and more all showed the drug to be ineffective against the coronavirus.

The video first went viral on Facebook, where it racked up more than 14 million views before it was removed on Monday, according to CNN. The video was also removed by YouTube.

“We’ve removed this video for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” a Facebook spokesperson told the outlet, adding that the network was “showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO.”

Trump shared several versions of the video and numerous responses before Twitter removed it. He shared 14 tweets within 30 minutes defending hydroxycholoroquine and questioning medical experts’ advice.

“WOW!! Doctor calls out what should be the biggest scandal in modern American history,” one since-deleted tweet shared by Trump said. “The suppression of #Hydroxychloroquine by Fauci & the Democrats to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump.”

Numerous other Republicans, including the Jeff Landry, the attorney general of Louisiana and the chairman of the Republican Attorney Generals Association, shared the video as well.

Some of the posts shared by Trump alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had “misled the American public on many issues.”

“‘I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances,” Fauci told ABC News on Tuesday. “I don’t tweet. I don’t even read them, so I don’t really want to go there. I just will continue to do my job no matter what comes out, because I think it’s very important.”

The woman in the video, Stella Immanuel, claims that she worked as a doctor in Nigeria before getting her medical license in Texas last year, according to The Washington Post.

Immanuel calls herself a “Deliverance Minister,” who is “God’s battle axe and weapon of war.” She recently posted another video in which she rails against “the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic new world order.”

After Facebook removed her video, Immanuel threatened the social network.

“Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do,” she tweeted. “You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.”

Martha McSally’s campaign netted $300,000 during supposed fundraising “pause”

Embattled Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona promised voters that her campaign would “suspend all campaign fundraising” for the first two weeks of April in favor of “15 Days of Giving,” but finance records released last week show that the campaign seems to have raised $300,000 in that time, and apparently kept all of it.

“For the next 15 days, McSally for Senate will suspend all campaign fundraising and instead raise as much money as possible for The Salvation Army of Arizona,” the campaign claimed in an April 1 press release.

McSally also announced the plan in a video posted that day to Twitter: “I’m announcing today that my campaign will pause all fundraising for the next 15 days, as I launch a 15 Days of Giving campaign,” she said.

The campaign statement also said that McSally would “donate her entire Senate paycheck for the month of April to help people impacted by the coronavirus.” It’s unclear if she delivered on the promise.

In an April 2 interview McSally told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that the campaign was “ceasing fundraising,” and shared a video of the interview to social media.

“I’m spending the next 15 days putting politics aside & raising money for the Salvation Army of Arizona. They’re providing rent assistance, household essentials & meals for kids & families. Make a donation today at http://15daysofgiving.care. We’re in this together! #15DaysofGiving,” McSally tweeted.

The next day the Arizona Republic published a report citing information from the campaign and an interview with the candidate: “Today, she’s not even asking for money. Instead, McSally is raising money for 15 days for The Salvation Army of Arizona.”

On April 11, McSally promoted a TV segment which suggested she had “stopped fundraising.” 

The campaign also promoted a landing page designed to collect email information, which reads: “For the first 15 days of April, our campaign is committing 100% of our campaign resources to raising money for The Salvation Army’s COVID-19 relief efforts in Arizona.”

However, a Salon analysis of the campaign’s finance filings does not show that those funds went anywhere other than toward the campaign’s own account for future use. The donations came from large PACs and small-dollar individual contributors alike.

The campaign characterized that money as “passive.”

“Any money that passively came in during this period was from recurring donations, past money coming in the door, or joint fundraising committee disbursements,” campaign spokeswoman Caroline Anderegg told Salon in an email.

“Senator McSally and her team channeled 100% of their efforts during these 15 days to raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the thousands of Arizonans served by the Salvation Army and any suggestion otherwise is outrageous and a misleading attempt to politicize this important work,” she added.

The campaign provided information from the Salvation Army claiming that McSally’s page had raised more than $212,000, adding that McSally’s team volunteered “many hours of their time” at Salvation Army Corps Community Centers, “packing and delivering food boxes and household essentials for Arizonans in need.”

It nonetheless appears that McSally repeatedly conflated her campaign with the fundraising effort, calling them “our funds” in her launch video. She conducted the fundraising through a separate landing page, paid for by her campaign, which routed donors who entered contact information to make a direct donation to the Salvation Army.

McSally has found herself consistently trailing Democratic opponent Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and the husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was severely injured in a 2011 shooting. Kelly has held a double-digit margin over McSally for months, and recent polling puts the spread at around 12 points.

Last week the Cook Political Report shifted the race from “Toss Up” to “Lean” Democrat.

“The bottom fell out for us at the end of May and June,” a Republican strategist told the outlet.

Kelly has consistently outraised the Republican incumbent, more recently raising $12.8 million to McSally’s $8.9 million in the second quarter of this year.

A former Air Force combat pilot and two-term House member, McSally ran for an open U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in 2018, but was narrowly defeated by Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. Then McSally was appointed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to fill Arizona’s other Senate seat, left vacant by the death of Sen. John McCain. She could end up losing two U.S. Senate races in the same state within two years, a rare accomplishment.

William Barr attacks “bogus” Russia investigation and “violent rioters” in House Judiciary testimony

Attorney General William Barr is expected to attack Democrats and the Department of Justice’s own investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during his first appearance Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee.

Barr is scheduled to testify before Rep. Jerry Nadler’s, D-N.Y., panel after numerous delays and subpoena threats. The attorney general is set to accuse Democrats of seeking to discredit him and defend his controversial moves since taking office, according to his prepared opening remarks released on Monday.

“Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate scandal,’ many of the Democrats on this committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the president’s factotum, who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions,” Barr says in the opening statement. “Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda today.”

Barr is likely to be grilled on a wide-ranging number of issues, including the federal deployment to cities like Portland and Chicago; his role in the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters ahead of President Donald Trump’s church photo-op; his decision to fire Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman; his intervention into the cases of former Trump advisers Roger Stone and Michael Flynn; and the alleged politicization of the Justice Department.

“The president has not attempted to interfere in these decisions,” Barr says in the prepared remarks.

“From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents,” the remarks say, even though Trump has attacked the Justice Department on Twitter and demanded that it prosecute his enemies throughout his presidency. “The president has occasionally, and appropriately, confirmed that the department is aware of the matter. But the handling of the matter, and my decisions on criminal matters, have been left to my independent judgment.”

But as he seeks to downplay the president’s role in the decision-making process at the department, Barr says he views his role as fighting back against what he views as the politicization of the department against Trump.

“I became deeply troubled by what I perceived as the increasing use of the criminal justice process as a political weapon and the emergence of two separate standards of justice,” his statement says. “When asked to consider returning, I did so because I revere the department and believed my independence would allow me to help steer her back to her core mission of applying one standard of justice for everyone and enforcing the law even-handedly, without partisan considerations.”

Barr is also set to speak about the federal deployment in response to protests over the death of George Floyd and police brutality. He is expected to reject claims that the law enforcement system is racist and insist that the presence of federal authorities is warranted, even though officials in Oregon have said the deployment has escalated tensions after protests were already calming down.

“Until just the last 50 years or so, our laws and institutions were explicitly discriminatory,” Barr says in the statement, before claiming that everyone has been equal under the law since then despite numerous staggering documented racial disparities.

Barr cites the increase of Black police officers and says that events such as the killing of Floyd “are fortunately quite rare,” even though unarmed Black people are disproportionately more likely to be killed by police than white people.

“The number of unarmed Black men killed by police so far this year is eight. The number of unarmed white men killed by police over the same time period is 11,” Barr says in the statement, neglecting to mention that Black people make up 13% of the population while white people make up 60% of the population.

Though he acknowledges that concerns about racism in policing from the Black community are “legitimate,” he goes on to describe protests over Floyd’s death as violent, even though the overwhelming majority have been peaceful.

Barr complains about people “demonizing the police” and “irresponsible efforts to defund the police” as he points to the number of Black people killed by other Black people each year.

Barr describes a “breakdown in the rule of law” since Floyd’s death, citing “violent rioters and anarchists” that have “hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc,” even as federal officers in Portland have been seen on footage tear-gassing peaceful moms and veterans who came out in support of demonstrators near a federal courthouse protected by federal forces.

“What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest: it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” he claims. “Largely absent from these scenes of destruction are even superficial attempts by the rioters to connect their actions to George Floyd’s death or any legitimate call for reform.”

Barr goes on to criticize the media for blaming the federal government over the response, even though the blame has come from Portland and Oregon’s own elected officials and police chief.

Democrats are ready to fire back at Barr ahead of his testimony, as well.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a member of the Judiciary Committee, penned an op-ed in Newsweek on Monday casting Barr as the president’s “fixer.”

“Michael Cohen was Donald Trump’s fixer, until he got caught, pleaded guilty and went to prison. Now Bill Barr has taken the job,” Swalwell wrote. “Unfortunately, Bill Barr already had a job — as attorney general of the United States, our nation’s top law enforcement official. And we must not let him do both jobs at once.”

American fascism has arrived, and the danger is real — but it’s not too late to defeat it

Ever since the beginning of the Trump crisis, I’ve written about Donald Trump’s obvious fetish for authoritarian dictatorships and how observing our nation’s most despotic president is an ongoing exercise in waiting for the other tyrannical shoe to drop. 

Following the jackbooted nincompoopery of the Trump White House, as I’ve said multiple times before, is a lot like leaning too far back in our chairs and almost falling over backward — but catching ourselves at the last minute. Every day brings with it new devilry violently propelled from Trump’s twisted tennis-ball machine of awfulness, keeping the entire nation perpetually off balance.

Trump’s lack of personal restraint, combined with his complete inability to understand or respect democratic institutions, along with his obvious sociopathy and admiration for overseas villains like Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte, were always destined to fuse at the cellular level in harrowing ways, especially if he were tested by a national or global calamity. 

And here we are. In the past several weeks, as the coronavirus death toll draws close to 150,000 while demonstrators take to the streets, the other shoe has officially dropped, exposing Donald Trump as the first American fascist to occupy the White House. I don’t write this lightly or colloquially: Trump is our first fascist president, and the people who continue to enable him, be they his staff or his accomplices at OAN or Fox News or on Capitol Hill, ought to be viewed as sympathizers to his version of strongman ultranationalism.

Trump’s policies have always been racing at ludicrous speed toward American fascism, and now, during the most horrendous global crisis since World War II, he’s fully embracing the worst-case scenario — the thing many of us have warned about since 2016.

The age of American fascism has arrived. The dangers are immeasurable. 

As soon as Trump chose to unleash federal stormtroopers in reaction to protesters, deploying an army of faceless thugs into American cities armed with allegedly non-lethal weapons, the Rubicon was crossed. There’s no going back until, at the very least, Trump is ousted from power and held accountable for the unconstitutional horror show he’s manifested. We’ll circle back to this.

Fascism, derived from Benito Mussolini’s political stranglehold on Italy, generally possesses the characteristics of hyper-nationalism, opposition to socialism and communism, suppression of dissent, an ideology of racial supremacy and the vilification of “the other” — foreigners, minorities and other groups, often rounded up and virtually disappeared into government internment camps. 

Trump’s entire campaign for president began with the demonization of Latino immigrants and, after his inauguration, segued into mass incarceration of entire families, including infants and small children, with myriad reports of sexual assault against both adult women and underage girls. He routinely frames moderate Democrats like Joe Biden as full-blown commies. He’s labeled the American news media as enemies of the people. And no one would argue that he expresses obvious, if dunderheaded, ultranationalism. 

Now, on top of all that, he’s turning ICE and other paramilitary forces against American citizens. At his command, activists are being assaulted, injured and disappeared for the offense of exercising their First Amendment free speech and assembly rights. Whatever acts of petty vandalism may be taking place, Trump has publicly described the “walls” of moms and veterans, along with other groups, as “lamestream media” scams, offering up more propagandized excuses for assaulting constitutional liberties.

There wasn’t any graffiti being sprayed nor statues being toppled when Trump and Bill Barr ordered their foot soldiers to tear-gas the crowd at Lafayette Park on June 1, so the president could stage his awkward photo-op holding a Bible he’s never read. Incidentally, the following maxim has been playing on an endless loop in my head: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” and I’d wager I’m not alone. Fascism is here and it looks exactly like that — flanked by Lee Greenwood anthems and bogus religious imagery. 

It doesn’t matter how much graffiti is sprayed or how many Confederate statues fall, the federal government was never intended to exercise police powers inside our borders. Yet the party of alleged “small government” is ignoring all that. In the past, many of our most conservative 10th Amendment scholars have noted that police power is reserved for the states. (For instance: Read this, from the libertarian Cato Institute’s “Handbook for Congress.”) And yet every day, new videos emerge of Trump’s stormtroopers brutalizing unarmed Americans, be they 14-year-old girls, Navy veterans or women daring to brandish flowers. Indeed, Republicans have abandoned their claim to states’ rights and libertarianism. No more. Not when their fascist messiah is ordering children beaten by his shock troops. The Republican Party, like Trump, is utterly devoid of core values now, lost forever in a cloud of pepper spray and throat-constricting gas.

Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” said in a recent interview that Trump isn’t intrinsically fascist — instead, he’s “performing fascism,” which is almost as terrible. Trump, as many have noted, doesn’t possess any core values, be they fascist or miscellaneous. That said, he certainly possesses a lizard-brain fight-or-flight instinct and knows how to co-opt behaviors to suit his ass-saving agenda. Whether his actions reflect his personal sense of right and wrong doesn’t really matter. The overall effect is that of a fascist dictator beating the opposition into submission while suppressing critical speech. And like good fascist enablers, his Red Hat loyalists are cheering it along.

Of course Trump’s fanboys are unwaveringly supporting the fascism of their Mad King, keeping his polling approval averages in the low 40s, even as he invades and indefinitely occupies what he considers to be opposition strongholds — the cities of the “Radical Left.” There’s no exit strategy and in fact Trump has publicly threatened to send in more goon squads to accompany his Nixon-derived “law and order” campaign plank. (By the way, Trump also stole “Make America great again” from Ronald Reagan. He steals a lot, including taxpayer money — an idea he stole from Putin, his kleptocratic paymaster.)

The clear ascendancy of fascism inside the White House is unprecedented and therefore the response must be equally without precedent. If Trump is ousted in November — and he must be ousted — he and his sympathizers must face the legal consequences of their actions so that it never happens again. Not here. There must be ramifications for what they’ve done to our country. 

Naturally, the Red Hat entertainment complex will scream and whine and play the victim like always. So what. Fascism, in whatever form, has to be crushed before it crushes us. On the other hand, a second Trump term will fully metastasize it, ending our democratic republic as we know it. Put it this way: If we do our jobs as citizens of a free republic, Trump and his co-conspirators will have to start thinking about late-night escape routes to non-extradition nations. And the sooner we recognize the true nature of what’s happening right now in America, the sooner the perpetrators will face commensurate repercussions.

With new coronavirus fatalities in Texas, the state’s death count is rising faster

Texas reached another grim milestone Sunday when it surpassed 5,000 deaths from the new coronavirus. In doing so, the state reported 1,000 deaths in six days, four days faster than it took to hit that total the previous time.

According to state health data released Sunday, 5,038 people in Texas had died from the virus. That’s 153 more deaths than the day before and 1,080 more than a week ago. Public health experts have said that reported totals are likely to be an undercount because not all people who died with coronavirus symptoms were tested.

Since July 20, when Texas passed 4,000 deaths, some Rio Grande Valley counties have seen significant increases in the number of people dying from COVID-19. That part of the state— among the hardest-hit parts of Texas — has a larger share of Hispanic residents than many other areas.

National data has shown that Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately affected by the virus. In Texas, Hispanic people are the most likely to lack health coverage, making up 61% of the uninsured but only 40% of the population, according to figures used by the Texas Medical Association.

Cameron County reported 96 total deaths on July 20. On Sunday, it recorded 177. During that same time frame, Hidalgo County reported 456 total deaths on Sunday, up from 284.

While Texas continues to report daily deaths in the triple digits, the number of new daily cases seem to be stabilizing. In the past week alone, state data appears to show new daily infections leveling off, albeit at nearly record highs.

The state recorded its largest number of daily new cases on July 15, at 10,791. On Sunday, that number was 5,810.

Epidemiologists and disease modelers have said they are cautiously optimistic that the mask mandate Gov. Greg Abbott issued three weeks ago is helping the state turn a corner in its efforts to contain the outbreak. Although a plateauing of new virus cases would hardly represent a victory over the pandemic, it could help keep hospitals from being overrun with sick patients.

But hospital data is incomplete. The state isn’t releasing the information it collects about how many beds individual hospitals have available. And only a fraction of the state’s hospitals, cities and counties are providing that information to the public on their own.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Abbott had expressed displeasure to hospital executive about headlines related to ICU capacity, but Abbott spokesman John Wittman said any insinuation that the governor suggested the executives publish less data is false.

Still, even if new case counts remain steady, public health experts are asking Abbott not to rule out another shutdown, especially in the state’s hardest-hit regions, given that the disease continues to infect about 10 times as many people each day compared with two months ago, ravaging some parts of the state more severely than others.

An Abbott spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Sunday.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

Americans load up on millions of guns as federal government fails the COVID challenge

A week ago Sunday a family’s entire world ended when Roy Den Hollander shot and killed 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, the son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, at the judge’s home in North Brunswick, New Jersey. 

In the days since, there’s been a lot written about how Den Hollander, a “men’s rights” activist and ardent supporter of President Trump, had used the internet to heap misogynist scorn on Judge Salas, the first Latina appointed to the federal bench in New Jersey.

The number of threats made against federal judges has spiked over 400 percent over the last four years to 4,500 last year, yet fewer than 10 percent of those threats were investigated, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

The tone of Hollander’s racist male grievance rants mirrored the cyber-bullying of federal judges by Trump himself, which U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman warned in 2019 were taking our nation into “uncharted territory” and risked undermining the “faith in the rule of law itself.”

“This obviously is a trend we’re seeing throughout public life, but I would suggest, the stakes in attacking the judiciary have graver implications,” Judge Friedman said, according to the Washington Post’s reporting. “And regrettably, the current President of the United States is feeding right into this destructive narrative.”

He continued. “We are witnessing a chief executive who criticizes virtually every judicial decision that doesn’t go his way and denigrates judges who rule against him, sometimes in very personal terms. He seems to view the courts and the justice system as obstacles to be attacked and undermined, not as a co-equal branch to be respected even when he disagrees with its decisions.”

Den Hollander’s murderous act killed a young man who would have likely been in his 50s in a nation that will be majority-minority, something that 46 percent of white respondents believed would “weaken American customs and values,” according to a Pew Research Center poll published in March of 2019.

That same survey, taken a full year before COVID rocked our world, found that a majority of people of all races surveyed predicted that 30 years from now “the economy will be weaker, health care will be less affordable, the condition of the environment will be worse and older Americans will have a harder time making ends meet than they do now.”

The last few months in the deadly jaws of COVID-19 have acted as a kind of cruel accelerant, a cosmic fast-forward to a dystopia where fear, anger and scarcity have hijacked our collective consciousness.

Exhibit A would be Sunday’s edition of the Asbury Park Press, whose front page proclaimed “Gun applications triple in Jersey,” “26 lifeguards at Long Beach Island test positive for COVID-19” and “Thousands of jobless are still waiting for check.”

New Jersey is not an outlier.

Just as millions of Americans have taken to the street in peaceful protests in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody, millions of their fellow Americans have become first-time gun buyers, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

“The early part of 2020 has been unlike any other year for firearm purchases — particularly by first-time buyers — as new NSSF® research reveals millions of people chose to purchase their first gun during the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the foundation website”

Thanks in large part to the work done by NSSF’s legislative team, the firearms industry was deemed essential in most states, and firearm retailers were allowed to stay open to conduct business. And conduct business they did, with NSSF-adjusted NICS figures showing year-over-year increases of 80 percent in March and 69 percent in April 2020. These strong increases led to more than 6.5 million NSSF-adjusted background checks in the first four months of 2020, up 48 percent from 4.4 million during the same period in 2019.

So, what’s driving this rush to arm? What’s sparked this creeping sense that our nation is unraveling and that our civil society is no longer capable of rising to the challenges we face, whether those are systemic racism or global warming?

Could it be a heavily armed federal government that has failed to institute an effective national public health response to a once-in-a-century pandemic that is likely to kill 200,000 Americans by Election Day, and has isolated us as a disease-infected global pariah?

Or perhaps it’s the realization that for all of our national hubris, our winner-take-all economy was based on a fragile model that made a tiny percent of people extremely rich while tens of millions of Americans struggled week to week for the basics.

We did not get here overnight. It wasn’t just Donald Trump’s divide-and-conquer modus operandi that has us on the precipice of imploding. I heard the tearing of our national fabric in the congressional debate several years ago over providing relief for the states hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy, when other regions of the country resisted helping.

This alienation between so-called red and blue states is clearly manifest in the refusal of Republican-governed states like Georgia, Florida and Texas to learn from New Jersey and New York’s COVID-19 experience, as if there was something innately inferior about states governed by Democrats.

And now, as the nation sinks deeper into disease and economic dislocation, our politics are increasingly fueled by a cynical fracking of these fissures that produces more hot gas to obscure reality.

There’s no doubt that part of what’s feeding our collective angst is the way the corporate news media represents our deteriorating national circumstance.

We are being pickled in a heavy rotation of video images of federal law enforcement officers launching tear gas rounds and beating protesters in Portland, Oregon. On Fox News, these images are used as propaganda that cast Trump as the guarantor of law and order. In fact, in an effort to stabilize his free fall among suburban female voters, the president’s campaign is warning that without such a robust response, disorder will spread from America’s “liberal” cities and overwhelm the tranquility of Main Street, Everywhere Else.

On MSNBC, the same footage is used to set up segments predicting that Trump will break the more than 220-year tradition of a peaceful transition of presidential power by refusing to accept the results of the election. This of course ratchets up the sense of dread that some strategists hope will juice turnout for Joe Biden as it sucks more and more Americans into a vortex of anxiety and fear.

What too many journalists fail to do in setting up these video clips is what MSNBC host Ari Melber did when he prefaced them with a contextual map of the limited area of downtown Portland where the events were playing out. For most people in that city, life continues pretty much as usual.

That footage only depicts what’s happening in and around one neighborhood in one city, but it serves as effective clickbait and in the process distorts our situational awareness about street conditions throughout the country, at a time when many people are cut off from friends, family and the larger world.

I recently heard the consequences of living in this virtual reality in the voice of a health care worker who is also a young mother in Ocean County, New Jersey. She told me that the arc of current events as depicted on Fox News had convinced her she needed to get a handgun for personal protection.

Who did she think was threatening her family, I asked her? She said, “The looters, just like we saw with Sandy.”

“No, I won’t be going”: Trump refused to pay respects to John Lewis lying in state

President Donald Trump said Monday that he will not be visiting the U.S. Capitol to pay his respects to the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who passed away earlier this month after a fight with pancreatic cancer.

“No, I won’t be going. No,” Trump told reporters outside the White House Monday without offering an explanation.

Just days before being sworn in as president in January 2017, Trump described Lewis—who was brutally beaten by police and white supremacists as he worked to advance civil rights in the 1960s—as “all talk” and “no action” in response to the Georgia congressman’s vow to boycott the inauguration. 

Lewis will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda for several hours later Monday following a private ceremony attended by members of the legislative branch.

The late civil rights leader’s coffin will then be moved outside to the Capitol steps for a public viewing from Monday evening through Tuesday afternoon.

Trump is daring us to stop him

President Donald Trump’s recent reelection campaign advertisement is straight out of the plot of a horror movie. Just days after he deployed federal officers to the streets of Portland, Oregon, his campaign released a 30-second television spot featuring an elderly white woman watching on her television the news of activists demanding a defunding of police. The woman shakes her head in disapproval as she notices a figure at her door trying to enter her house. She nervously calls 911, but apparently the activists she disapproves of have been so effective in their nefarious demands that the universal emergency hotline Americans rely on now goes unanswered. The vulnerable woman drops her remote control as the intruder enters her home, and we are only left to imagine the horror of what he does to her as the words “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” appear on the screen. In this dystopian version of America, only Trump promises law and order.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, supports the defunding of American police. He does not, and in fact, in keeping with his historic support for police, Biden has demanded increased funding for law enforcement. But Trump has already proven that he will not let truth get in the way of his desires, and therefore a little more digging on the part of voters and a little more forthright reporting on the part of journalists is necessary to understand exactly who is breaking American laws.

The paramilitary units from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that Trump has deployed to Portland have engaged in disturbing violations of human rights. They have used munitions to injure people, and acted like “thugs and goons” in the words of a Navy Veteran who was beaten with batons and pepper-sprayed in the face. They have arrested and detained people without documentation. Trump has defended their tactics saying the targets “are anarchists. These are not protesters… These are people that hate our country.”

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Director Chad Wolf took Trump’s characterization of protesters as “anarchists” to comical extremes in his public record of how and why his officers engaged with protesters. Saying that he “Condemns The Rampant Long-Lasting Violence In Portland,” Wolf used the words “violent” 76 times to describe what protesters have done to justify arrests and repression. Wolf’s definition of violence seems to almost entirely encompass property damage such as vandalism and graffiti. The closest that Portland protesters came to actual violence, it seems, was when they apparently, “attempted to cause eye damage to officers with commercial grade lasers,” and in another instance, “proceeded to launch aerial fireworks at federal property.”

The DHS records used the term “violent anarchists” 70 times and the term “protesters” only once, without making any effort to explain how exactly they distinguished “violent anarchists” from protesters, journalists or passersby. Nowhere in the document was there any documented behavior by protesters that came close to an attack on vulnerable elderly white women like the fictitious one in Trump’s ad. In not a single instance reported in the DHS account did a protester — or in Wolf’s words, violent anarchist — actually commit intentional violence against a human being.

Trump’s policy violates an idea that Republicans have long supported — that states ought to have the right to set their own laws and rules and that the federal government ought to respect that right. It also goes against the warnings that pro-gun Republicans have echoed for years — that mass gun ownership is necessary so that vigilant citizens can counter federal government tyranny of the sort that Trump has unleashed. Now that the kind of federal government overreach they have warned against for years is actually unfolding, there is nary a peep from the “gun rights” crowd.

It isn’t just Republicans who have embraced the march toward authoritarianism. Eighteen years ago Congress passed the Homeland Security Act to create the DHS — an agency with an Orwellian name — with 88 Democrats joining more than 200 Republicans in voting yes. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks prompted a reconfiguring of American society and government that reverberates today, unleashing excessive surveillance and harsh immigration enforcement, while doing little to address the factors that provoked the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the first place.

Yet year after year, Democrats have voted to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act and other aspects of the post-9/11 authoritarian architecture. Now even as DHS officers are being deployed by a president they strongly criticize, Democratic lawmakers are trying to tie up funding for the DHS with that of the Department of Health and Human Services, which, according to the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, is “making it more difficult for progressive Democrats to oppose.”

But Trump has abused the infrastructure of the post-9/11 state repression to a far greater extent than either Presidents George W. Bush or President Barack Obama. The Washington Post reported that Tom Ridge, the notorious DHS secretary under Bush, denounced Trump’s move saying the agency was formed to counter “global terrorism,” and that, “It was not established to be the president’s personal militia.” A former Bush-era DHS official, Paul Rosenzweig, characterized the deployment as “lawful but awful,” while seeing the phenomenon as clearly unconstitutional. Michael Chertoff, another Bush-era DHS secretary, told a Washington Post columnist, “While it’s appropriate for DHS to protect federal property, that is not an excuse to range more widely in a city and to conduct police operations, particularly if local authorities have not requested federal assistance.” Chertoff added that Trump’s move is “very problematic,” and “very unsettling.” If those GOP officials who served under Bush — who were considered the political villains of their time — are disturbed, Trump has indeed crossed a line.

But another figure from the Bush years is rearing his head under Trump and encouraging his authoritarianism. John Yoo, the infamous lawyer who helped craft the “torture memos” during the Bush administration’s “war on terror” to justify the CIA’s use of torture during interrogations, is apparently advising the Trump administration on how best to use his executive power to skirt congressional authority, the Guardian reports. In June, Yoo wrote in an article in the National Review, “Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency.”

Trump has made clear that norms, ethics, laws, and even the U.S. Constitution are merely suggestions that mildly constrain him and that can be tossed aside when needed. His modus operandi is to push the limits of what he can do and dare the nation to stop him. Will we?

Senate Republicans push back on White House demand to fund new FBI HQ near Trump hotel: report

On Monday, the GOP’s coronavirus stimulus proposal was revealed to contain funding to construct a new FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. — a proposal that could make the Trump Organization a lot of money, but that took Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely by surprise.

On CNN’s “OutFront,” reporter Phil Mattingly noted that Senate Republicans are not happy with the sudden inclusion.

“The bill [has] a $1.75 billion new FBI building in it,” said host Erin Burnett. “This is, would seem inappropriate to put pork in a bill like this.”

“This has been a major flash point of Republican negotiations over the course of the last several days between the White House and Senate Republicans,” said Mattingly, “and if you want to know how Senate Republicans really feel about it, take a listen to what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had to say.”

“Well, regarding that proposal, obviously we had to have an agreement with the administration in order to get started,” said McConnell in the clip. “And they’ll have to answer the question of why they insisted on that provision.”

“The Majority Leader is not very loose with his words, but he has very clear intent with what he was saying there, which is this is the administration’s proposal,” said Mattingly. “The administration tried to force this proposal into these negotiations, I am told, multiple times over the last several weeks. Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said earlier today, ‘I just don’t know why we’re doing this.'”

Watch below:

Right-wing media are killing Trump’s campaign

Even close allies of Donald Trump are flummoxed about why he hadn’t grasped earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic that it was in his own best interests to “at least pantomime[] a sense of command over the crisis or convey[] compassion for the millions of Americans impacted by it,” according to The Washington Post. 

Part of the answer, per the report, was “his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error.” But another factor was the existence of “a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News.” Trump, a malignant narcissist, is known to lash out at aides who provide him bad news so it appears that they’ve fed him a steady diet of the kind of Pollyannaish stories that are a mainstay of the conservative media’s coverage of the pandemic, and of his regime’s response to it.

Trump is running a historically awful campaign for re-election. At present, his twin pitches for a second term are his ability to pass a rudimentary test designed to diagnose dementia and a promise to deploy thousands of unidentifiable and poorly trained federal paramilitaries to American cities, against the protests of state and local officials, in the name of protecting statues and federal buildings from vandalism.

For anyone who consumes a balanced media diet, these strategic choices are inexplicable. While it’s true that as we approach 150,000 mostly avoidable deaths from the pandemic and millions continue to file for unemployment, he doesn’t have a lot to run on, a competent candidate would make an effort to show that he understands how this crisis is impacting people and demonstrate that he’s focused on containing the outbreak and rebuilding–whether or not it’s true. This is politics 101.

Polls find that Trump is losing to former Vice President Joe Biden on both of the quixotic issues he’s chosen to litigate the race; more voters question his cognitive abilities and physical stamina than do Biden’s, and while a majority of Americans oppose the removal of Civil War memorials, Biden is nonetheless more trusted to “effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues,” AKA “law and order.” And polls aside, Democrats cleaned Republicans’ collective clock running on healthcare against Trump’s argle-bargle about invading refugee caravans in the 2018 midterms, long before the pandemic hit.

But what seems like an incomprehensible strategy on its face makes perfect sense when you consider that, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is an avid consumer of conservative media who tends to be impervious to advice from experienced Republican campaign hands. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s been led astray by the conservative press.

I’m sure that if you look hard, you could find a conservative commentator or two who acknowledge the existence of peaceful protesters standing against systemic discrimination in policing. But you’d have to really look for them. The overwhelming majority of right-wing discourse about these protests is premised on the belief that everyone out in the streets are rioting, looting or engaging in vandalism. It is also a given in these circles that the protests are motivated by Marxism or a desire to destroy the “American way of life” or whatever other fanciful idea occurs to the conservative commentariat–anything other than racial injustice.

That discourse leads to a significant reality-gap. While there were scattered instances of vandalism and rioting early on, real reporters on the ground in cities across the country consistently describe mostly peaceful protests, with small numbers of people occasionally crossing the line and damaging property.

Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t ensconced within the right-wing media bubble have been alarmed and appalled at an endless stream of reports–almost always accompanied by viral videos–of unprovoked police violence against reporters, legal observers and of course protesters who were only “guilty” of refusing to disperse when ordered–or in many cases, guilty of nothing at all. That police brutality has contributed to an extraordinary shift in public opinion toward the Movement for Black Lives and away from Trump’s preferred narrative of what’s happening in American cities.

A similar dynamic may be driving Trump’s mystifying decision to make his ability to pass a simple dementia test–and his bragging that the doctors who administered it were shocked that he passed–into a news story. It’s the kind of attack that would be condemned as dirty and vicious if it were delivered by an opponent.

For those of us outside the conservative epistemic bubble, Joe Biden stutters, is prone to gaffes and suffers from occasional “senior moments” when he flubs a date or gets a number wrong. Most of us have had an older relative or acquaintance who was perfectly sharp and entirely “there,” as Biden pretty clearly is, but who had similar lapses. (My late grandmother did eventually develop dementia in her mid-90s, but she started having those “senior moments” 20 years earlier, when she was about the same age as Biden.)

While this line of attack is born of desperation as the Trump campaign has failed to land solid punches on Biden–a white man who’s been around forever and is well known as a moderate, mainstream Democrat–it’s also a  matter of faith in the conservative press that the “liberal media” are covering up Biden’s dementia, and that Trump would have a good chance of turning his campaign around if only he manages to expose the former Vice President as the drooling dotard they claim he is. As Greg Sargent reported a couple of weeks back, “Fox News has been relentlessly pushing the line that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia.”

It would be wrong to attribute Trump’s stunning decline in support among seniors–long a reliably GOP-leaning constituency that he needs to remain competitive in the must-win state of Florida–to these hamfisted attacks on Biden’s cognitive acuity. That decline is clearly a result of his gross mismanagement of the pandemic, and of his party’s consistent refrain that we must sacrifice the elderly and infirm on the altar of the stock market. But those attacks certainly can’t be helping.

The carefully constructed alternate reality presented by the conservative media is a double-edged sword. They keep the Republican base engaged by maintaining a constant state of anxiety about the horrors of immigrants, socialists, modest expansions of public health insurance, tax increases on the wealthy, etc. But while savvier Republican operatives rely more on polling and focus groups to devise strategy, Trump’s ego drives him–and the sycophants he surrounds himself with–to embrace their partisan propaganda as reality. And that appears rendered him and his campaign incapable of making the substantive and enduring course-correction that they so desperately need.

You can “see” PTSD in a person’s eyes, researchers find

A new study reveals that you can learn a lot about whether a person suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by looking into their eyes — specifically, at their pupils.

The study, published in Biological Psychology, found that individuals who suffer from PTSD display increased sensitivity to emotional stimuli and hyperarousal through their pupils. People who suffer from PTSD had greater pupil dilation than non-sufferers when exposed to images that were either threatening or happy; when there was a change in light level, their pupils showed reduced constriction compared to subjects in the control group.

The former responses were recorded to study the autonomic nervous system, which is largely unconscious and is responsible for regulating involuntary bodily functions like respiration and heart rate. The latter responses were recorded to study the parasympathetic nervous system, which is one of the three divisions in the autonomic nervous system, and is nicknamed the “rest and digest” system because of its role in extracting nutrients from food and conserving energy.

Through their studies, the researchers at Cardiff University and Swansea University & Swansea Bay University Health Board realized that PTSD sufferers may be hypersensitive to non-negative emotions as well as negative ones, which went against common assumptions about PTSD.

“The finding of increased emotional modulation of the pupil response in PTSD across positive and negative affective categories, rather than that of a specific threat response, was unexpected,” the authors write. They note that they were surprised that the heightened emotions linked to PTSD occurred when connected to images that would not be considered “threat related” or negative images. 

To come to their conclusions, the authors conducted an experiment in which “participants viewed images with emotional or neutral content.” They tested 48 people who had PTSD or were “trauma-exposed” without PTSD, and 17 controls. 

Researchers characterized their study as the first to investigate “primary physiological responses to emotional, but trauma-unrelated stimuli.” 

This is not the first recent scientific study to change the way we perceive the biology behind PTSD. In October a research study by Pennsylvania State University published in Nature Communications found that the ways in which male rats responded to traumatic stimuli had to do with how their brains are wired. There were 15 specific neural circuits associated with how long rats froze when exposed to something threatening (in their case, fox urine) and, in turn, whether they were especially prone to avoiding the traumatizing stimuli in the future. Most of these circuits were in the olfactory (smell-related) parts of the brain or in areas that regulate stress, such as the amygdala.

The authors speculated that there could be a similar link between specific neural centers of the brain and PTSD in humans, as previous studies have established possible links between PTSD and the hippocampus and amygdala.

Trump changed tune about pandemic as aides said “our people” in red states are getting sick: report

Media outlets heralded President Donald Trump’s “new tone” on the coronavirus last week, but the so-called shift only came after aides warned him that “our people” in Republican states were getting sick, according to The Washington Post.

After weeks of trying to downplay the coronavirus spikes around the country, Trump acknowledged last week during his first pandemic briefing in months that the health crisis would likely “get worse before it gets better” and urged Americans to wear a face covering, even though he has refused to do so publicly on all but one occasion.

The “shift” also came as polls showed even the president’s own supporters souring on his widely-criticized response to the pandemic. The U.S. has reported more than 147,000 deaths out of more than 4.2 million confirmed infections, according to Johns Hopkins University. That number is nearly twice as many as the next country on the list: Brazil.

“Trump’s shortcomings have perplexed even some of his most loyal allies, who increasingly have wondered why the president has not at least pantomimed a sense of command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans impacted by it,” The Post reported.

Sources close to Trump told the outlet that “the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.”

Trump has revived the coronavirus press briefings, and the White House has started a new working group led by Dr. Deborah Birx and senior adviser Jared Kushner as cases have continued to rise across the country.

The moves came after advisers began to show Trump maps and data illustrating that the spikes were among “our people” in Republican states, a senior official told The Post. They also showed projections that the spikes could soon hit key election swing states, such as Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

Ben Rhodes, who served as the deputy national security adviser under former President Barack Obama, questioned why Trump waited until the end of July to react to the spikes, which have impacted his re-election chances.

“The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now, where the economy is reopening, where jobs are coming back,” he told The Post. “And he just could not do it.”

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the outlet that Trump’s entire economic message was riding on his coronavirus response.

“The best thing that we can do to set our economy up for success and rebounding from the last few months is making sure our outbreak is in a good place,” she said. “People are not going to feel comfortable returning to activities in the community — even if it’s allowed from a policy perspective — if they don’t feel the outbreak is under control.”

But Trump was largely “unreceptive” to that message until recently, advisers told The Post, arguing that he was not “fully grasping the magnitude of the pandemic” and was “overly preoccupied with his own sense of grievance, beginning many conversations casting himself as the blameless victim of the crisis.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews disputed the report, arguing that Trump had handled the pandemic “early and decisively.”

“The president has also led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response — resulting in 100,000 ventilators procured, sourcing critical PPE for our front-line heroes and a robust testing regime resulting in more than double the number of tests than any other country in the world,” she told The Post. “His message has been consistent and his strong leadership will continue as we safely reopen the economy, expedite vaccine and therapeutics developments, and continue to see an encouraging decline in the U.S. mortality rate.”

But Trump’s detractors said the change in tone, if not action, was far too delayed. Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director before becoming an avowed critic of the president, said the president’s response to the crisis was not unlike his failed business ventures.

“His operating style is to double- and triple-down on positions and to never, ever admit he’s wrong about anything,” he told the outlet. “His 50-year track record is to bulldog through whatever he’s doing, whether it’s Atlantic City, which was a failure, or the Plaza Hotel, which was a failure, or Eastern Airlines, which was a failure. He can never just say, ‘I got it wrong, and let’s try over again.’ “

Rhodes predicted that Trump’s coronavirus response would go down in history as electoral self-sabotage, which could have been avoided by simply doing the bare minimum.

“There is quite a high likelihood where people look back and think between February and April was when Trump burned down his own presidency, and he can’t recover from it,” he said. “The decisions he made then ensured he’d be in his endless cycle of COVID spikes and economic disruption, because he couldn’t exhibit any medium- or long-term thinking.”