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New report shows more than 200 pregnant people have faced criminal charges since Dobbs decision

Police responded to a call that a pregnant woman was overdosing. When they arrived, they administered Narcan, the life-saving drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Afterward, they charged the woman with "abuse" of her “unborn child,” according to documents obtained by Pregnancy Justice.

This is one of 210 examples of pregnancy criminalization the nonprofit organization has documented in a report released last week that tracks police investigation and criminal court files involving pregnant people in the year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. A previous report from the nonprofit organization showed that more and more pregnant people were being charged in the decades leading up to Dobbs. The year since saw the highest number of prosecutions the research team has documented in a single year, report co-author Wendy Bach told Salon.

“The report shows how pregnant people are really under increased surveillance in all kinds of ways, in particular when there's a pregnancy loss,” Bach said in a video call. 

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The majority of cases documented in the report involved general criminal laws used to prosecute pregnant people. Ninety percent of charges were for some form of child abuse, neglect or endangerment wile 86% of cases did not require prosecutors to find evidence of harm to the fetus. Instead, these charges could be handed down if the defendant was judged to put the embryo or fetus at risk, noted Maya Manian, a law professor at American University who specializes in healthcare and reproductive rights.

“It just makes it easier to bring that charge and criminalize a person for their behavior during pregnancy,” Manian told Salon in a phone interview.

"The report shows how pregnant people are really under increased surveillance in all kinds of ways, in particular when there's a pregnancy loss."

Only one charge involved an abortion-specific crime under a now-repealed statute, and the remaining included criminal homicide, drug charges, and one charge of "abuse of a corpse." While the reproductive rights movement is often centered around abortion, the distribution of these court cases shows how expansive the legislation restricting pregnant people’s reproductive rights enacted over the past several decades, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and author of various books detailing the history of U.S. abortion.

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“What [anti-abortion groups] want to do is write the idea that a fetus is a person into as many laws and as many contexts as possible to eventually say to the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, ‘Isn’t it weird that a fetus isn’t a person in this other context?’” Ziegler told Salon in a phone interview. “Each prosecution, in a way, is a sort of break in the wall of building toward that national ban.”

The interconnectedness of the carceral system and the health care system in the context of reproductive rights can be traced back to the persecution of Black midwives in the South in the early 1900s, said Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

“Being pregnant, desiring pregnancy, and parenting your children does not absolve you from being at risk of criminalization,” Perritt told Salon in a phone interview. “In fact, based on this report, what we see is that it actually heightens that risk because people are being prosecuted, arrested and charged for things that they otherwise may not be criminalized for.”

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Almost all of the cases in this report involved drug use, most commonly methamphetamine and THC, the active drug in cannabis. In five cases, defendants were reported to have a medical marijuana card, suggesting some pregnant people were charged for taking legal medication, according to the report.

“What we do in these cases is activate a sense of disgust that a person who is pregnant is doing something that threatens the fetus, and we skip over the question of whether, in fact, the fetus has been harmed by it,” said Michelle Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who studies the impact of abortion regulations. “Because if the drug is illegal, then we can just say that by virtue of taking this illegal drug during pregnancy, she deserves a level of scrutiny, perhaps arrest, perhaps interrogation, perhaps prosecution.”

Nearly half of prosecutions in this report occurred in Alabama, whereas others were documented in Oklahoma, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi and Texas. In the report, nearly three-quarters of cases involved pregnant people who were low-income, and 68% of pregnant people with criminal charges were white. About 14% of pregnant people charged in the report were Black, 6% were Indigenous, and 4% were Latinx, although racial data was missing for about 7% of cases. 

"Each prosecution, in a way, is a sort of break in the wall of building toward that national ban."

Racial disparities are well documented in the health care and carceral systems that are affecting many of the pregnant people documented in these cases. Black women are more likely to be tested for illegal substances during pregnancy compared to white women, although they are less likely to test positive, according to a 2023 study published in JAMA Health Forum. Black and Indigenous mothers are also more likely to have Child Protective Services or a family surveillance system involved in their birth. 

“We cannot separate any of this from the economic, racialized and gendered context in which medical care is provided because it absolutely shapes the decision that people make to engage or not engage with care,” Perritt said.

Ultimately, in many of these cases referring pregnant people to the criminal justice system instead of the health care system harms health outcomes. The states in this study with the highest number of prosecutions also have some of the worst maternal and infant mortality statistics, which disproportionately affect the Black and Indigenous mothers who are also overly policed in and outside of healthcare settings.

The patterns of prosecuting pregnant people for drug use trace back to the crack cocaine crisis in the ‘80s, when it was thought that in utero exposure to crack cocaine would lead to a generation of "crack babies." That assumption, which mostly targeted Black mothers, turned out to be false — crack babies aren't a thing — but that same stigmatizing attitude has shifted with changes in the drug supply and is now directed toward pregnant people who use opioids and methamphetamine.

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The Pregnancy Justice report recommends strengthening Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protections as one way to reduce pregnancy criminalization. In its report, 57% of cases used information obtained from health care settings such as drug tests to make a criminal report. While many health care providers believe reporting this information can connect people to services, the reality is that it often has the opposite effect and ends up pushing them further away from care, Perritt said.

“This idea that medical care facilities or medical providers are safe spaces or safe people is not something that is universally experienced,” Perritt said. “That experience is going to be shaped by the identities upon which people experience oppression.”

Since the study was concluded in 2023, the research at Pregnancy Justice has found additional court cases that were not included in this report, and many cases were likely missed in their search, Bach said. With additional restrictions on reproductive health continuing to go into effect, experts agree that the number of pregnancy criminalizations are likely to continue to increase. For example, a Louisiana law went into effect this week designating the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances, making possession without a prescription carry a maximum five year prison sentence.

"Whether we're talking about reclassifying or scheduling medications, the attempt by states to criminalize self-managed abortion care, or, in the case of this report, folks being accused of child endangerment for not receiving prenatal care, the number of folks that are going to be caught in this web of criminalization is going to continue to grow," Perritt said.

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Rwanda reports dozens of Marburg virus cases, with 11 dead, alarming public health officials

Rwandan health authorities are working to control an outbreak of Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic disease in the same family as Ebola, that is spreading across the country. 

As of Oct. 1, Rwanda’s Ministry of Health reported 36 confirmed cases and 11 deaths due to the virus, which spreads between people through close contact as well as contact with surfaces that have been contaminated with bodily fluids. It is not an airborne virus like COVID-19, but it has a far higher death rate: as high as 88% with no vaccine or treatment.

Jennifer McQuiston, the deputy director of the division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that studies lethal viral diseases, told NPR that the speed at which more than two dozen patients were diagnosed was of particular concern, because it can take up to 21 days before people start feeling symptoms — meaning there could be far more cases forthcoming.

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“We're concerned about the number of cases that got diagnosed very quickly,” she said. “That indicates to us it's probably been circulating for a few weeks.”

There have been at least 15 prior Marburg outbreaks globally, but these usually occur in remote places. The virus originates in Egyptian fruit bats who live in caves, although some think it can transfer to other animals and then spread to humans. In the original 1967 outbreak in Marburg, Germany, scientists got the Marburg virus from working with monkeys in Africa. 

This is the first Marburg outbreak in Rwanda, where 70% of cases have been diagnosed in health care workers from two facilities in the capital city of Kigali. Although Rwanda has a robust health system to track and respond to the outbreak, some are concerned that the virus has landed in a metropolitan area, where it could potentially spread to more people. Meanwhile in Europe, it was reported Wednesday that two people have been hospitalised with the suspected Marburg virus in Hamburg, Germany. At least one patient had returned from treating patients with infectious diseases abroad, according to German authorities.

The World Health Organization and the CDC have stepped in to offer assistance in helping to control the outbreak. The WHO classified Rwanda’s national risk from the outbreak as very high and the global risk as low. Nonetheless, the WHO’s Rwanda representative Dr. Brian Chirombo said in a press conference Sunday that he believes the country has “the capacity and the ability to stop this outbreak very quickly.”

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CBS News delivered a veep debate riddled with falsehoods and lacking in fact-checking

Two old statements haunted my thoughts during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Republican nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee.

The first was an off-the-cuff remark that CBS’ former top executive Les Moonves said about Donald Trump’s late entry into the presidential race more than eight years ago: “The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he told a roomful of suits attending that year’s Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

He was referring to the ballooning ad spends by competing candidates, observing that “most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates.”

“It may not be good for America,” Moonves added jovially, “but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Mentioning this as a segue into analyzing Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan’s performance as debate moderators may not seem fair. O’Donnell, the CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor, and Brennan, CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent and the moderate for "Face the Nation,” bear no responsibility for their former boss’ moral rot. (CBS fired Moonves in 2018 following its investigation into multiple allegations of sexual assault and misconduct going back decades.)

Still, no longstanding institution enacts a philosophical about-face overnight, especially when the profession it is representing has been under attack for decades. An ascendant right-wing media ecosystem is devoted to tearing down the trustworthiness of legacy broadcast media.

The assaults have only become more virulent since Trump won the 2016 election with ample help from foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns.

The news and information consumer has not recovered from this and shows few signs that they will. Our inability to agree on a common set of facts and truths remains a mournfully repeated refrain, demonstrated within the substance of Tuesday night’s statements and rebuttals between the candidates.

But the moderators’ velvet-gloved handling of fact-checking, couched as clarification, was not enough to buttress the event’s anemic utility.

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O’Donnell and Brennan directly checked Vance's statements a few times. The first came early in the 90-minute telecast during a question about climate change tied to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.

When Vance characterized the scientific community’s finding that carbon emissions are driving climate change as “weird science,” the primetime anchor said at the end of his response. “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” Good on her.

Brennan got under Vance’s skin and he tried to pivot away from directly answering whether Trump’s plan for mass deportations would include separating children of undocumented migrants from their families, including those born on American soil, by incorrectly defining the Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH., as part of the “millions of illegal immigrants” supposedly destroying American lives.

“Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status,” she said, attempting to throw to O'Donnell for a topic change to the economy.

But Vance wouldn't let that go, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he said. “And since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.” Vance kept talking over O'Donnell and Brennan, ever so politely, repeated some version of, “Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to, Senator. We have so much…” until the producers cut the candidates’ mics.

This debate, hosted by CBS News at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, is the third and possibly final presidential candidate face-off of the 2024 election. It followed President Joe Biden’s campaign-ending match with Trump on CNN and Vice President Kamala Harris tapping in for the knockout on ABC.

Depending on who's doing the analyzing, it was as inconsequential as past pre-election veep matches or extremely important, considering that one of the contenders is the second to the oldest presidential candidate in history against whom there have been two assassination attempts.

Viewing the debates as an advertisement, Vance, who was polling as one of the least popular vice presidential contenders in modern times, had a much better night than Walz.

O’Donnell, Brennan and CBS News helped make that possible.

As most analysts warned before the debate began, a lack of real-time fact-checking aided the Republican nominee. CBS, which has the oldest primetime audience among broadcasters with a median age of 67.8, directed viewers to a QR code which, when scanned, would take them to the network’s fact-checking site. ("I love that CBS thinks their viewers know how to use a QR code," Jimmy Kimmel joked on his post-debate episode. "Their newest show is 'Matlock'.")

Of course, it could have eliminated that step by including a live scroll on the side of the screen dedicated to that purpose, which should have been easier to run in this debate since Vance doesn’t lie at the same volume and rate as Trump.

But CBS didn’t, likely out of concern that insisting on such a helpful tool would have led to the Republican nominees’ refusing to participate. And not without reason, since Trump backed out of a scheduled "60 Minutes" interview on the same day as the debate. 

CBS News’ official rules did not specify that O’Donnell and Brennan wouldn’t be allowed to fact-check – rather, to clarify unclear statements. That is, as we witnessed, not quite the same thing but more than enough to throw Vance slightly off-balance, especially since neither O’Donnell nor Brennan announced they’d be wielding this workaround during the debate. 

Instead, the co-moderators only informed viewers of the network’s line that the candidates would have the opportunity to fact-check each other’s claims. Anyone operating with a modicum of critical thinking could see how Vance would benefit from that decision.  

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So did Walz, by the way, when he inaccurately blurted “Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” and the moderators let that pass uncontested.

That right-wing manual says plenty of legitimately terrifying things, including the proposal Walz mischaracterizes. The specifics are as repugnant, if not more so. Project 2025 would have the Department of Health and Human Services require all states to report detailed information about abortions that are performed within their borders and include an invasive level of private data down to the reason for the abortion and the method used to perform it. 

It took me a few seconds to look that up – it’s on page 455 of the doorstop, in case you’re wondering. Viewers certainly could have as well, since the proceedings, though collegial, were dull enough for anybody to follow a second screen without missing much.

Or, and here’s a crazy idea, CBS News could have fulfilled its public service duty to provide accurate information to better inform their viewers' understanding of each candidate by pasting the manual's verbiage into a live scroll.

Relatively light fact-checking is better than none, I suppose.

This brings me to the second voice echoing in my memory throughout those 90 minutes, that of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

In recent months, O'Donnell has used his late primetime show “The Last Word” to take the establishment media to task, including his own network.

On the August day that reporters flocked to Mar-a-Lago for a “press conference” set up in a way that the audience could not hear most of the questions but all of Trump’s babbling and lies, the MSNBC anchor was beside himself.

He lamented the lack of a corrective live scroll in that situation too, but his ire wasn't limited to that. “Reporters understandably and incorrectly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions, but they don't know what an answer actually is,” MSNBC’s O’Donnell observes in his show-opening monologue. “Words spoken after their question marks are not necessarily answers.”

We've accepted that to be the case with our presidential debates too. But something else “The Last Word” host pointed out then is acutely relevant to Tuesday’s performance by CBS News: Most of the questions at that conference “were terrible, the silliest possible questions you could ask."

Norah O’Donnell and Brennan’s queries weren’t terrible, but they were poorly worded and organized, allowing the candidates to avoid accountability for past statements.

Walz’s epic flub in addressing his disproven claims of having been in Tiananmen Square when the 1989 protests and massacre took place was more a factor of his lack of debate skills than the moderators’ pointed questioning.

But the questions posed to Vance concerning his past statements about backing a national abortion ban lacked enough specificity in their phrasing for the Ohio senator to claim he never supported one.

It would have been as simple as Norah O’Donnell citing in her question when he did, which was on a January 2022 podcast, along with his exact quote. Believe me when I say I am no fan of Megyn Kelly, but she did a better job of holding Trump accountable for his misogyny in 2015 by doing exactly that, line by line.

Allowing Vance’s lie about his and Trump’s stances on abortion to go unchallenged gave the impression, as one pregnant undecided voter on CNN’s panel put it, that the Republican platform on reproductive rights is “more progressive” than it is.

The moderators’ choice to leave until the end questions about the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s plan to contest the results also did voters a disservice. This, indeed, is the most important question dangling before us in this election and should have been asked first. O’Donnell did not specifically mention the insurrection in her question, leaving Vance and Walz to say the words themselves.

Admittedly, this led to one of the evening’s most animated exchanges. Telling, too, when Walz directly asked Vance if he accepted the legitimate results of the 2020 elections and Vance responded with what his opponent accurately described as “a damning non-answer.”

We’ve been conditioned to view these action spikes for their entertainment value, assessing them through the framework of whether they made our candidate of choice look better. That view has always been antithetical to the civics purpose of television political debates, but we forgot that long ago, and certainly after candidates figured out how much being telegenic trumps honesty and platform positions.

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All this forgets how abnormal this election is, to say nothing of our national politics and inability to effectively govern. Those factors are so distracting that viewers might not have noticed that not a single question was asked about the uptick in attempts by foreign actors, including Iranian hackers and Russian propagandists, to influence the election’s outcome by flooding us with misinformation.

Or the very pertinent issue of what each candidate plans for Ukraine and NATO, both of which are directly tied future of liberal democracy in Western Europe and the ascension of Russian and Chinese influence on the global stage.

I would have traded the time spent listening to Vance explain his change of heart on Trump (it’s the naked political ambition, stupid) or Walz’s Hong Kong hooey to hear both weigh in on that since their outcome stands to affect everything from our economy to our safety.

But these omissions prove part of what Moonves said to be accurate – the debate was great advertising, especially for Vance. After Tuesday, Republicans who were going to vote for Trump despite his increasing incoherence and lack of impulse control can feel better about it.

The Vance who showed up at CBS seemed reasonable, misled the audience confidently and smoothly, and wrapped an extremist agenda in a fuchsia tie and a few folksy stories to seem family-friendly. An authentic if bumbling Walz wasn’t ready to slap down his lies. The people best equipped to do that, CBS’ moderators, barely rose to that duty.

To echo the other O’Donnell on MSNBC, it was 2016 all over again.

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Harris backs striking dockworkers, Trump blames labor stoppage on the Biden administration

Vice President Kamala Harris expressed support for the 47,000 dockworkers striking for better compensation and job security on Tuesday, putting the onus on the shipping industry to prevent a potential economic fallout by satisfying organized labor's demands.

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, said that workers should be able to "negotiate" for better wages, but stopped short of endorsing the strike or the International Longshoremen Association (ILA), the dockworkers' union on the East and Gulf Coasts.

"This strike is about fairness,” Harris said in a statement. “The Longshoremen, who play a vital role transporting essential goods across America, deserve a fair share of these record profits.”

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The shipping industry recovered from a 2023 slump to record billions of dollars in profits so far this year. Harris also pointed out that, during his presidency, Trump "blocked overtime benefits for millions of workers" and  "appointed union-busters" to the National Labor Relations Board. More recently, she noted he "said striking workers should be fired."

For his part, Trump took the opportunity to snipe at Harris, blaming the strike on "inflation brought on by Kamala Harris’ two votes for massive, out-of-control spending," likely referring to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which Harris helped pass with a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Inflation has steadily declined since passage of the IRA.

After months of stalled negotiations over higher wages and restrictions on automating jobs traditionally held by workers, the ILA went on strike this week, shutting down more than a dozen major ports. Failure for both parties to reach a deal could cause severe delays in the transportation of goods and raise prices.

President Joe Biden could have invoked the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to suspend the strike for 80 days while negotiations continued. However, he chose to let the strike proceed, saying he wanted to let workers exercise their collective bargaining rights. He and Secretary of Labor Julie Su have called on all parties to return to the negotiating table and give workers the "benefits they deserve."

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“One rough hour”: Experts say Trump’s call for a “violent” purge should be taken as a serious threat

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently claimed that "one real tough, nasty" and "violent" day of police brutality would bring an immediate end to crime in the nation, raising alarms for experts on authoritarianism about the danger to democracy should Trump's remarks ever translate into policy.

The former president's comments came during a Sept. 29 campaign rally in Erie, Pa., as he bemoaned what he falsely claimed is "rampant" crime plaguing the nation. Specifically highlighting incidents of theft from stores, he called for police to be able to "do their job" and crack down on the perpetrators, lamenting that the "liberal left won't let them do it."

"One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately," he told the crowd after falsely linking crime to migration. Recent FBI data shows that overall crime in the U.S. has dipped in recent years, while analyses of historical crime data indicate immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.  

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Geoff Eley, a University of Michigan professor of contemporary history who studies nationalism and the far-right, told Salon that Americans should take Trump's comments seriously even if it's often hard to know his true intent. 

"We need to take his comments very, very seriously, partly because this time he's bull-in-a-china-shop determined to get his way, partly because (by contrast with 2016) he's surrounded by a core of smart and ruthlessly committed helpers and ideologues, whose ideas are most definitely coherent, thought-through and focused," Eley said in an email.

Trump's "political accomplishment," Eley said, has been in imparting to large swaths of the country that "democracy, proceduralism, civility, speaking across differences, and the rule of law have outlived their purposes — they're fictions, illusions, tricks, and they no longer matter."

Despite Trump's insistence both at the rally and throughout his campaign that crime "has gone through the roof," data indicates that the opposite is true.

Recently released FBI stats show a 2.4% decrease in property crime between 2022 and 2023. Preliminary data comparing periods of 2024 ranging from the first quarter to the first half to the same periods of 2023 also indicated a drop in violent crime following the COVID-19 isolation-era uptick, suggesting this year will see a continued decline in the nation's crime rate. 

While the FBI stats reflect a jump in shoplifting — from 999,394 recorded incidents in 2022 to 1,149,336 in 2023 — those values roughly mirror the numbers reported before the pandemic in 2019, according to NBC News. A July Council on Criminal Justice report found that incidents of shoplifting during the first half of this year were 24% higher than the same period last year, but just 10% higher than during the same period in 2019. 

Trump's linking of crime to the rise in immigrants attempting to cross the border also appears to sidestep the data. A 2023 Northwestern study, which used incarceration as a proxy for crime, found that immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crimes. 

Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College and Columbia University who studies democracy and authoritarianism, said that the bottom line of Trump's Sunday comments — and likely the interpretation of the ordinary American voter — is that Trump is "doing what all politicians do: trying to paint his opponents as ineffective, ineffectual, and him as being able to come in and solve these problems."

"Trump understands the kinds of things that rile his supporters up and that worry them, so crime, disorder, these are things that not just his supporters, but generally Americans, are quite concerned about," she said in an interview. "The more he emphasizes them, the better it is for him, especially because, over the last three and a half, almost four years now, the country's been run by Democrats."

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In an effort to bolster his appeal to voters, he's creating "this image of disorder and crime that is not entirely out of touch with reality" but is juxtaposed with misinformation through his assertion of "exploding crime" and placement of blame on immigrants, Berman explained.

The difficulty in parsing exactly what the former president means also makes it hard to determine how literally to take him, even if his comments do inspire worry. Berman quoted reporter and columnist Salina Zeto's 2016 assessment that the press took Trump "literally, but not seriously" while his supporters took him "seriously, but not literally." 

"This is why rhetoric matters but should be taken differently than actual behavior," she said. "You want to listen to what people say because it tells you something about what they're thinking, but you want to be able to differentiate that from actual actions."

Trump, who had been impeached twice and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York earlier this year, has a documented history of inflaming his base through violent rhetoric. His Jan. 6, 2021 speech at the Ellipse, claiming a stolen election following his 2020 defeat, resulted in hundreds of people storming the U.S. Capitol.

Last month, his repeating an inflammatory conspiracy theory falsely accusing Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, of abducting and eating pets during the presidential debate sparked unrest in the city, which received dozens of violent threats in the following days and is still recovering from the unwanted spotlight. 

The former president has also previously voiced support for police violence, once calling the police response to the nationwide social unrest in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 murder "a beautiful thing to watch." In 2017, he also said: "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”

Trump's presidency reflected this endorsement of police violence. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he deployed federal agents to Portland, Ore., to forcefully quash the demonstrations. Department of Homeland Security officials went on to break up crowds with stun grenades and tear gas, pelt protesters with impact munitions and detain demonstrators in unmarked vans.

That October, Trump also praised the actions of the federal task force that killed Michael Reinoehl, a Portland antifa activist who had been wanted for fatally shooting Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer. According to The New York Times, a reconstruction of Reinoehl's death based on witness and officer accounts raises questions about whether the officers made any serious attempt to arrest him before opening fire. 

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Trump's comments resemble the "strategy of tension" of Italian neo-fascists of the 1970s, or what is contemporarily known as "acceleration," Eley said. Where the GOP presidential candidate aligns is in his use of "provocations and 'plain speaking,'" in effect giving voice to beliefs once considered too inflammatory to be spoken, to "ramp up the tension with the conscious hope that things will fall apart and open the space for the truly effective MAGA-related breakthrough," he speculated.

"As I've argued in my writings about fascism, this is the really frightening breach — the willingness to embrace the necessity (and virtue) of political violence," Eley argued. "As January 6 dramatically showed, this is where we've actually arrived."

The Trump campaign has sought to downplay the Republican candidate's remarks, with spokesman Steven Cheung telling Politico that Trump was “clearly just floating it in jest."

“President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws,” Cheung said in the statement.

Still, Berman, also a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for European Studies, said that she worries upon hearing Trump make comments like his "violent day" remarks because the action they could reflect should they be literal is "obviously, not only ludicrous but profoundly non-democratic, illiberal, non-constitutional." Even if the language remains just that, such rhetoric evinces "some lack of understanding of what can actually be done within the rule of law," she said.

"Even if [immigration or crime] is a legitimate concern of yours, nobody should want a government — nobody should want a president who seems to indicate that he might be willing to engage in large-scale violence or semi-lawful acts in order to deal with this issue," she said.

She noted that voters who take Trump seriously and not literally are more likely to take his comments as him voicing a commitment to addressing their concerns over crime should he become president again. 

"What his supporters would like is someone who takes crime and immigration seriously. Totally fair within the rules of the game," she said. "But you should sanction — that is to say, criticize, threaten, not vote for — someone who says, 'Look, I'm going to take these legitimate concerns of yours, and I am going to address them in ways that go beyond the framework of the Constitution, that go beyond the boundaries of the rule of law, that stress the norms and institutions of our democracy.'"

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Sean “Diddy” Combs faces 120 new sexual assault allegations

The ongoing legal saga for Sean "Diddy" Combs shows no signs of abating, as the disgraced rapper was just hit with 120 new sexual assault allegations.

Lawyer Tony Buzbee on Tuesday at a press conference in Houston said that he was representing the sizable group of accusers whose claims stretch back for more than two decades. 

“The biggest secret in the entertainment industry, that really wasn’t a secret at all, has finally been revealed to the world,” Buzbee said, per The Washington Post. “The wall of silence has now been broken.” 

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“We will expose the enablers who enabled this conduct behind closed doors. We will pursue this matter no matter who the evidence implicates,” the lawyer continued, per NBC, noting that the allegations point toward “many powerful people … many dirty secrets." Buzbee indicated that the claims include “violent sexual assault or rape, facilitated sex with a controlled substance, dissemination of video recordings and sexual abuse of minors.”

“It’s a long list already, but because of the nature of this case, we are going to make sure, damn sure, we are right before we do that,” Buzbee continued. “These names will shock you.”

WaPo reported that lawyer Andrew Van Arsdale will also represent the involved plaintiffs, whom the lawyer said are approximately an equal number of men and women ranging from age 9 to 38. Van Arsdale also observed that the 120 lawsuits will be filed in California, New York, and Florida starting next month. The entertainment mogul's lawyer, Erica Wolff, vehemently denied the allegations in a statement Tuesday. 

“As Mr. Combs’ legal team has emphasized, he cannot address every meritless allegation in what has become a reckless media circus. That said, Mr. Combs emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors. He looks forward to proving his innocence and vindicating himself in court, where the truth will be established based on evidence, not speculation," the attorney said, per WaPo.

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Brown bananas, crowded ports, empty shelves: What to expect with the US dockworkers strike

Getting any product to consumers, whether it's a can of sardines or a screwdriver, requires that supply chains function well.

The availability of labor is essential in each link of the supply chain. That includes the workers who make sure that your tinned fish and handy tools smoothly journey from their point of origin to where they'll wind up, whether it's a supermarket, hardware store or your front door.

Amazingly, 90% of all internationally traded products are carried by ships at some point. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hard not to notice the supply chain disruptions. For U.S. ports, there were many bouts of congestion. Demand for goods that were either more or less popular than they would normally be became volatile. Shortages of truckers and other freight service providers wreaked havoc on land-based and maritime transportation networks.

Consumers became exasperated when they saw all the empty shelves. They endured price spikes for items that were suddenly scarce, such as hand sanitizer, computer equipment and bleach.

I'm a scholar of supply chain management who belongs to a research group that studies ways to make supply chains better able to withstand disruptions. Based on that research, plus what I learned while writing a book about labor and supply chains, I'm concerned about the turmoil that could be in store for cargo arriving on ships.

 

Concerns over pay and technology

The International Longshoremen's Association's six-year contract with the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports expired on Sept. 30, 2024, at midnight without an agreement. About 45,000 dockworkers are now on a strike that has paralyzed ports from Maine to Texas. Only military cargo and cruise ships, as well as oil, gas and liquid chemicals, can go in and out.

It's the first such work stoppage for the East Coast ports since 1977.

Labor and management disagree over how much to raise wages, and the union also wants to see strict limits on the use of automation for cranes, gates and trucks at the ports in the new contract. The union is seeking a 77% increase in pay over the next six years and is concerned that jobs may be lost because of automation. When management offered a nearly 50% raise, the union rejected it.

Dockworkers on the West Coast, who are not on strike, are paid much higher regular wages than their East Coast and Gulf Coast counterparts who are on strike. The West Coast workers earn at least an estimated US$116,000 per year, for a 40-hour work week, versus the roughly $81,000 dockworkers at the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports take home, not counting overtime pay.

Management is represented in the talks by the U.S. Maritime Association, which includes the major shippers, terminal operators and port authorities.

 

What to expect

Starting on Oct. 1, 36 ports, including those in Philadelphia and Houston, ceased operations due to the strike, blocking almost half of the cargo going in and out of the U.S. on ships.

If the strike lasts just a day, then it would not be noticeable to a typical consumer. However, businesses of all kinds would no doubt feel the pinch. J.P. Morgan estimates that a strike could cost the U.S. economy $5 billion every day.

Even if the strike were to last only a day, it could take about five days to straighten out the supply chain.

If a strike lasts a week, the results would quickly become apparent to most consumers.

Some shipping companies have already begun to reroute their cargo to the West Coast. Even had there been no strike at all, costs would have risen and the warehouses could have run out of room.

The effects on everything from bananas and cherries to chocolate, meat, fish and cheese could be severe, and the shipping disruption could also hamper trade in some prescription drugs if the strike lasts at least a week.

If the strike were to last a month or more, supplies needed by factories could be in short supply. Numerous consumer products would not be delivered. Workers would be laid off. U.S. exports, including agricultural ones, might get stuck rather than shipped to their destinations. Inflation might increase again. And there would be a new bout of heightened economic anxiety and uncertainty – along with immense financial losses.

All the while, West Coast ports would face unusually high demand for their services, wreaking havoc on shipping there too.

 

Yes, we'd have no bananas

My research group's latest work on supply chain disruptions and the effects of various transportation disruptions, including delays, quantifies the impact on the quality of fresh produce. We did a case study on bananas.

This isn't a niche problem.

Bananas are the most-consumed fresh fruit in the U.S.

Many of the bananas sold in the U.S. are grown in Ecuador, Guatemala and Costa Rica. About 75% of them arrive at ports on the East and Gulf coasts.         

Although bananas are relatively easy to ship, they require appropriate temperatures and humidity. Even under the best conditions, their quality deteriorates. Long delays will mean shippers will be trying to foist mushy brown bananas on consumers who might reject them.

Alternatively, banana growers may opt to find other markets. It's reasonable to expect to find fewer bananas and much higher prices – possibly of a lower quality. Flying bananas to the U.S. would be too expensive to sustain.

Fresh meat, seafood, cheese and other refrigerated foods could spoil before they can complete their journeys, and fresh berries, along with other fruits and vegetables, could perish before reaching their destinations.

Tons of fresh produce, including bananas arriving after Oct. 1, could end up having to be discarded. That is unfortunate, given the rising food insecurity rate in the U.S.

 

1947 Taft-Hartley Act

More than 170 trade groups had urged the Biden administration to intervene at the last minute to avoid a strike.

Even now, the government can invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allows the president to ask a court to order an 80-day cooling-off period when public health or safety is at risk.

However, President Joe Biden reportedly does not plan to invoke it. Instead, he has urged the two sides to settle their differences.

So if you're planning to bake banana bread or were thinking you might get an early start on your holiday shopping, I'd advise you to make those shopping trips as soon as possible – just in case.

This is an updated version of an article first published on Sept. 28, 2024.

 

Anna Nagurney, Professor and Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies, UMass Amherst

 

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

“Completely shocked”: What Lauren Greenfield learned following LA teens and their phones for a year

Lauren Greenfield and I both know quite a bit about what it means to be steeped in the world of teens and internet culture, albeit for different reasons.

During our recent "Salon Talks" interview, I exchanged anecdotes with the award-winning documentarian, photographer, and mother of two about growing up inextricably close to — yet enduringly far from — the reality of how social media has shaped childhood today.

As the oldest of five kids (with my youngest sibling being 14), I've watched (as a third parent of sorts) in squirming discomfort at the ways in which Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat have permeated my sister's generation at an entirely unprecedented level. When Greenfield began working on "Social Studies," her new docuseries on FX, which follows this social media through a group of Los Angeles teenagers, her sons were 14 and 20. "For the 20-year-old, he used social media lightly, talking to his friends, but really he was a reader," Greenfield told me. "My youngest is online all the time. We had constant battles over screen time and he gets all his news from TikTok. So in that kind of spread, I think the way young people use social media completely changed."

Greenfield is no stranger to documenting youth culture. In 2006, she directed "Thin" for HBO, a feature-length documentary examining women dealing with eating disorders. Two years later, Greenfield released "Kids + Money," a short film focused on a group of Los Angeles teenagers to analyze how finances affect young adults' lives. One of her most incisive photography projects, "Girl Culture" (2017), presented a monograph showcasing American girls under the influence of pop culture and society's ever-narrowing definition of beauty. Yet, despite being a journalist and parent in the digital age, making "Social Studies" surprised her.

"Sometimes I would say, 'How many people in the group have been sent a nude or been asked to send one?'" Greenfield says. "All the hands go up. 'How many people have struggled with an eating disorder, disordered eating?' A huge amount of hands go up. Things like suicidal ideation which we didn't talk about in the beginning, I really did not know in our group how many people had struggled with that." It goes on, too. Greenfield's series details how kinky sex is all the rage amongst teens, while those who prefer "vanilla sex" are simply uncool. 

While the details are disconcerting, that's part of what Greenfield wants "Social Studies" viewers, and especially parents of teens and teens themselves, to grapple with. "I hope it will be eye-opening to parents, but I think it also might create more empathy with teenagers that really, they're struggling with very difficult circumstances," she says. "It's not just like they're going on their phone 'cause they don't want to listen to you or don't want to do their homework."

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

As a documentarian and a photographer, some of your past work has allowed adolescents— especially girls — to be seen. Why did you want to take this particular project on?

In this series there are no experts, there's no scientists, there's no professors. The kids are the experts. I felt like it was really important to hear from teenagers, see how they're using [social media], see it in their lives. There's a portion that's verite, we're following them in their lives, but they also get to tell us directly what's happening and they get to kind of break down the presentational side and tell us the honest truth. Really, they're truth-tellers about how hard it is for this generation, so I thought it was really important to hear from them. It was a really big commitment for them to be in this, and they're also giving up a portion of their privacy, sharing their phones, and I think they did it because they did feel like it was important to be heard.

"Social Studies” follows a group of teens around Los Angeles for a year examining how their generation grew up online. When do you think social media started to really become embedded in teen culture?

When I started this project, my two boys were 14 and 20 and they were from two different generations. For the 20-year-old, he used social media lightly, talking to his friends, but really he was a reader. My youngest is online all the time. We had constant battles over screen time and he gets all his news from TikTok. In that kind of spread, I think the way young people use social media completely changed. Part of why I did this series was so people older than that, parents, teachers, siblings, and even kids themselves could see what exactly kids are doing online. We had access to their phones, and so we show that in the series.

"One girl told me, 'Half of my friends have eating disorders from TikTok and the other half are lying.'"

Trust must have been huge. How did you convince a group of teens to partake in this series? And what about their parents?

Their parents had to, of course, be on board too because we're filming in their homes. We also hear from a lot of the parents in the series. 

I think a lot of the young people felt it was really important. I think that they felt social media was having an impact on them. A lot of them felt the negative impacts. Some of them also saw the positives, but definitely, almost every kid said if they had a magic wand and could get rid of it, they would rather be in their parent's generation. I think they felt a sense of purpose in doing that.

I do slow journalism, we had a lot of time. I spent a year with them, we shot 150 days and collected about 2000 hours of social media. There was time to get to know each other, for trust to develop, and for them to really see what my intention was with this series. Also, I think they felt aligned with what they saw in past work like “Girl Culture” and “Fast Forward.” They could see that it was also about hearing from them and their voices.

There's a scene during a focus group where some of the teens share that they would feel better without their cell phones and without social media, but they feel tethered to it. That's a very scary sentiment.

One of the things that we did was have these group discussions. I think the young people really wanted to talk with each other about this thing that they're all going through, but they don't really get to talk about it in this way outside of it. Nobody had phones in the discussion group, and I think it was very freeing for them to just connect.

That's kind of where they end up, at the end saying, “We just need to learn how to be people again, and it's so relieving to just talk face to face.” For people older than this generation, I think that seems like the most obvious and, in a way, silliest answer, but actually, it's so important to have that connection and they're the ones who say it's so healing.

Your film “Thin,” examined a group of women struggling with eating disorders, and in “Social Studies” we see that many teen girls are plagued with disordered eating as a result of the social media that they consume. What are the parallels and differences with body image that you've seen as media has evolved?

I went into this thinking body image and social media were going to be a big thing, but really I had no idea of the scale. When I made “Thin,” 1 in 7 women had an eating disorder. When I started this, one girl told me, “Half of my friends have eating disorders from TikTok, and the other half are lying.” We hear from men too about how body image issues affect them. I think the difference now is that the triggers are ubiquitous and 24/7.

If you have the slightest predisposition towards an eating disorder, the algorithm is going to take you by the hand and show you how to [develop an eating disorder] very well, how to be inspired, and technically how to do it. Then for people who don't have a predisposition towards an eating disorder, they're still going to get triggered on the dieting of it all, and the comparing yourself to people with perfect bodies, often bodies that are not even real.

When I started this work it was about the retouched photos in the magazines, but now it's your friends who are retouched. Also, the people that they're looking at like the Jenners are very art-directed and manipulated, so it's a really, really tough comparison culture.

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At one point, one of the teen's moms in the series says that she doesn't want to look at her daughter's TikTok. How does parents' involvement vary?

I think we see in the show that there are a lot of caring, well-meaning parents who are completely clueless about what's going on. I count myself as a parent [who was] in that group when I began this. For me, there were so many things that were revelations that I then could take home and talk to my boys about. I think that this is going to be a learning curve for parents.

I think the show will be educational for parents and I think it will also be of interest to teenagers who maybe are not shocked like their parents, but who are relieved to see other people going through similar experiences and who will feel seen in the show. When we premiered at Telluride Film Festival, afterward, there was a mother and daughter who came up to me and the daughter who was about 20 said, "It was really awkward and kind of uncomfortable watching this with my mom because she knows nothing about my life, but I'm glad that she does now."

So I hope young people watch it with their parents. We've also made a parent guide and an educational curriculum for schools and parents to start those conversations.

The series covers cyberbullying, racism, sexual predators, overdosing, and even the threat of school shootings. Most of these dangers have been around for a long time, but teens today are facing them in an especially aggressive way. Can you share your thoughts on that?

"It's like an opiate. We don't expect drug addicts to self-regulate. I don't think we can expect kids to self-regulate."

I've looked at youth culture for 30 years. My first book was actually about teenagers in LA and how they're influenced by some of these same values: celebrity, materialism and image. I think the thing that's different now is it's like everything on steroids 24/7. Whereas kids used to maybe compare themselves to the people they knew, the popular clique, the people in their school, now they're comparing themselves to the entire world.

And now if you are bullied, the whole bigger community is going to know about it. We see in episode one, Sydney gets slut-shamed and it goes online and the whole school knows about it, but really, people beyond the school know about it too. If you have a fight and you lose the fight, it's filmed and people are going to see it. I think the peer pressure and this feeling of people watching you and being worried about what your peers think is just under a magnifying glass.

Over the summer, the surgeon general called on Congress to issue a warning label on social media similar to the one that we see on cigarette boxes and tobacco products, and that was due to its effects on young people's mental health. Do you think that something like that could actually be effective?

Well, this day has been very exciting because I just came from a meeting with the surgeon general. We were on a show together and it was amazing to talk to him. I am in such awe of what he's doing. I think it's so brave the way he's saying we need to have an advisory on social media apps saying they can be mentally harmful to young people. That's actually what Sydney says in episode five. She says, once people knew the connection between lung cancer and smoking, regulation followed, and we can see there's a connection between social media and mental health.

I think one of the unique things about this series is it's all from the kids' voices and from their lives. I think in the scientific community there's been debate over whether there's correlation or whether there's causality. I think in the show you see, it doesn't matter. They're making the connection. They're saying, “I go on social media, I lose four hours like that, and I feel sad and depressed,” or, “I'm comparing myself against this person. It makes me feel really bad about myself,” or, “I'm going down this algorithm and my eating disorder is getting worse.”

I hope that people can start talking about what we can do together collectively instead of debating the research. I think what the surgeon general is recommending is amazing. Regulation on the part of the government, like all other media is regulated. The tech companies changing their algorithm to be in the best interest of kids instead of whatever will keep them on the longest. We see how when there's features like “likes” that's so important to kids, they're wired to care about popularity.

It's so addictive. I think the mistake that we as parents sometimes make is getting upset at our kids for staying on too long, and I had those battles with my son a lot. Now I see it's like an opiate. We don't expect drug addicts to self-regulate. I don't think we can expect kids to self-regulate, and I don't even think it's fair to put it on parents. I think that we need institutions, the tech companies and the government to also step in on what's basically a public health crisis.

I think we see how relieving and how different it is for young people when they're not on [social media]. I think encouraging those spaces is great, and I think the companies could do a lot to make it less addictive.

"I would ask, 'How many people in the group have been sent a nude or been asked to send one?' All the hands go up."

Comparison culture is a huge part of “Social Studies” and of everyone who is on social media’s life. At one point, Sydney Shear says, "Social media is more about looking good and appealing to what other people like." Can you elaborate on that?

I think it's interesting. The surgeon general was saying that one of the things that alerted him was he was worried that young people were not having as much happiness and joy. I think that the constant looking over at what other people are doing kind of takes the joy out of life because you're never good enough, and teenagers already are insecure about that. It's just endless, looking at the entire world and whether it's your body being thinner, or in the series, a lot of kids talk about how there's a Caucasian body type that's the ideal. The kids of color feel less than and say things like, "I think it would just be easier if I was white."

We see it with college pressure. Instead of it being a time where kids are discovering what they want to do in life, where's the right place for them, they're all applying to a very small group of schools and looking at who gets in when they do not. I think that's just made it so hard, seeing what everybody else is doing constantly and what other people who may not even be real or realistic and comparing yourself to them.

What was the most shocking or unexpected thing you learned during the time you spent with these kids?

I think the scale of it was really shocking to see sometimes. I would ask, “How many people in the group have been sent a nude or been asked to send one?” All the hands go up. “How many people have struggled with an eating disorder, disordered eating?” Huge amount of hands go up. Things like suicidal ideation which we didn't talk about in the beginning, I really did not know in our group how many people had struggled with that. There were so many stories about that, we couldn't even include them all. So the scale was really shocking.

A lot of the specifics were really shocking. There was this TikTok trend called “devious licks” where kids destroy things at school. We had a conversation about how kids learn about sex, and a lot of them volunteered when they were exposed to pornography first, and the ages were very young. Then they started talking about how kinky sex was in fashion and BDSM was in fashion and you weren't cool if you just liked vanilla sex, that completely caught me off guard. I was completely shocked and tried not to have my jaw be on the floor when we were in the group, and then went home and asked my boys, “Is this real?” That's a question I never would've thought to ask them. They completely validated and said, "Yeah, that's what we're seeing." 

I hope it will be eye-opening to parents, but I think it also might create more empathy with teenagers that really, they're struggling with very difficult circumstances and it's not just like they're going on their phone because they don't want to listen to you or don't want to do their homework.

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How America changed post-Dobbs — and how the fight for abortion rights continues

The night the Dobbs decision was leaked, feminist writer Jessica Valenti wailed. She crawled into bed with her husband, sobbing, saying “My daughter, my daughter.” When it was made official in June 2022, she again wondered how she was supposed to protect her daughter when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

Eventually, she turned her despair into action, quickly starting a newsletter called “Abortion, Every Day.” At first, Valenti wasn’t planning on starting a publication. She was just so angry and committed to not missing any ban, any court case, or any anti-abortion tactic that might pop up. Today, the newsletter is a thriving hub and go-to destination for all abortion-related news in the post-Dobbs landscape (sometimes featuring Salon's reporting), highlighting the news almost daily and putting it into context. 

“My joke has become that I should have called the newsletter 'Abortion, Every Hour,'” Valenti told Salon in a video interview. “That’s how quickly things are changing; it’s complete chaos.” 

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Indeed, it is. But Valenti decided to take the platform a step further and turn it into a book.

“The newsletter is sort of here one day and gone the next,” she said. “It lives on the website, but it does feel sort of temporary.” Hence, her publishing "Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.” Salon spoke with Valenti to discuss how the media reports on abortion access and reproductive rights, and what those in despair can do right now. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The book is a compilation of your newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. You do such a good job of putting into context what's happening in real time. I'm curious if you can share why you decided to extend this project into book form, and if you could share a little bit about what that process was like. 

"Any abortion denied is a tragedy. Some of those tragedies are going to have different mental health and physical health outcomes."

As much as I do try in the newsletter to contextualize everything and connect the dots to the broader narrative, I really wanted to be able to do that in something tangible, in something that you could hold and have. The newsletter is very much about keeping everyone updated and providing some order to the chaos. But I was thinking of the book as something that people could use, something that gives them the information and the language they need to do the work they're interested in doing when it comes to abortion. Whether they're a seasoned activist who's already out there, or maybe someone who is new to the issue, who feels uncomfortable and doesn't know quite how to articulate something, I wanted to create something that was super accessible for anyone, no matter what their level of engagement on the issue. 

And with the election coming up, I wanted to capture this particular moment in time. I imagine we'll look back in a year from now, and some of these trends will be the same, and a lot of them will be different, right?

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I appreciated how you prefaced the book by saying some of the things you write about now may have changed by the time someone is reading this. I bet that made for an interesting challenge in writing the book. 

It was difficult. I just finished taping the audiobook version, and even as I was reading it out loud and seeing it for the first time in a while, you're like, well, there's been an update on that, and that's changed. It’s challenging because things do change every day. I tried to pick issues that I thought would stand the test of time, and also that demonstrate these broader trends. Like, what happens in Florida with the ballot measure is going to be different than when I was writing about it. But attacks on democracy are still going to be there. And having an understanding of that is really important.

It was definitely challenging because you sort of instinctively want to make sure you're covering everything, but you have to put that idea to the side and just be okay that there is no way that you can capture everything that's going on with this issue.

In Chapter 1, you write about how abortion is usually seen as an ending. Even in the rhetoric in which we use to describe an abortion — the termination of a pregnancy. But you write it's very much the opposite for many. Abortion can be the start of something. And as you share with your readers, that was true for you and your abortions. I'm curious, how do you think people can communicate the shift in tone? That it can be an opportunity, not an ending. 

"We're coming from this place of letting them frame the debate, and coming from a vantage point of this is a necessary evil, rather than a proactive moral good."

I think such a huge part of it is undoing the stigma. And I think part of undoing that stigma is not talking about this issue apologetically — not feeling like I have to tell you why it was important that I had access to this basic health care. And that's why I framed it that way and told my own story because I think that talking about the lives, the choices, and the paths that abortion made possible for people, is a really important reminder to folks. 

I feel really confident if you talk to most people about their abortions, and you ask, “What did your abortion make possible for you?” they're going to have some really incredible answers. 

In Chapter 3, you talk about the debate on who deserves abortion care and who doesn't, especially in this post-Dobbs landscape. It’s so noticeable in the media that more attention is given to these stories of those who wanted to be mothers and were denied care. But I can’t help but think so many stories are being left behind, and as you said, women who don't want to be pregnant are being portrayed as murderers. What is the path forward to embracing a message that the “why” doesn't matter. 

I fall into that trap myself too, right? It’s difficult not to because I think my instinct is to provide evidence for the horrors of this. You want to change hearts and minds. You know what is compelling. But it does leave people behind. And I think it does open up windows and doors for Republicans to say, ‘Well, yeah, you're right, a rape victim should have access, and here's your bulls**t exception.” We have to remember not to allow them to frame the debate. 

We’re coming from this place of apologeticness. We're coming from this place of letting them frame the debate, and coming from a vantage point of this is a necessary evil, rather than a proactive moral good. I think talking about the value of women’s and pregnant people's lives, futures and decisions is a big part of that. And recognizing that any abortion denied is a tragedy. Some of those tragedies are going to have different mental health and physical health outcomes for people, and it's important that we talk about all of them. But we're not going to get anywhere by leaving people behind and we run the danger of replicating, I think, the same mistakes that we made with Roe.

I found your chapter on birth control very interesting, especially how you brought up the trad wife and wellness influencers, some of whom are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control. Can you elaborate on the consequences of this, and how does this ultimately strengthen the anti-abortion movement’s campaign on restricting access to birth control?

The thing that I worry about most with this campaign against birth control, and specifically this really culturally insidious piece of it with the trad wives and the wellness influencers, is that anti-abortion activists and legislators are taking advantage of a very real issue — which is medical sexism. [These are] real issues that women have with all sorts of medication, not just birth control, and they're tapping into this valid, legitimate fear and concern that women have, and they're exploiting it. 

And that is what I find so egregious about the entire thing. And they know that feminist language, feminist rhetoric, feminist ideas, resonate with people and resonate with young women They're successful in painting this really negative picture. When let's say, they start doing certain kinds of restrictions, which we've already seen in some cases like with Title X funding, they can paint it as protecting women, which we've seen all of them do in all sorts of ways when it comes to abortion restrictions. But it becomes a lot easier for them to pass those restrictions without voter outrage — like a 24-hour waiting period, right? I worry about that chipping-away approach going unnoticed. 

I wanted to talk about the phrase "abortion ban" with you. As you point out in your book, mainstream media outlets don't always use it. It’s frequently reported that there's this law, in this state, restricting access to abortion with this specific gestational limit, and it has these specific exceptions. I got a sense from your book that you sympathize with the media, because there is this pressure to be objective with all of this information. At the same time, it can almost be as if reporters are unintentionally supporting the anti-abortion agenda. How, in your opinion, should journalists be describing abortion bans and their exceptions in their reporting?

I do have a lot of sympathy for them. Especially when you're talking about individual reporters who are beholden to editors, who are beholden to senior editors, who are beholden to publishers — it's not just obviously one reporter's singular decision. But like, in a perfect world, I think we would just call things what they are. An abortion ban is an abortion ban, right?

And I wish they wouldn't use the word exception. Or if you’re going to write about exceptions, say what Republicans call an exception, right? Because that is objectively true. That is honest. That is factual. It’s impossible to say that Mississippi has a rape exception if no rape victims in Mississippi can get an abortion. That's not an exception.

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In your book, you also talk about how anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are targeting the helpers, but you put a little bit of a positive spin on that. Yes, they are targeting the helpers, but the good news is that they know people are paying attention and doing something about it. For people reading this who want to help, what would you suggest?

That's a really good question. I think, what is so incredible about the way that people have risen to the occasion since Roe was overturned, is that there are so many different ways to help. I think for so long, people sort of thought that the only way that I can be like an activist or do something was to like be out with a picket sign or be really knowledgeable about an issue. There's so much work that's required to help each and every person get the care that they need.

"It’s impossible to say that Mississippi has a rape exception if no rape victims in Mississippi can get an abortion."

And so it really can be anything from volunteering, giving money, to sitting on the phone as an abortion navigator. There are a million steps between someone's positive pregnancy test for an unwanted pregnancy and then getting to the clinic. Generally what I tell people is to look who is already doing work in your community and see what they need. I think that that is the best starting point. 

What else do you hope people take away from your book?

I think knowing that the anger, sadness and horror that they feel is fine and understandable. And that it also can be used to do something. That we don't have to feel stuck in it. I think that is one of the hardest things about this moment with a lot of issues. It's easy to feel sort of frozen with the overwhelm of it all. I really want people to understand that it doesn't have to be that way. That you can move out of that stuck, frozen feeling and into something better, especially when you're looking at the incredible community of people who are already doing work on this issue.

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Trump supporter destroys pricey “Taylor Swift guitar” purchased at auction as “a joke”

A clip of a Texan Trump supporter named Gary Estes has gone viral after he purchased what was believed to be a Taylor Swift-autographed guitar for $4,000 at a local charity event auction and then performatively destroyed it with a hammer in front of everyone, as a "joke."

Although his actions conveyed a strong message, Estes later told NBC News that he has no grudges against Swift personally, saying, "There was nothing malicious or anything about it. It was just a joke at an auction that we had to raise money for kids, right? And that's all it was. There was nothing mean about it, nothing bad about it. It was just a joke that they were making up on the stage, and we just followed through with a joke."

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"She’s an incredible artist": Harris shows gratitude for Swift endorsement

Auctioneer Craig Meier, a spokesperson for the Ellis County WildGame Dinner that donated its proceeds towards agricultural-based education efforts for local youths, said the guitar-smashing was "a funny, light-hearted thing."

"I know maybe it seemed to be malicious, but everybody was laughing," Meier said. "There were people there, at the time, who joked around that he's mad because he doesn't know how to play the guitar." 

That being said, there was most definitely an underlying political message to Estes' actions at the auction that day.

"Taylor Swift, it became a political thing, and that was kind of the gist of it, just a light-hearted bit of a dig at Taylor for coming out politically and entertainers using their influence to influence politics," Meier added.

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The billionaire pop star, who has been on the Eras Tour for two years, has been at the center of ire from Trump and the right-wing because of her liberal views and endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Variety reported that Swift including a voter resignation link in her endorsement statement on Instagram following the Harris vs. Trump presidential debate attracted more than 400,000 people to the government's sight in one day.

The smashed guitar — which was never owned or played by Swift personally — was thought to be one of many items that the singer signs that are distributed to charitable causes to be purchased by people who are, usually, fans. But, in a twist, Variety revealed on Wednesday afternoon that that was not the case by any stretch.

Per the outlet's reporting, "the Ellis County WildGame Dinner presented the guitar with a signed CD insert but the guitar itself was not signed."

"At the end of the day, thank you, Taylor Swift," Meier said. "Whether he hung your guitar on the wall or whether he hit it with a hammer, it really doesn't make any difference. In the end of the day, the kids are the ones that are going to benefit from it. I don't care if he set it on fire [or] put it in a shrine in his house, he paid $4,000 for it."

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“It’s a total dream”: Alison Roman on heading to television, First Bloom and her favorite snacks

It's been a long time coming: Alison Roman will soon be on your TV screen.

A new partnership with Tastemade will bring Roman’s beloved digital series “Home Videos” to television. The series, which has only been available on YouTube, debuts on the Tastemade streaming channel on Oct. 2. (This comes several years after Roman had filmed multiple episodes for a CNN+ show, which didn’t end up airing amid the streaming platform’s dissolution in 2022). 

Roman, who is well known for a wide variety of viral recipes like “The Stew” and “The Cookies,” is one of the foremost voices in modern cooking discourse, and is personally one of my absolute favorites within the entire, wide-ranging landscape.

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Bestselling cookbook author Alison Roman offers “Solicited Advice” in her new podcast

Roman's energy, which comes across equally in both written and video form, is loose, convivial, casual — the perfect pal to have in the kitchen to help calmly, kindly walk you through a recipe, no matter if immensely simple or outrageously challenging. 

For me, this energy is perfectly encapsulated in her Thanksgiving 2019 YouTube video, which was equal parts entertaining, funny and genuinely informative. Not to mention, packed with stellar recipes and top-tier tips. 

(Another early exposure to Roman was her “Lemons” book within the Short Stack collection, which is one of my favorite single-ingredient focused cooking series of all time. Roman’s book was just perfect, distilling every aspect of the lemon and then guiding the reader through the bevy of ways the citrus can be used, both in savory and sweet applications.)

Yet in recent years, Roman has expanded beyond written recipes and fun videos with a unique newsletter, an advice podcast and also a store in upstate Bloomville, New York, fittingly called First Bloom. Recently, she announced the store would begin shipping some items, as well as the first volume of the First Bloom Zine, which includes recipes “to help you cook from what you might find inside the shop.” 

Roman spoke with Salon Food about the transition from YouTube to television, what inspired First Bloom and her current three favorite ingredients (other than anchovies, dill and lemon). 

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Hi! How does it feel to know that videos that were once intended for a YouTube-only audience are now making their way to television via Tastemade? What's that transition like?

It’s a total dream to have something that you self-produce, self-make and put your money and spirit behind get the seal of approval from a company and a brand that has a huge reach and is focused on food. It's really nice and it was totally unexpected and super welcome. I'm looking forward to seeing how the audience expands and how they respond. It's great for people to be able to watch the show on TV.

I love the idea of First Bloom. What initially led you to conceptualize that? Can you speak a bit to what it's been like operating the store?

For me, it was important that the store feel like a grocery store that belongs to the place that it's in. I didn't want to just make a Brooklyn store and put it in the Catskills. I want it to be focused on upstate New York’s ingredients, makers and farmers and to make it feel like a celebration of all of the wonderful things that are happening up there.

It also serves as a nice meeting place for people in the community, if they're visiting or live up there. I also want it to be a nice experience. I don't think grocery stores need to always have fluorescent lights and weird music. I think it should be warm and inviting and you should want to spend time in there and feel excited to go to the store. 

Of course, your affinity for ingredients like anchovies, dill and lemons is clear, but I was curious what other ingredients you've been feeling especially fond of lately? Would you be able to name a top three?

I've been eating a lot of roasted seaweed, dark toasted pretzels and a lot of kimchi. 

What stands out for you as a formative moment that got you into cooking or food at large?

I don't know if it was a formative moment. It was a very immersive process and I feel like I kind of fell in love with cooking over time and became clear that this is what I'm going to do. I would also say, a formative moment was my first job because that was really what solidified that this is where I should be.

What’s your biggest tip for cutting down on food waste? 

Don't buy too many ingredients at once, especially perishables. Buy as many pantry items as you want, because those will never go bad. Make sure to use all of any ingredients you buy. If you are slicing fennel for salad, save the stem and put it in your salad too, or save it for stock or broth.

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I adore "Nothing Fancy" and "Dining In" (I'm not a big dessert guy, so I haven't cooked from "Sweet Enough" nearly as much, to be fair). What's on the agenda for a potential fourth book?

I'm working on it right now, so I can't say too much about it. It'll come out next year and I can tell you all about it then!

Congrats on beginning shipping First Bloom products, which was just announced. I'm also super intrigued by the Zine. What can readers anticipate discovering in those? 

Those are like mini cookbooks focused on the ingredients that we sell at the store. We get such a wide variety of customers and not everybody who comes into our store is familiar with cooking, or even me as a person, so they're like, why would I need preserved lemon? Or how do I use it? So the zine explains how to use it and offers a recipe for it. Or, if you only shop in our store and you're deciding what to make for dinner, you can use a recipe from the zine and get all the ingredients from our shop. 

That felt like the most helpful way to encourage people to cook and to bring these ingredients home and turn them into something. I think that especially in the colder months, it can get repetitive, so it’s a little book of inspiration.

I also realized that it's not always easy for people to get to the store. So if you live in Arizona, you could still kind of get a sense of the place. And I think that's nice to share.

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Republicans are extremely mad that CBS fact-checked JD Vance’s lies about Haitians

Republicans are crying foul after CBS' Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan, one of two debate moderators for the vice presidential showdown on Tuesday, fact-checked false claims by Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, that "illegal immigration" was the root cause of a crisis in Springfield, Ohio.

Vance himself admitted in the past that he was "creating a story" about Haitian immigrants to draw attention to the apparent suffering of his constituents, who now face bomb threats from people who think Springfield is the epicenter of immigrant pet-eating and other crimes.

Blaming journalists for their own missteps has become a common tactic for Republicans to divert attention from poor performances or outright falsehoods. Former President Donald Trump hardly waited for Brennan and CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell to commit any apparent transgression, complaining that “both young ladies have been extremely biased Anchors!” barely two minutes into the debate on Truth Social. (O'Donnell and Brennan are 50 and 44 years old, respectively.)

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JD Vance claimed a false police report backed up his lie about Haitians eating cats, WSJ reports

In this case, Vance repeated his claim about Haitian immigrants early in the debate, prompting Brennan to interject that many of them had "legal status." Vance then complained that “the rules were that you were not going to fact check me" before trying to explain that the "illegal immigrants" could apply for asylum through the CBP One application and be granted legal status by the federal government. Midway through his speech, and with Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., trying to get in his own responses, CBS cut both of their mics.

The New York Post editorial board, declaring the fact-check "a load of horse manure," echoed Vance's invocation of CBP One and claimed that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been abusing the process by potentially allowing 1,000 immigrants in per day, even if they're only seeking "better economic opportunity" rather than escaping from persecution. The right-wing tabloid did not mention that Haiti is in the throes of a political and humanitarian catastrophe where murder and kidnapping is rampant — and that the vast majority of asylum applications have historically been rejected.

The Biden administration has even been deporting Haitian migrants back to their country on chartered flights.

Brennan's fact-check and O'Donnell later clarifying that there was "no widespread fraud" in the 2020 election provoked a furious response by Republicans on social media within minutes of those happening.

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"Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!" Trump declared on Truth Social. "Norah just made a statement about the Election, not a question. She’s having a bad night!" he wrote in another post.

Some of Trump's Republican supporters also joined the protest. Former vice presidential prospect Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fumed on X that the moderators "offered two gratuitous editorial statements, (one of them misleading), taking a shot at JD Vance under the guise of 'fact checking.'"

Fox News' Brit Hume, crowing that Vance won the debate, said that the debate moderators were "obnoxious" and that it felt like a "three-on-one" ganging up on the Ohio senator — repeating the line Trump used to blame his poor debate performance on the media. His former colleague Megyn Kelly was more concise: "F you CBS – how DARE YOU,” she wrote on X.

When ABC News fact-checked Trump during his debate with Harris, the GOP nominee and his supporters likewise railed against the network for holding him accountable rather than reflecting on a performance that prompted the fact-checking in the first place. The backlash may have persuaded CBS to relegate fact-checks to an opt-in, "second-screen" experience rather than correcting the candidates live, generally allowing Vance and Walz to speak without interruption from the moderators, with the rare exception by Brennan.

The decision by CBS angered some journalists who accused the network of sacrificing ethics in a vain attempt to assuage Republicans who want to make up stories with impunity.

“If there’s one thing Vance has learned from Trump, it’s that lying to get ahead is OK," former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote on Substack. "If you get caught, just double down and lie some more. Who’s going to fact check you? Well, apparently not CBS News.”

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Trump backs out of “60 Minutes” interview after appearing “scattered” and incoherent in Wisconsin

Former President Donald Trump backed out of an interview with "60 Minutes," bucking a decades-long tradition for presidential candidates appearing on the program, CBS announced Tuesday.

The news station said both Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump had previously agreed to appear on the special, airing Oct. 7 special.

“After initially accepting 60 Minutes' request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump's campaign has decided not to participate. Pelley will address this Monday evening. Our election special will broadcast the Harris interview on Monday as planned,” the network said in a statement.

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Trump’s campaign communication director Steven Cheung claimed Trump never agreed to the show in the first place, an assertion challenged by sources familiar with the matter. 

“Fake News. 60 Minutes begged for an interview, even after they were caught lying about Hunter Biden's laptop back in 2020,” he said in a post on X. “There were initial discussions, but nothing was ever scheduled or locked in. They also insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.”

But sources told CNN that CBS news anchor Scott Kelley was indeed scheduled to interview Trump at his Mar-a-Logo club on Thursday, as well as attend a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Trump appeared on "60 Minutes" multiple times before he launched his political career and again as a presidential candidate in 2016 and in 2020, when he walked out on host Leslie Stahl after getting frustrated with her questions. The former president said he is still waiting for an apology from CBS.

"Where's my apology? They should apologize. They were wrong on everything. So I'd like to get an apology,” Trump said at a press conference in Milwaukee on Tuesday in which he repeatedly fumbled his words and showed signs of potential cognitive decline.

The 78-year-old first confused the leaders of North Korea and Iran, and then suggested that 34 soldiers who suffered traumatic brain injuries from an Iranian attack during his presidency were merely experiencing "headaches." 

As The Washington Post reported, Trump "was especially scattered and hard to follow" at Tuesday's event. Several of his remarks were unintelligible, including a claim that Democrats want to "keep Black and Hispanic children trapped in family government."

In a post on X, Sen. Brian Shatz, D-Hawaii, said Trump's confused speech in Milwaukee, along with his withdrawal from "60 Minutes," is enough raise questions about the former president's health.

"I think it’s reasonable to watch this clip, add the withdrawal from a 60 minutes interview, and wonder if there’s something actually going on. I don’t know- maybe he’s fine, but it’s not a wacky or nasty thing to inquire about," he wrote, linking to video of Trump's speech.

With just over a month until the election, Harris and Trump have no other debates scheduled. Harris' interview with CBS correspondent Bill Whittaker will air as scheduled on Oct. 7, CBS announced.

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Can New York Democrats deliver in 2024? Inside the plan to “reach more voters than ever before”

All eyes are on the Empire State in the battle for the House, where there are at least five toss-up House races that could make or break a majority for either party. In the state, Republicans are fighting to hold onto seats they won in 2022, while Democrats are working to rebuild neglected party infrastructure.

In 2022, Republicans flipped four House seats in New York and held on in a close race in New York’s 22nd District. Although Democrats chipped away at those gains, retaking the Third District in a special election in early 2024, these five districts, alongside two other New York districts Democrats have identified as competitive, could be House majority-makers in 2024. By some estimations, the races in New York State delivered the House majority to the Republicans in a year that otherwise saw the GOP perform historically poorly for a midterm election. 

This year, however, Democrats in New York seem to be feeling optimistic. They feel that the issues in 2024, particularly the focus on abortion, are more favorable to them than the crime-focused campaign in 2022. They also see Rep. Tom Suozzi’s victory in the special election in New York’s 3rd District as a template that they can work from in the general election.

This year, Democrats like Rep. Pat Ryan, who was one of the Democrats to hold onto his seat in 2022, told Salon that the party's new infrastructure gave the campaign the ability to “knock more doors, make more phone calls, and reach more voters than ever before.”

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A New York Republican flipped his district red, then hired his mistress and his fiancé's daughter

Democrats have said they were caught flat-footed by voters' perceptions of crime in the state. Others have argued that the Democrats inherited a party that was hollowed out in the wake of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation. Others still have pointed to the quick turnaround between redistricting and the 2022 general election as a hurdle in the 2022 campaigns.

A spokesperson for the DCCC, Ellie Dougherty, told Salon that the New York Democrats see the current issue set as more advantageous than the focuses in the 2022 campaign, saying that Democrats are “laser-focused on delivering on critical issues impacting their communities like protecting reproductive rights, lowering costs, and strengthening the border."

“Meanwhile, their Republican opponents have repeatedly peddled extremism and propped up corruption, which is why New Yorkers will reject them in November,” Dougherty said.

In 2024, Democrats face a different political landscape compared to 2022. Instead of a gubernatorial race at the top of the ticket, there is a presidential race. In years past the presidential elections have been a boon to down-ballot Democrats in New York because of high turnout in the heavily Democratic state.

While high turnout could still help Democrats, former President Donald Trump is polling better in New York than he did at this point in 2020. A recent Siena College survey found Trump with 39% support in New York. A survey from Siena College taken in late September 2020 found that Trump enjoyed just 29% support at this point in the race. Trump ended up losing the state with 38% support in New York in 2020.

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State Democrats are facing issues beyond the presidential race. According to a recent Siena College survey, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval rating has sunk to an all-time low of just 39%. New York City Mayor Eric Adams was also recently indicted for allegedly exchanging favors in return for illegal donations from the Turkish government.

Democrats also think that the scandals of former Rep. George Santos, who represented the Third District before Suozzi, and the recent scandal surrounding Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who gave part-time jobs to both his paramore and the child of his fiancée, has helped deflect Republican attacks against Adams’s alleged corruption.

In addition, the New York State Democratic Party is touting the “coordinated campaign,” an effort to get Democrats elected that initially drew comparisons to past promises to invest in down-ballot races but seems to be more serious than previous such endeavors.

What the coordinated campaign aims to do is to take pressure off of House campaigns by organizing a ground game on their behalf. So far, the state Democratic Party has opened up 40 field offices in the state, hired 100 full-time staffers and recruited 20,000 volunteers dedicated to things like canvasing and voter outreach.

Separately the Democrats have launched a new program aimed at organizing the party’s voter contact and outreach data and making it available to partner organizations. The Democratic firm TargetSmart was brought on board to help update and manage voter files in the interest of tracking voter outreach and Stac Labs was hired to help coordinate field efforts in New York. 

In a statement issued Sept. 20, the state party indicated that the coordinated campaign effort had already seen volunteers knock on some 325,000 doors and make more than 1 million phone calls.

Whether the coordinated campaign lives up to the hype, it’s clear that the effort from the state party is already above and beyond what the party did to help down-ballot Democrats in 2022. In 2022, Hochul’s gubernatorial campaign was the closest the party came to having a coherent statewide effort.

The national party is also dedicating significant resources to New York. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dedicated some $3.5 million to electing Rep. Tom Suozzi in a special election earlier this year. This is only a fraction of the more than $21 million spent on the race but represents a significant investment from the DCCC.

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Tim Walz wins the nice guy debate

Writing about a debate on the morning after always feels more like theater criticism than political analysis. How did they look, how did they sound, did they come off as authentic and real or were they phony and glib? Were they believable to the faceless Real Americans watching being asked to decide which of them to vote for? But that's what these televised debates really are. The substance is usually secondary because they've practiced their lines and have a specific message they want to impart regardless of the topic they're being asked to address. They're political rituals that we use to decide if the person appears to be someone we want to watch perform the role of whatever office they are seeking.

The worst debate ritual we've all ever witnessed happened last June when President Joe Biden was seen to be doddering and incompetent. It wasn't that most Democrats disagreed with his policies to the extent that he articulated them or were unhappy with his record, quite the opposite. It was his performance, and it resulted in him having to withdraw from the race. One of the best debates of the last few decades was the one after that, when Vice President Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump. The former president's performance revealed him as unprepared and incompetent while the vice president was effective and commanding. Trump has retreated into a negative feedback loop ever since.

The interesting thing about both of those debates, as consequential as they were, is that neither of them seem to have moved the polls very much. Biden was behind by about 2-3 points in the polling averages after the debate and today Harris has a 2-point lead in the same averages. It's all within the margin of error. It's mind-boggling to me how this race could be so close but if those polls are correct (a dicey assumption) the country is closely divided and nothing seems to change that.

We are cursed with having to re-run the last election because Donald Trump has convinced most Republicans that he has a right to be president because the last election was "stolen" from him. What he says or does is irrelevant to that question as far as they are concerned. They want a restoration. The rest of us are voting against that. It's really not more complicated than that.

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"Focused on the future": Vance dodges Jan. 6 questions at debate

There are issues at stake, of course. Republicans are obsessed with foreigners being put in their place, whether it's here at home or overseas (although they do seem to have a soft spot for American adversaries.) They don't believe everyone should have access to affordable healthcare, that climate change is real, guns should be regulated or that women have a fundamental right to control their bodies. But they do believe the rule of law only applies to other people. Democrats believe the opposite. In the age of Trump, these issues have become proxies for which team you're on and for the most part, those teams can easily be defined as Trump vs Not-Trump.

While Vance may have been nicer than expected they still liked Walz more.

In light of that, it's very hard to see how a vice presidential debate could possibly change anything and last night's event between JD Vance and Tim Walz almost assuredly will not. The two men obviously came into the debate with some very specific performance strategies and they both did what they needed to do. Vance obviously decided that his goal was to shed the intellectual extremist "cat ladies" persona and portray himself as the smart conservative who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy." He is very adept at changing roles, having even changed his name several times, so this came very naturally to him. Walz clearly wanted to highlight his record and show his wonky side with lots of details. He came across as less polished than Vance but effectively made his points on the issues the campaign wanted him to raise even if his performance wasn't as slick.

Mostly they were agreeable and collegial, just a couple of Midwestern guys having a friendly disagreement after which, under other circumstances, they would go out and have a beer together. That performance was a bit over the top, in my opinion, certainly Vance's who has all the charm and warmth of a King Cobra. Walz is a genuinely nice guy but he could have been a little less accommodating to Vance's shape-shifting.

I suspect that Vance may go viral with some of his answers though. His lies were overwhelming and the fact-checks were brutal. Walz got dinged for saying that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 when he was really only there for the demonstrations afterward (and he called himself a knucklehead for saying it). But Vance denied that he had supported a national abortion ban when there is written proof that he did. He whined about the moderators "fact-checking" him —- a real beta boy move. He mansplained to the female moderators, which is something he just can't help doing even when he's trying not to be a flagrant misogynist. And with Olympian-level chutzpah, he said that Donald Trump saved Obamacare. That's just for starters.

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And then there was the big one: Vance refused to answer whether the 2020 election was stolen. It came toward the end of the night but it was Tim Walz's finest moment and the most memorable of the debate:

For everyone tonight, and I’m gonna thank Senator Vance, I think this is the conversation they wanted to hear and I think there’s a lot of agreement. This is one that we’re miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say—he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. I will just ask, did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance responded with his clumsiest evasion of the night, a weird pivot to federal censorship, an issue that has urgency only among the most online right-wingers.

And then Walz delivered the coup de grace by bringing up the absence of Mike Pence:

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JD Vance has said in the past that he would have done what Mike Pence refused to do. Even with his slick delivery, he was unable to finesse that reality on the debate stage. We all know that if he had said anything otherwise, there is an orange man down in Florida who would have flipped his blond lid.

CBS ran a snap poll after the debate and this is what they found:

Politico's snap poll of debate watchers found an obvious partisan split, with independents notably declaring Walz the winner 58% to Vance's 42%.

It appears they both accomplished what they set out to do when it comes to issues and the debate watchers were happy to see a convivial debate. But while Vance may have been nicer than they expected they still liked Walz more. I suspect that may end up being more important than any single thing either of them said.  

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Ina Garten says a memorable interaction with Oprah Winfrey inspired the title of her new memoir

In the conclusion of her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” Ina Garten reveals the inspiration behind her book title. The title, she writes, can be credited to a chance meeting with Oprah Winfrey back in 2010.

“I spoke about how lucky I was at each phase of my career because it seemed whatever I was most interested in doing was exactly what the world wanted at the time,” she writes of the speech she delivered while accepting the Matrix Award for Women in Media. “I was lucky that I was interested in food and cookbooks at a time when the world was interested in food and cookbooks. I was lucky that Food Network was looking for home cooks when they found me, and lucky that they refused to take no for an answer. Lucky.”

Afterward, Garten took her seat on the stage “right next to Oprah,” she writes.

“Immediately, she turned and smacked me on the arm, saying, ‘You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck,’” Garten recalls Winfrey telling her. “‘Actually, I have been lucky,’ I started to say,” she writes. “And then she smacked me again.”

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Sorry, Ina Garten, you're wrong this time: The subtle power of the bay leaf

Garten then says Lesley Stahl referenced Garten’s conversation with Winfrey while introducing the next guest on stage. “‘Why do successful women always say they’re lucky, and successful men say they got there by the force of their talent?” Stahl said, per Garten.

The topic of luck came up again weeks later, when she learned about the time Liza Minelli told a 23-year-old Rob Marshall to “Be ready when the luck happens.” Those moments ultimately inspired Garten’s memoir. Her story is about “hard work and luck,” she writes, adding that she never has a “five-year plan.” 

Garten says she instead concentrates “on what’s in front of me and work[s] hard because I love what I do, and I have fun doing it.”

“And then I leave the door open, so I’ll be ready when the luck happens,” she closes out her memoir.

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JD Vance’s “weird science” hypocrisy: His climate change cleanup job shows a contempt for children

If there's one thing most Americans knew about Sen. JD Vance of Ohio before Tuesday night's debate, it's that he really hates childless cat ladies. The number of mean comments Donald Trump's running mate has made about cats, childless women, or any combination of the two are too numerous to count. Cat owners/childless people (categories he regularly conflates) are "miserable" and "sociopathic", according to Vance. They should have fewer votes and pay more in taxes, as punishment. His obsession with bullying and shaming people who don't have children has led more than one person to wonder, "Does J.D. Vance actually like being a parent?"

Vance's hypocrisy on the issue of children's health and safety won't register to most people, because they always knew that his chatter about childlessness was always more about women than children. 

Vance would like you to believe, however, that this isn't a matter of personal psychology, but a well-considered political philosophy. He has repeatedly insisted that only parents have "an investment in the future of this country." Vance doesn't seem to think people can care about people beyond their immediate, biological family, and so need to physically create children to care about policies that impact the youngest generation. During Tuesday night's debate, he brought up his "beautiful children," attempting to enhance his self-styling as a man who cares because he is a father. He insisted that he wants a Republican Party that is "pro-family." He insisted he's "pro-baby." 

But at every turn during the vice presidential debate with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Vance showed that having three children has done diddly squat to make him care about the future. On the contrary, Vance repeatedly made it clear that his "pro-family" view is all rhetoric. In practice, he doesn't care about actual children, either now or in the future. 

That much was evident when Vance sneered that climate change is "weird science." 

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The CBS hosts asked if he agreed with Trump that climate change is a "hoax," and Vance dodged the question by saying he doesn't think that Harris "doesn't believe her own rhetoric" when she says climate change is real. As we've been told ad nauseam, Vance is a smart guy who went to Yale. He knows full well that the science on climate change is as ironclad as it gets. With the devastation of the recent Hurricane Helene, we've all been reminded how much worse the future will be if we don't continue reducing carbon emissions, as Democrats have started to do with the Inflation Reduction Act. With that simple answer, "pro-baby" Vance showed he will wreak havoc on the futures of all children for his political ambitions. 

As many feminist critics — myself included — have argued, Vance's relentless talk about children isn't rooted in a true enthusiasm for the joys of parenthood. Instead, it's about leveraging childbirth as a weapon against women's equality, driving them out of the workforce and into dependent relationships with men. That's why he also opposes affordable childcare and divorce. It's why he was giddy that his accomplished mother-in-law gave up a year of her career to give him free childcare so he didn't have to contribute as much to the care of children he sure loves to talk about. And it's why he's an adamant opponent of legal abortion, even though most women who have abortions are mothers trying to care for the children they already have. 

At every turn during the debate, viewers were reminded that Vance doesn't really care what happens to kids after they're born. As Walz reminded voters, Vance's lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio have led to terror being rained on the community and disrupted the ability of children to even go to school. 

Vance shrugged it off and kept up the lies, falsely claiming that migrants have been a disaster for the community when all objective reports show they have boosted the economy and brought young people back to a town that was rapidly aging.

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 When abortion came up, Vance tried to put a humanizing spin on his anti-choice views by invoking a friend who used abortion to escape an abusive relationship. But he immediately pivoted to insisting that the goal of Republicans — for which there is no evidence — is to pass policies so that no one feels like they need to have an abortion again. That sounds nice as rhetoric, but in practice, it shows a chilling disregard for the safety of not just women, but children. Even if it were true that Republicans were willing to shore up the social safety net — and they are not — that does little for the issue of keeping women and children safe from abusive men.

Research shows that when women are forced to carry pregnancies they don't want to term, they are more likely to stay in contact with men who abuse them and often their children. And Vance has said he thinks women are obliged to stay with men who beat them, condemning women who leave violent marriages for shifting "spouses like they change their underwear." Men who hit women are also more likely to hit children. One of the surest ways to keep actual children safe from violence is to give women the autonomy to decide when they have children — and with who. 

In the end, it may not matter much that Vance exposed himself as thoroughly anti-child. Most people, whether they agree with Vance or not, already understand that his "childless cat ladies" comment wasn't really about children, but about Vance's hostility to women's freedom and equality. His glib lies and rationalizations don't confuse most people on this front. Vance's hypocrisy on the issue of children's health and safety won't register to most people, because they always knew that his chatter about childlessness was always more about women than children. 

Still, it matters. Vance claims to care about children, but can't seem to see them as anything beyond a weapon to wield against women. But children are people in their own right. Children's interests aren't well-served when they're being used this way. Children do better when they have mothers who are happy and stable. Children do better when the government protects their education, health care, and safety. Children need adults who believe in science, especially climate science, and are willing to make sacrifices to protect the planet for the future. Vance made it very clear last night that children are only valuable to him if they can be used to derail women's futures. But when it comes to the futures of children themselves, Vance could not care less. 

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“The Apprentice” gets honest about the making of Donald Trump

When we first meet Donald Trump in the new movie “The Apprentice” it is in the early 70s and Trump is in his mid-20s. He is a slumlord collecting rent from poor tenants for his abusive father. Some of them pour water on him. Some cuss him out. Some avoid him completely. 

Facing bankruptcy for discriminatory rental policies, young Donald, looking for help, turns to the one man he believes can successfully bully the government – Roy Cohn. The infamous attorney takes Trump under his wing, teaches him how to dress, act, and above all how to “win." Thus begins an acidic mentorship that ends up giving us the Donald Trump we all know today.

It's the story of Cohn, who at the top of his game adopts and mentors the vacuous and malleable Donald Trump.

“The Apprentice” is a dark comedy and drama that shows us what happens when our darkest desires, tempered by amorality, grim determination, a substandard intellect and greed all converge into a real-life Shakespearian tragedy. In Ali Abbasi’s movie, as in real life, Trump relies on the mentorship of a lean and mean Falstaff (Cohn as played by the brilliant Jeremy Strong) to guide him through his business dealings in New York.

Trump, as played by Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes in the Marvel movies) is a dead-ringer for the Trump we all know today. Stan plays Trump as a blank slate. In the beginning, he is naïve. Cohn quickly schools him up in his limousine about the reality and facts of the case against him and his father about the accusations of racial discrimination in their housing project. Through it all we see a Trump who is simultaneously ambitious and cowardly. Barnes nails Trump’s pursed lips and soft squint without ever descending into mimicry. He becomes Trump in such a frightening fashion that at times if you blink, you’ll swear it’s the real Trump on screen.

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The movie played to raves at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, but after the real Trump and his lawyers threatened legal action with a cease and desist demand, the producers could not get a distribution deal. Briarcliff Entertainment and Tom Ortenberg stepped in and took up the cause. Ortenburg is well known for having the courage others have lacked in Hollywood and has distributed several controversial projects like “Spotlight,” which won two Academy Awards – including Best Picture.

“The Apprentice” may not be the movie Trump wants, but it’s the movie everyone should see. It embraces Trump’s controversies and takes us through a harrowing and yet, dare I say it, entertaining ride through the darker side of the American dream.

It is a place where there is no right or wrong, no morality and no truth with a capital “T." It is a construct, at least according to Strong’s Roy Cohn.

But the movie is even more than that. It is a character study of a young, impressionable and eager man of privilege, who wants to rebuild Manhattan in his own image and for his own vanity while trying to convince others it’s for the greater good. It is about two sons, the oldest of whom is abused by his father and told that as an airline pilot, he is nothing more than a “chauffeur in the sky” and a younger son who is scared of his dad yet yearns to please him.

It's the story of Cohn, who at the top of his game adopts and mentors the vacuous and malleable Donald Trump. Like Falstaff, he is convinced of his own importance. “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men,” Falstaff declared. Cohn? He preaches three rules of success: attack, deny everything and never admit defeat. It is the template by which Trump operates to this day. 

The seeds of everything we know about Trump are in “The Apprentice.” The movie begins with a warning, the infamous” I am not a crook”  statement by Richard Nixon, and ends with Trump screwing over his own mentor.

Who would ever think that a movie could make Roy Cohn a sympathetic character? Abbasi and the screenwriter Gabriel Sherman manage to do it in truly Faustian fashion. Trump strikes a deal with the devil and then uses the devil’s own advice to overpower him and become the King of Hades.

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They manage to do this with subtle humor as well. Without giving anything away, the scene where Trump meets Andy Warhol is just laugh out loud funny. The scene where Trump discovers who the real Roy Cohn is? Devastatingly understated humor. Strong chews through his scenes as Cohn, with a perverse sense of humor, anger and focus. Knowing that he played Jerry Rubin in “The Chicago Seven” and seeing him even more effective as Cohn is not only a testament to his acting range, but it is truly Oscar-worthy. The same can be said for Stan who, while playing a cartoon villain/hero in several Marvel movies, simply reaches a depth in the real-life portrayal of Trump that is equally Oscar-worthy. 

The supporting cast in this character study is as strong as the lead actors. Maria Bakalova who was last seen in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” shines as Ivana Trump, bringing a sense of poignancy and survivability to the character, especially after a traumatic scene of physical and sexual abuse. Martin Donovan as Trump’s father is frightening and pitiful. His older brother Freddy as played by Charlie Carrick is simply tragic.

The cinematography and soundtrack round out the immersive sense of the 70s. Authentic videotape from that time and the shallow, kitschy music take you back to the time of the “Me Generation” and every low-brow cliché of the 70s through the Reagan years.

Trump supporters will undoubtedly scream that this is “bad fiction.” And while the film takes some literary license, Trump’s entire life has been dedicated to the fabrication of a reality that suits him – even if it is entirely fiction. That’s exactly where this film hits the nail on the head.

It’s an important character story of a characterless man. It entertains and explains how Trump became who he is. All of the abuse, anger, shallowness, greed and insecurity is there from the very beginning; a volcano of human pettiness and greed stoked by the racist fire of his father, his own sense of entitlement and sparked by a man who helped defend Joe McCarthy.

In the end, more than anything else, “The Apprentice” is simply one of the most effective studies of the American Dream since Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

“The Apprentice” opens nationwide on October 11.

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The Hurricane Helene devastation in Asheville confirms we can’t hide from climate change

People are still reeling from the devastation Hurricane Helene left behind, with some wondering why the storm was so intense. At least 162 people were killed across six states, with many still unaccounted for and over $35 billion in estimated damages. One community was particularly hard-hit: Asheville, North Carolina. But this is strange, because Asheville has been painted a place more resilient to climate change than other areas affected by the global crisis.

Record-breaking flooding washed out roads, including long stretches of interstates, while knocking out electricity for days. Now mules and planes are transporting supplies to the pummeled city, where residents describe a community covered in debris and without running water. Many in Asheville are scientifically literate enough to be aware that climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, can cause extreme weather events like hurricanes to become both more common and more severe. Indeed, a recent report calculated that climate change may have triggered as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.

"Tragically, those who are least responsible for climate change are the ones most at risk: namely low income people in low income countries in the global south."

Before all this, multiple accounts from Asheville residents described hope their community would be safe from these events. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, many Asheville citizens believed they were insulated from the kinds of vicious storms that are a byproduct of climate change. “I never, ever considered the idea that Asheville would be wiped out,” Anna Jane Joyner, a climate campaigner who grew up in the area, told The Guardian.

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As experts explained to Salon, the tragic reality is that there are truly no places on Earth safe from climate change.

"No where is 'safe' from climate change — but of course many people in certain parts of the world are more vulnerable than others," Dr. Charlotte A. Kukowski, a postdoctoral research associate at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab who has studied climate change refugees, told Salon. "Tragically, those who are least responsible for climate change are the ones most at risk: namely low income people in low income countries in the global south. Low lying regions such as Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to storm surges and climate change induced sea level rise, but even regions that have thus far been 'lower risk' are no longer safe with the increasing severity of the climate crisis."

Hurricane Helene was "absolutely" fueled by climate change, "no question," Dr. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who emphasized his opinions are his own, told Salon. "Hotter ocean means stronger storm and hotter atmosphere means stronger flooding rain," he said. As such, Kalmus argues that both residents of Asheville and people all over the world should heed the inevitability of climate change — and the urgent need for action to address the problem at its source.

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"All the impacts so far are tiny compared to what’s coming. We must end the fossil fuel industry to survive."

"Even just a few years ago I regarded the Pacific Northwest as a climate haven," Kalmus said. "Now look at the deadly heat dome, the fires and smoke. Here in North Carolina, Asheville was seen as a climate haven because it’s up in the mountains and therefore cooler. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere. People need to accept this. People need to understand that I’m not exaggerating when I say everything is at risk. All the impacts so far are tiny compared to what’s coming. We must end the fossil fuel industry to survive."

As Kukowski pointed out, part of the problem in convincing people is that individuals in more affluent countries often feel detached from the issue of climate change. In addition to the economic and scientific challenges entailed in addressing climate change, people also must psychologically adjust to the new reality caused by humanity's carbon emissions.
 
"The fact that some parts of the world are more at risk than others I think gives some of the super rich the idea that they can hunker down in a bunker in New Zealand and aren’t in this with the rest of us, and unfortunately that’s true to some extent," Kukowski said. "As a rule of thumb, the older and richer you are — particularly if you live in cooler climates rather than tropical ones — the less risk climate change poses to you over the course of your lifetime, compared to young people in poverty in the global south."

Dr. Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist at NASA's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told Salon that scientists and other experts urge communities everywhere to plan for climate change precisely because it is "a global event and a myriad of impacts will touch all communities in both interconnected and different ways."

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"This is why planning for, reacting to, and influencing climate change is something every person can and should be talking about and working on with others," Moon said. "There’s no need to be a climate scientist to talk with your neighbors and coworkers about how to prepare for extreme weather like flooding, high winds, wildfires and smoke, or heat waves, and how you can work together to minimize future risks, like through using less oil, gas and coal."

Moon added, "It’s okay to feel surprised, angry, sad, frustrated or grieving due to climate change and the weird weather it’s bringing to us all. But it’s important to find others to talk with this about and find ways that you can work together to reduce future risk and prepare for these new experiences. This collaboration is key to addressing the climate crisis and to making ourselves and our communities better able to deal with these changes, in part by bringing purpose and positive personal relationships."

According to Kalmus, it is also essential to remain focused on the primary culprits behind climate change: the corporations that continue to emit greenhouse gases that cook our planet.

"This is caused by the fossil fuel industry," Kalmus said. "The entire industry has been systematically lying and blocking action for decades, otherwise I’d say it was just caused by fossil fuels. The lying executives, their lobbyists, and the politicians who took their money are responsible for this irreversible damage and they belong in prison."

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“A damning non-answer”: Walz, Vance clash over abortion, economy, and democracy at debate

The vice presidential debate on Tuesday night saw Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio face off on issues ranging from abortion to industrial policy to democracy — with only a little bit of complaining about the rules.

The decision by CBS News not to fact-check loomed over the debate. Vance remarked on the decision early on when moderators Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell noted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status, not illegally, as Vance has claimed.

“The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you're fact-checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on,” Vance said.

Aside from that dust-up, the vice presidential debate was significantly more polite than the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The candidates struck a more respectful tone, with observers noting Walz’s apparent nervousness on stage. In between his chances to speak Walz would frown, though he did steady later in the debate.

“Tim Walz seems incredibly nervous,” The Hill’s Robby Soave said in a tweet.

Vance spent the night dodging questions on topics like climate change and how a Trump-Vance admin could cover the cost of extending tax cuts first passed under former President Trump.

Vance's most notable side-step came toward the end of the debate, when he refused to answer a question concerning whether or not he would accept the results of the 2024 election.

Vance asked viewers to remember that Trump “said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully, and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.”

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Walz cornered Vance on the question, saying that Jan. 6 "was a threat to our democracy in a way that we have not seen” and asked whether Vance would say that Trump lost the 2020 election. 

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.

"That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer," Walz said

Throughout the debate, Walz put Vance in the position of defending Trump’s record. He referenced Trump's previous penchant for called climate change a “hoax” and asked Vance about the former president's rollback of abortion rights. Vance came prepared to discuss his own past criticisms of Trump, like when he suggested that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”

“Sometimes, of course, I disagree with the president, but I’ve also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump. I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” Vance said.

Vance put Walz on the backfoot on immigration early in the debate and saying “I’ve been to the southern border more than our border czar, Kamala Harris, has been.”

“I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does,” Vance added.

Abortion also featured prominently in the debate with Walz sharing the story of Amber Thurman, who died tragically while awaiting a dilation and curettage procedure. Performing that procedure in Georgia, outside of specific circumstances, is considered a felony under the state’s abortion law.

"There's a very good chance that if Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she'd be alive today," Walz said, later adding that “This is basic human rights.”

If elected, Trump has promised to keep abortion policy as a state-level issue, and Vance agreed with that position. The former president reiterated his position on abortion as a state's issue during the debate, posting on Truth Social that he would veto a federal abortion ban.

This stance marks a shift for Vance, who supported Sen. Lindsey Graham's bill that would’ve banned abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

On economic issues, the candidates discussed manufacturing, housing, the cost of healthcare and the cost of childcare at length, with Vance directing economic discussions back to immigration talking points.

“There’s a Federal Reserve study that we’re happy to share after the debate — we’ll put it up on social media, actually — that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices,” Vance said.

On the same issue, Walz suggested that the root of the current affordability crisis was that housing was treated as a commodity.

“This issue of housing — and I think those of you listening on this — the problem we’ve had is that we’ve got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity,” Walz said.

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“Focused on the future”: Vance dodges Jan. 6 questions at debate

JD Vance dodged questions about Jan. 6 during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, declining to answer whether he would take part in any attempted subversion of the election. 

Ohio Sen. Vance was asked by moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan whether he would participate in a repeat of the events of January 6, 2021, a question he got around by outright ignoring it.

“First of all, I think we're focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris’s policies, make housing affordable, make groceries affordable, and that’s what we’re focused on,” Vance said.

Ultimately, Vance downplayed the events of the attempted insurrection and claimed his running mate Donald Trump urged protesters to remain peaceful.

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“He said that on January the 6th that protestors ought to protest peacefully,” Vance said. “And on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President, Donald Trump left the White House.”

“I mean, he lost the election, and he said he didn't. 140 police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag,” Walz said. “I worked with kids long enough to know, and I said as a football coach, sometimes you really wanna win, but the democracy is bigger than winning an election."

In a heated back-and-forth, Vance refused to answer whether Trump lost the election, which Walz called a “damning non-answer.”

“I think you've got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump,” Walz said.

Governor Walz was quick to point out that Vance’s suggestion that he may not certify the election was a feature of his candidacy, not a bug, for Trump.

“He lost the election, this is not a debate,” Walz said, rejecting Vance’s side-steps. “When Mike Pence made the decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence is not on that stage.”

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“This is basic human rights”: Walz hits Vance on abortion

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz slammed JD Vance and Donald Trump’s platform insisting that abortion ought to be left to the states. 

At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Walz called the rollback of abortion in conservative states a denial of “basic human rights” to control one’s own body and argued that abortion bans were killing women around the country.

“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world. This is about healthcare,” Walz said. “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography.”

Vance, who supported a nationwide abortion ban before joining the Trump ticket, argued that a “big country” demanded diverse laws on reproductive rights. Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and kickstarted the most-recent wave of strict abortion restrictions in places like Georgia and Texas. 

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1841294883274834246

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Walz pushed through legislation in Minnesota to preserve the right to reproductive care and, on Tuesday, he questioned the impact of leaving abortion up to the states.

“There’s a young woman named Amber Thurman, she happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. She had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey,” Walz said. “There’s a very real chance had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota she would be alive today.”

Walz countered that he and Harris were not pro-abortion, as Vance said, but “pro-women. We are pro-freedom to make your own choice.” The Minnesota governor also slammed the Project 2025 vision for reproductive care, a platform that is closely tied to Trump and Vance.

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry. It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access to infertility treatments,” Walz said.

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Walz rips Trump’s suggestion that troops hurt in Iran suffered “headaches”

At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz laid into former President Donald Trump’s assertion that  traumatic brain injuries suffered by dozens of American troops in 2020 were exaggerated.

Earlier in the day in Milwaukee, Trump disparaged U.S. soldiers who were left with traumatic brain injuries after Iranian strikes on an Iraqi base in January of that year, accusing the troops of going home “because they had a headache.” 

Walz condemned the comments during the vice presidential debate, questioning why the ex-president, who reportedly called dead American troops “suckers” and “losers” would dismiss troops’ concern.

“When Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches,” Walz said.

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Walz, who spent 24 years in the National Guard, laid blame for instability in the region partially at Trump's feet. He noted that the former president pulled out of a nuclear deal with Iran, severing U.S. diplomatic ties and ratcheting up tension.

Walz noted that Trump’s leadership was not the “steady leadership” that Americans needed in the hours after Iran launched a widespread missile barrage at targets throughout Israel.

“A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” Walz said.

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“You weren’t going to fact-check”: Vance gets his mic cut after fuming over fact-check

JD Vance has never let the facts get in the way of his stories about Springfield, Ohio's Haitian community. 

That continued at the vice presidential debate Tuesday night when the Ohio senator tried to conflate the legal immigrants with people who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Vance fumed after debate moderator and "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan pointed out that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield — which Vance and running mate Donald Trump have accused of eating local pets — are in the country legally. 

"Just to clarify for our viewers: Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal…temporary protected status," Brennan shared. 

"The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check," Vance responded, before explaining the process by which Haitians in Springfield obtained their legal residency.

"Thank you so much for explaining the legal process," Brennan said, as both Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tried to shout responses. "The audience can’t hear you because your mics are cut."

Since the night of the first presidential debate, the Trump-Vance campaign has run a smear campaign against immigrants, focusing on the town of Springfield in particular. Their claims about the immigrants in the town, which even Vance admits aren't true, have led to a string of bomb threats and event disruptions. Republican governor of Ohio Mike DeWine and Springfield's GOP mayor have refuted the attacks on immigrants. It hasn't slowed down Vance's talking points, who said on Tuesday that an influx of Haitians has left the schools, hospitals and housing of Springfield "overwhelmed." 

Walz, for his part, pushed a vision of a more compassionate and accepting U.S., that takes in immigrants who are in need. He cited the New Testament and encouraged action on immigration that lets the country "keep our dignity."