Trump vows to be a “protector” of women despite having been found liable for sexual assault

"You will be protected, and I will be your protector," Donald Trump assured women at a rally Monday, seeking to boost his appeal among female voters after boasting of his responsibility for overturning Roe v. Wade, being found liable for sexual abuse and convicted of covering up hush money paid to an adult film star after allegedly cheating on his wife.

The former president has not been polling well among women, in part due to his opposition to national abortion rights. A recent NBC News poll found that Vice President Kamala Harris leads Trump among female voters by 58% to 37%.

"Crude, sexist and misogynistic": Trump shares "blowjobs" attack against Harris on Truth Social

Speaking Monday in Pennsylvania, where Harris has a slight lead, the 78-year-old Republican promised women that he would protect them once elected, adding that they would feel so safe they wouldn’t “be thinking about abortion,” The New York Times reported. “I always thought women liked me,” Trump said at the stop in Indiana, Pa. “But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me.”

The comments come after the former president posted lengthy remarks on Truth Social focusing on women voters, claiming he will “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”

In an exhaustive list of women’s perils, Trump’s post falsely claimed that in the last four years, women have become “poorer,” “less healthy,” “less safe,” “more depressed” and “less optimistic.” He promised he would: “FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER.”

about Trump's appeals to women

US report found that Israel blocked Gaza aid, but the Biden administration kept weapons flowing

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta accuses Israel of "terrorism" over Hezbollah pager attack

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

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The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Igor Derysh 10:45 AM They haven't created a template for that so you have to manually switch to the Source view and add this html code:

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Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

about Israel and Palestine

For Donald Trump, it’s the golf that matters

I covered the presidential campaign (briefly) for the late-lamented Village Voice in 2016. The first thing I did was log onto Donald Trump’s campaign website. You want to know what was there? A banner reading “Trump for President,” and below that, a list of the next two or three rallies Trump was holding, each with a big “Tickets” button where you could sign up to attend the rally.

That was it. No “white papers” on issues, no recent quotes from the candidate, no links to interviews he had given to local news outlets, not even any video from the rallies he had already held.

It bears noting that it worked. Trump won his race against Hillary Clinton, who had over three dozen well-studied published policy papers on her website. Going into the month of the election, Trump held 43 rallies in the five weeks before election day on Nov. 8. On Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, he held rallies in Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado. The next day, he held rallies in Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. On Monday, Nov. 7, the day before Election Day, Trump’s rallies were in Sarasota, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. That’s a lot of rallies and an almost inhuman amount of flying.

During the month of September in 2016, Trump held 21 rallies. Three times that month, he doubled up and held two rallies on the same day, two of those in the same state and the third in two states fairly close together. In October, he held 44 rallies, holding multiple rallies on 16 of those days.

So far this month, Donald Trump has held seven rallies. One of those was held on Thursday of last week in Nassau County, New York, a state he lost by 23 points in 2020 and 22 points in 2016. The rally started at 7 p.m. Can you guess what Trump was doing earlier that day, before he spoke at his rally?

Playing golf.

Republicans may need to ditch Donald Trump to save MAGA

The next day, Friday, back at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump gave an interview to Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a conservative network of independent television stations around the country. You want to know what else Trump did that day?

He played golf.

Here is a list of the rallies Trump has held since the summer, compared with a list of the rallies he held during his winning election campaign in 2016:

June 2016: 14

June 2024: 6

July 2016: 10

July 2024: 4

August 2016: 26

August 2024: 7

September 2016: 21

September 2024: 7

Trump’s website lists six rallies scheduled for this week, between Sept. 23 and 28.

During the interview last Friday, Sinclair Broadcasting’s Sharyl Attkisson asked Trump if he planned to run for president again in 2028 if he doesn’t win this year, Trump made news when he answered, “No, I don't. No, I don't. I think that that will be, that will be it. I don't see that at all. I think that hopefully we're gonna be successful.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the answer of a man who misses the golf course.

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Trump is now trailing Kamala Harris in most national polls. Battleground state polls are all over the place, with multiple polls last week showing Harris ahead of Trump in most states. In one poll, she was even slightly ahead in North Carolina, where the self-inflicted wounds of Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson have begun to drag down the Republican ticket, including the man at the top. On Monday, in the Times-Siena poll, which has consistently put up numbers more favorable to Trump than practically every other poll, Trump led in Georgia and Arizona, with a narrow lead in North Carolina. NBC News published a poll on Sunday that showed Harris with a 16-point gain in favorability since she began her campaign. Harris is ahead of Trump nationally by an astonishing 21 points among women, while most battleground state polls show Trump with a single-digit lead among men.

Speaking of self-inflicted wounds, on Friday, Trump put up a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, that you really have to see to believe:

WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) September 21, 2024

So that’s where we stand on the doorstep of October, going into the final month of the campaign. Donald Trump continues to insist that Democrats are murdering babies just out of the womb and that legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio are kidnapping and eating the pets of their neighbors, two of the most outrageous lies ever told in an American presidential campaign. But don’t worry, he still has 42 days to generate a few more whoppers — even from the golf course — before this one is in the books.

from Lucian Truscott

The danger of a Trump campaign on a losing trajectory

Gore Vidal was correct when he observed that the American people do not have a memory of the last week. “We are the United States of Amnesia," the famed novelist concluded. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Given America’s state of hyperpolitics, the black hole that is the attention economy spurned on the 24/7 news media, and a public that is not able to concentrate longer than a goldfish, Vidal now looks much too generous.

This absence of memory is especially true for white America and its understanding, or lack thereof, of the realities of the color line and its impact on America’s past and present. The real and complex history of the United States, and how it was and continues to be shaped by racism and white supremacy, is systemically whitewashed and distorted in the nation's schools and culture. This is a form of psychological and emotional abuse for Black and brown people whose history and life experiences are erased in service of protecting white privilege and the many lies that sustain it.

Such acts of racial erasure eventually damage the minds, morals and ethics of white people — and in particular white children. As such it is a threat to American democracy. It is an attempt to deny the American people the lessons of the Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement, two of the most successful pro-democracy movements in U.S. history.

White America practices a type of selective remembering that is grounded in an eternal present, where the complex history of the country and the color line are flattened and distorted. In this narrative, there are great men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. show up, read a speech, die by violence and are robbed of their radicalism and inducted into the pantheon of American heroes. Miraculously, the "race problem" is solved. The election of Barack Obama is cited as further proof that racism and white supremacy have largely been vanquished. In the Age of Trump, the long arc of history has been twisted and distorted to such an extreme that now white people are perceived as the "real victims" of racism,” rather than Black and brown people. There is no substantive evidence to support such fantasies of white victimology.

It’s now all fiction. Donald Trump destroyed reality

Ultimately, because the American people (specifically many white people and those mercenary Black and brown people invested in accessing the privileges of whiteness) live a selective relationship to history, where the past is almost like a motherless child, they possess a limited ability to confront the challenges we are facing as a country. Thus the American people and their political elites are unable to respond effectively to Trumpism and the neofascist authoritarian movement because they still believe in the fiction of American exceptionalism and believe that fascism is something that happens “over there” by definition, and cannot be homegrown.

In one of the most recent and dangerous examples of how America’s organized forgetting has negatively impacted our public discourse and politics, Donald Trump, JD Vance and other mouthpieces and agents of the MAGA movement have recently claimed that Black Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, are eating white people’s dogs and cats and presumably other pets as well.

The mainstream news media and political class — and many among the general public — are responding with shock and disgust that Trump and his agents would traffic in such obvious white supremacist and racist conspiracy theories that are dehumanizing and inciting violence against innocent people. However, alongside that disgust and outrage is a general failure to understand how these attacks against the Haitian community — which are auxiliary to the larger campaign of racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris — are part of a much older history of white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories and violence in America.

First and most importantly: there is no evidence to support this racist fear-mongering about Haitians. Vance has all but admitted that his claims that Haitian refugees are eating pets are not true. But the facts and the truth have little meaning or importance for racists and white supremacists because their ideology and beliefs are based on the twin lies of the race concept and that race is a real thing. Those people deemed to be “white” are thought to be somehow inherently superior to nonwhites.

Racist conspiracy theories and rumors about Black and brown immigrants eating white people’s pets have a long history. Such lies are routinely circulated by white supremacists and other racists and nativists when there are changes, real or perceived, in the country’s racial and ethnic demographics.

Springfield, like other parts of the country, has a history of anti-black violence including lynchings. Eleven African-Americans were lynched in Springfield, Ohio, between 1902 and 1904, as leading sociologist Joe Feagin explained:

Historically, Springfield, Ohio, like other U.S. cities, has experienced major racial conflict and segregation tracing back to the city’s early 1900s race riots. White riots in 1904, 1906, and especially in 1908 were motivated by white efforts to "cleanse" the city of its growing Black immigrant population. …

The 1908 Springfield riot was particularly savage. Beginning as an attempt to lynch Black men falsely accused of crimes, when a white lynch mob discovered these men had been moved away, they took out their racist rage on the city’s Black community, destroying businesses and homes and killing several other Black men. This early white violence was followed by much racial segregation and discrimination in the city that targeted the Black community.

Neo-Nazi groups, Feagin continues, "have racially targeted Springfield, starting the false claim that Haitian immigrants there are eating pets, a phony claim picked up and used by GOP politicians like Trump and Vance in public statements."

Phillip Dray, author of "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age," offered this historical context for the racist lie about Haitians in Springfield"

One thing I've been reminded of during the current Springfield situation is the response of Black anti-lynching crusaders to the lynching scourge of the post-Reconstruction era, that at its deepest level, it represented not whites' fear of Black crime or sexual transgression, which was sensationalized and exaggerated, so much as the opposite, white resentment of the political and economic progress Black people had made, along with their increased social mobility.

Today, the faux claims that Haitian immigrants are eating white people's pets seem to speak of a final desperate phase, much as Southern whites in Reconstruction, as Frederick Douglass argued, first fought imagined Black insurrection, then turned to securing white control of the ballot, and eventually to the fiction that Black men were sexually assaulting white women.

What truly disturbs JD Vance and other dubiously concerned whites is that what is actually taking place in Springfield — a successful integration of Black immigrant workers and their families into a struggling Rust Belt city — is a welcome development that local white officials characterize as a "resurgence." For white supremacists like Vance and Trump, however, it is a glimpse of the functioning multi-ethnic, multi-racial future they most fear.

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As a direct result of MAGAworld’s lies and provocations (which now include claims that Haitians are spreading HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis), there have been several days of bomb threats and other terrorist threats targeting the Haitian community in Springfield (and nonwhites more generally). Racist street thugs have also been seen in the streets of Springfield, and the mayor has invoked his emergency powers.

In a speech last week in Tucson, Arizona, Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for sexual assault, launched into a lurid fantasy "about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” At a rally in Uniondale, New York, on Wednesday, he was even more explicit:

I’ve been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let them in, it’s going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country, their people that their countries, who are very smart, they don’t want them. That’s why, all over the world, a lot of people coming from jails, out of the Congo in Africa.

Where do you come from? "The Congo." … Where in the Congo? "We come from jail." What did you do? "We will not tell you.” …They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world … and what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. … For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, November 5 will be your Liberation Day. It’s going to be liberation because you are living like hell. You’re living a life like hell.

Leonce Gaiter, author of "A Memory of Fictions," offered the following insights on Trump and the MAGA movement’s race-baiting and appeals to white racial violence:

A Trump campaign on a losing trajectory leans on its main appeals — race hatred and white supremacy. Trump’s and Vance’s blatant lies about Haitians in Springfield are an invitation for their white supporters to revel in their collective revulsion at dark-skinned immigrants and Black people in general. It’s a MAGA team-building exercise. It supports their power to spin lies with impunity while reinforcing Trump’s status as vortex of white grievance-as-religion, as well as white, Christian, male dominance and contempt for everyone else as a political platform.

Philosopher and fascism scholar Jason Stanley warned of the destructive results that await us if Trump and his agents continue with such provocations and incitements:

Dehumanizing rhetoric has become so normalized in U.S. politics that it has become easy to ignore it. In the lead up to the Rwandan genocide, Tutsis became used to being called snakes and cockroaches. They did not expect what this vocabulary prefigured for their lives.

Now, we face from the Republican candidate for president straightforwardly genocidal speech about non-white immigrants, together with very real Nazi like threats of deportation, “remigration” and explicit descriptions of concentration camps.

Is there any country in history where such talk has not led to widespread state atrocities, along a continuum that ends in Rwanda? When will Americans listen to history to understand what will happen?

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Trump has also been mining America’s white supremacist and racist past for narcissistic and political energy and momentum by holding rallies in what are known as “sundown towns.” These are largely white communities, as identified by the late historian James Loewen and other experts and activists, where in earlier eras, either by law or custom, Black people (and sometimes other nonwhite people) were not allowed to be within the city or town limits after dark. Black and brown people who violated these rules would be subjected to prison, fines, physical violence and sometimes death.

Sundown towns were also maintained as all-white spaces through pogroms and ethnic cleansing campaigns. It is estimated that dozens if not hundreds of Black communities were destroyed by such acts of white terrorism and mob activity. American society remains highly segregated by race and class. That is the legacy of sundown towns.

"Although Springfield, Ohio, was not officially a 'sundown town,'" Feagin notes, "it came close to this definition as evidenced by the white race riots and other aggressive white efforts to maintain an all-white Springfield."

When Trump and his agents dream of “Making America Great Again” and fighting back against alleged “reverse racism” or the myth that whites are being “replaced” in their “own country” by nonwhites and nonexistent "voter fraud," this is the social order he and they want to restore.

Donald Trump’s base of support remains solid. His strategy of racism and white supremacy on steroids has not hurt him among his base. Moreover, Trump and the Republican fascists have suffered few political penalties for their racist and white supremacist language, behavior and policies, or for their general contempt for multiracial and pluralistic democracy. White racism and racial resentment remain powerful forces in American life and politics. Trump and his movement are using those beliefs and values to acquire and hold power, even in a country that increasingly rejects their policies.

Wright Thompson, author of the new book "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi," draws a provocative comparison:

The political rhetoric of August and September 2024 in America reads eerily like a transcript of the political rhetoric of August and September 1955 in Mississippi. Most everyone knows the price Emmett Till paid for whistling on a summer Wednesday night. What almost no one knows is that the day before was Election Day, the culmination of a Mississippi governor's campaign marked by violent rhetoric and fear-mongering. Ambitious humans with no sense of ethics or shame, in both parties, have long said whatever it took to win votes. And ordinary people have paid, and let us not forget collected, a price for those words and votes.

The mainstream American news media remains largely unwilling to strongly, consistently and forcefully condemn Trump and his followers’ racism and white supremacy. This reflects white racial fragility, where the bar for accurately describing racist behavior by public figures is set so high that it is almost unreachable by any standard of evidence. Instead, public discussions of racist behavior often default to vacuous discussions of intent, claims about what is in some white person’s "heart" or "bones." Racism and white supremacy are not simply about behavior or intentions. A mature and serious understanding of these things must focus on actual outcomes, public policies, impact, structures and institutions that unfairly privilege and advantage white people over nonwhites. Intentions and words have very little to do with it.

Donald Trump, his MAGA movement and the other neofascists are enemies of multiracial pluralistic democracy, not to mention human rights, freedom, equality and basic human dignity. That's the story that the mainstream news media, Kamala Harris and the country’s responsible political class need to tell over the next 43 days.

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Trump’s revolution succeeds: “One of the fastest shifts in evangelical thought in American history”

In the three and a half years since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Americans have come to learn how much Christian nationalism played a role in the riot. What is less known, however, is how the fringe Christian movement the New Apostolic Reformation dominated and shaped the effort to overturn the 2020 election. The group, once considered extreme even by most white evangelicals, was instrumental in organizing and spurring the crowd that stormed the Capitol that day.

In his book "The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy," religious studies scholar Matthew Taylor explores how this group of self-proclaimed "prophets" and "apostles" became central to the MAGA movement and, eventually, an attempted coup. He spoke with Salon about this poorly understood fringe religious group and why they matter so much to Trump.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

At the end of the book, you emphasize the importance of Christians speaking up against the far-right Christian nationalism that drove the Jan. 6 insurrection. Why do you believe liberal Christians need to speak out more?

To be clear, I'm also calling conservative Christians to be in that mix. I grew up as a conservative Christian. Many members of my family and many of my friends growing up are still conservative Christians. They're also shocked and appalled by a lot of this. There's a principled form of conservative Christianity in the United States that is not in bed with Christian nationalism. Those people need to be speaking up too. It's important for atheists and non-Christians to speak up, because their rights are going to be more infringed upon by Christian supremacists. But it's a duty for Christians to face when our fellow Christians go off the rails and become harmful.

A lot of the dialogue that needs to happen is a theological conversation. Part of the challenge here is that it's not simply politics or power that is driving this dynamic. Theology is also very much in the mix. And Christians are the ones who can talk about Christian theology. We desperately need intra-Christian dialogue and even intra-Christian debate, which can be quite heated at times. I'm OK with that, because the consequences are so dire. There's real peril that some of our fellow Christians are posing to our democracy and we need to challenge them.

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As someone who is outside of the Christian world, I learned a lot from your book about the complexities of it. I had heard of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) but had no idea what it is and how central it was to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Can you briefly explain what it is and why it was so important to the Capitol riot?

The New Apostolic Reformation is a set of leadership networks created by a seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. He was a professor at my alma mater, the Fuller Theological Seminary, though we never overlapped. He became fixated on the sector of Christianity that emerges from an intersection of nondenominational governance and charismatic spirituality, which focuses on the more supernatural dimensions of Christianity. Wagner became convinced that this was key to a global revival that he was helping to instigate.

"There's real peril that some of our fellow Christians are posing to our democracy and we need to challenge them."

One of the things that is distinct about independent charismatic sector of Christianity is that people believe in modern-day apostles and prophets. This is not something that mainstream denominations recognize. Wagner became convinced that he was an apostle. He surrounded himself with these modern-day prophets. When he talked about the New Apostolic Reformation, he saw a change like the Protestant Reformation that would have a lasting impact and become a new branch of Christianity. By the early 21st century, that group of leaders became increasingly radicalized around American politics, increasingly fixated on visions of taking over society. They embraced a prophecy called the Seven Mountain Mandate. Sarah Palin was mentored by one of these prophets in Wagner's networks. They really believe they're this vanguard that God had placed on Earth to bring about the Kingdom of God. They want a global revival and to take over whole societies and turn them into Christian nations.

The NAR leaders had a theology that was primed for a figure like Trump. They were some of the first Christian leaders to embrace him, to endorse him. They created the theologies and the propaganda that made Trump palatable to broader American evangelicalism. They became some of his closest advisers and helped structure a lot of the policy during the Trump era. They truly believed that God had willed Trump to win the 2020 election. They had hundreds of prophecies about that idea. When Trump refused to concede, all these prophets and apostles decided that it was that their prophecies were not wrong, but that God was going to intervene in a miraculous way to reinstate Donald Trump. They started a mass spiritual warfare campaign, mobilizing charismatic Christians. to pray against the demons that they believed were stealing the election. That spiritual warfare campaign was a major factor in the Christians who showed up on Jan. 6.

How Donald Trump turns a profit on political violence

You flesh out the story of the Appeal to Heaven flag, which came onto people's radar only after Sam Alito — who is Catholic — flew this outside of his house. It's an old revolutionary flag that had no real meaning until NAR embraced it as a symbol.

The Appeal to Heaven flag was commissioned in 1775, to fly over the Massachusetts navy. It was one of many flags flown by American forces during the Revolutionary War. It was an obscure piece of Americana. In 2013, an NAR prophet named Dutch Sheets encountered this flag. He believed he received a prophecy that this flag was a sign of a new spiritual revolution. It was a low point for Christian supremacist groups. They felt they were battling against a demonic Obama administration. The Appeal to Heaven flag was embraced as a sign of a Christian revolution that would transform America into a nation centered on Christianity and built around conservative Christian morality. Sheets left his job to promote the symbol of the flag. He wrote a book about it that came out in 2015. NAR networks with hundreds of leaders pressed followers to fly this flag. The flag functions as a visual prayer.

By 2020, the flag had become entwined with the cause of Donald Trump. It also symbolized anti-abortion activism, anti-LGBTQ activism. It was a coded symbol in these Christian nationalist circles. It's a double entendre. It signals support for spiritual revolution, but if they're called out on it, they can say they just love American history. It has a secret handshake quality. About two weeks before the 2020 election, Donald Trump was campaigning in Nevada and an NAR pastor presented Trump with an Appeal to Heaven flag. He said it is a symbol of Trump's victory. A photo of Trump with the flag went viral on charismatic social media. Dutch Sheets was one of most influential, most bombastic, most hyperbolic leaders pressing for Christians to support Trump. He backed the lies about the 2020 election and encouraged Christians to be in the streets to fight back against the legitimacy of the election.

That's why, on Jan. 6 you can see dozens of these Appeal to Heaven flags in the crowd. It's one of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Capitol riot. It's this Appeal to Heaven flag and reporters were interviewing people who are flying these flags on Jan. 6. The symbolism was quite clear, but many people were not paying close attention to those flags or just wrote them off as another generic right-wing symbol. But now, House Speaker Mike Johnson flies an Appeal to Heaven flag. We saw Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito and his wife fly an Appeal to Heaven flag. Republican leaders have embraced this symbol. It signals how far-reaching these Christian supremacist networks are, and how much traction these ideas have found in the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

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Most white evangelicals voted for Trump, but you argue that even in that world, the New Apostolic Reformation is a fringe Christian movement. How so?

The main thing would be their theology. They embrace Christian supremacy, this idea that Christians are supposed to be in charge of society and are mandated by God to take over societies and transform them into conservative Christian utopias. We might use the term theocracy, although it's a little more complicated than that. But they want Christians at the top of every part of society. They want to create a new vanguard of Christian leadership that will take over every nation in the world. And they've especially targeted the United States right now.

"It was a coded symbol in these Christian nationalist circles. It's a double entendre. It signals support for a spiritual revolution, but if they're called out on it, they can say they just love American history."

This is not entirely historically unprecedented. In the past, we've seen the crusades and pogroms and imperialism and colonialism and racism in Christian history. But in the modern world, NAR theology is very much a departure from the mainstream, even mainstream evangelical theology. It's troubling to see a movement that 10 to 15 years ago would have been seen as quite extreme now being mainstreamed in Republican politics. It's also moving into the center of American evangelicalism and the assumed leadership of the religious right in America.

One reason this has happened is these NAR leaders ingratiated themselves with Donald Trump, giving them power and influence beyond their numbers or representation in the larger evangelical world. How did they do that?

Some of it was a historical accident. Since 2002, Trump has been close to this megachurch pastor from Florida named Paula White Kane. When Trump entered the presidential race in the summer of 2015, he asked Paul White Kane to be his liaison to evangelicals. The problem is that Paula White Kane herself is not a conventional evangelical. She's a female preacher. She's charismatic. She's a prosperity gospel preacher. She's a televangelist and doesn't know a lot of the mainstream evangelical leaders. So she starts reaching out to the people that she does know. A number of them are NAR leaders.

It parallels the way that Trump revolutionized the Republican Party. Trump came as an outsider and brought with him this whole wave of fringe characters. People like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, people who were very much on the margins of the Republican Party. And Trump brought those people into the center of Republican politics. Traditional Republicans are disdained and scorned by the vast majority of self-identified Republicans. A similar revolution has occurred within American evangelicalism. Figures willing to embrace Trump — willing to support and propagandize him — he elevated them and their ideas and moved them into the middle of the conversation in American evangelicalism.

It's one of the fastest shifts in evangelical thought in American history. Ideas that would have been mocked in mainstream Republican circles even 15 years ago are now getting more than 50% approval among American evangelicals. We are living through a tectonic shift in both the culture and theology. It's reflected in the extremism we see every day in evangelical and Republican politics.

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“Misleading”: Trump touts tariffs as miracle cure-all — but Americans stand to lose the most

As ghosts and monsters prepare to strike this Halloween, Americans might find that what haunts them most are not the ghouls at the door—it's the price tags at the store. As stubborn inflation has eased, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden may spook Americans all over again by slapping tariffs on pretty much everything that dares cross U.S. borders, especially products from China.

Tariffs — taxes imposed on imported goods — are used by countries worldwide to protect domestic industries from foreign competition or unfair trade practices. Trump has long made them his top economic talking point, claiming that they would bring manufacturing back to the U.S. He has doubled down on tariffs this campaign, falsely arguing that they would help bring down prices for consumers.

While Trump frequently boasted about bringing in “billions of dollars from China” through his tariffs, those billions were actually paid by U.S. importers to the government. Numerous studies have shown that these costs are ultimately passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices.

Alex Durante, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy research group in Washington, D.C., called Trump's claim "pretty misleading."

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When tariffs are imposed, the cost of imports rises by the same amount, making everything from electronics to household goods more expensive. This functions much like a hidden sales tax on consumers. According to Durante, even products that aren’t directly affected by tariffs could see price increases, as businesses often raise prices to match their competitors and capture additional profits.

Trump this year has floated the idea of more aggressive tariffs, including a 60% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 10-20% tariff on goods from other countries. According to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, such policies could cost the average American household an additional $2,600 per year, putting further strain on consumers already dealing with high prices.

Trump's earlier tariffs, including Section 232 tariffs from 2018 — which imposed 25% tariffs on steel and 10% on aluminum — are still being felt by downstream industries. For example, the U.S. beverage industry, which relies heavily on aluminum for packaging, has paid more than $2.2 billion in additional costs since the tariffs were imposed, according to research from HARBOR Aluminum on behalf of the Beer Institute.

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“The reality is that Section 232 tariffs hurt far more than they help, and they hurt consumers who are already feeling the effects of inflation at the register,” Brian Crawford, president and CEO of the Beer Institute, said in a release. The U.S. beer industry packages over 74% of its products in aluminum cans and bottles.

In addition to driving up prices for consumers, tariffs can also harm U.S. exporters, who often face retaliatory tariffs from other countries. China in 2017 imposed a retaliatory 25% tariff on U.S. soybeans, which devastated American farmers. Soybeans, the top U.S. export to China, accounted for 62.5% of all U.S. exports to the country in 2017, according to data of the United States Department of Agriculture. After the tariffs were imposed, U.S. soybean exports to China plummeted by 74%, and overall exports fell by 20% in 2018, data show. Farmers, particularly in the Midwest, where over 80% of soybeans are grown, suffered significant financial losses.

Trump has bizarrely claimed that tariffs could “take care” of costs such as child care. He also suggested that he would use tariffs to stop wars, though experts like Durante argue that broad tariffs would instead trigger a global trade war.

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The Biden administration has acknowledged the economic harm caused by tariffs. In July, the White House released a report noting that tariffs have not been a meaningful source of government revenue since the early 1900s. A recent Moody’s study cited in the report found that widespread tariff increases would raise the U.S. inflation rate by 0.75 percentage points. But Biden has largely kept Trump’s tariffs in place.

These decisions are widely considered driven more by politics than sound economic strategy. Swing states in the Midwest, where steel production is a major industry, will be crucial in the upcoming election. “I don’t think it’s fair the entire country should have to suffer and see reduced growth and economic outcome because we want to benefit one particular industry in one particular part of the country,” Durante said.

Biden announced last Friday new tariffs targeting Chinese imports in strategic sectors that worth tens of billions of dollars, including 100% tariff on electric vehicles, 50% on solar panels and semiconductor chips and 25% tariffs on lithium-ion batteries.

Moreover, protecting domestic industries through tariffs may do more harm than good in the long run. Decades of research have shown that companies shielded from competition are less likely to innovate and invest in research and development, ultimately making them less competitive.

In short, tariffs are no treat — they're just a trick.

about money

California is suing ExxonMobil, which is accused of lying about their plastic recycling

ExxonMobil, a fossil fuel company that conspicuously touts a commitment to fighting plastic pollution, is being sued by the State of California as of Monday for allegedly misleading the public about the effectiveness of the various anti-pollution tactics that they advocate.

In the first lawsuit ever to be filed against a large oil company for spreading this type of misinformation, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the petroleum behemoth of "a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” Even though ExxonMobil frequently claims that plastic recycling can solve the growing plastic pollution problem, Bona claims that ExxonMobil knew these assertions were false and yet knowingly deceived the public.

Climate change is making crabs lose their sense of smell — and seafood may never be the same

“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said. “ExxonMobil lied to further its [record]-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health.”

Judith Enck, president of the anti-plastic pollution advocacy group Beyond Plastic, told NPR in a statement that the California litigation is “the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry for its persistent and continued lying about plastics recycling.”

In February Salon spoke with Erica Cirino, communications manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition and author of "Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis. Cirino denounced the fossil fuel industry at that time for what she claimed were deceptive practices in terms of advocating plastic recycling.

"In 2017, scientists estimated that just 9% of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastics produced from about the 1950s (when plastics were first mass produced) up to 2015 had been recycled," Cirino told Salon. "Plastic recycling rates vary widely from region to region around the world. In the U.S., plastic recycling rates are currently below 6 percent." Cirino added that those numbers are misleading because they incorrectly imply that plastic which is "recycled" helps the environment, yet "it doesn’t matter where or how you set out your plastic for recycling collection, whether at the end of your driveway, at your local recycling center, or in a municipal recycling bin: Most plastic items collected as recycling are not actually recycled. Surprisingly, plastic is not designed to be recycled — despite industries and governments telling the public that we should recycle plastic."

about climate change

What to know about Banned Books Week

Monday, September 23 doesn't merely mark the first workday of the autumn season. It's also the start of Banned Books Week.

Introduced by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to an influx of efforts to censor books in libraries, bookstores and schools, Banned Books Week "highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community . . . in shared support of the freedom to seek and express ideas," per the movement's website.

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It's almost #BannedBooksWeek! Let’s stand together to champion our right to read and be #FreedBetweenTheLines September 22-28. Find data, activities, and graphics about frequently challenged books and the freedom to read ➡️ https://t.co/KbCyHErHEs #UniteAgainstBookBans pic.twitter.com/1bJ23ghYUi

— Unite Against Book Bans (@UABookBans) September 9, 2024

This year, Banned Books Week will run from September 22-28 with the theme "Freed Between the Lines." Per the effort's customary tradition, ALA has compiled a list of ten titles from the previous year designated as the most challenged books submitted by teachers and librarians and as reported by media outlets. The majority of those titles — typically flagged by conservative legislators in red states and far-right organizations, such as "Moms for Liberty" — for containing LGBTQ+ content, representations of BIPOC voices and experiences, alleged sexual explicitness, rape, drugs, profanity and more. In 2023 alone, the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 1,247 efforts to censor books in schools and libraries, a sharp increase of 65% from 2022. Florida and Texas saw the most banned books in 2023, with a combined total of more than 4,000 titles, per The IndyStar.

According to the ALA, the top 10 most challenged books of 2023 are as follows:

"Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe
"All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson
"This Book is Gay" by Juno Dawson
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky
"Flamer" by Michael Curato
"The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison
"Tricks" by Ellen Hopkins (tied)
"Me Early and the Dying Girl" by Jesse Andrews (tied)
"Let's Talk About It" by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan
"Sold" by Patrica McCormick

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who directed "When They See Us" and "13th," will helm this year's Banned Books Week as the honorary chair.

"I believe that censorship is the enemy of freedom," DuVernay said in a statement posted to the ALA's website. "By banning books, we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn from the past and to envision a braver future. Books have the power to open minds and build bridges. This is why certain forces do not want the masses to engage with books. They fear progress and growth in new, bold directions."

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"For this reason," DuVernay's message continued, "Banned Books Week is vitally important. It is a celebration of our right to access varied voices and to engage with ideas that challenge and champion us. I am honored to be selected as honorary chair of Banned Book Week for this election year, and I stand with my fellow readers, fellow writers and fellow advocates around the world who refuse to let voices be silenced."

Compared to 2023, however, 2024 has seen a notable drop in challenges to banned books, per two reports published on Monday. As noted by The Associated Press, the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom tallied 414 challenges over the first eight months of 2024, involving 1,128 different titles; this comes in contrast to the previous year's 695 challenges for 1,915 books. Still, though, the ALA's reliance on media accounts and reports from librarians remains a confounding variable in the numerical accuracies, as the body has previously noted. “Reports from Iowa are still coming in,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the office, of paused legislation currently set to resume in the state. “And we expect that to continue through the end of the year.”

In a recent survey, the nonprofit PEN America conversely found more than 10,000 instances of book bans in the 2023-2024 school year, nearly triple the number from the previous school year. The organization determined that Florida and Iowa alone saw approximately 8,000 bans. However, as The AP observed, each nonprofit's definition of "ban" varies significantly, attributing to the discrepancies in their reports — for the ALA, the permanent removal of a book from a library's collection qualifies as a ban, whereas for PEN America, withdrawals of any length of time constitute a ban.

“If access to a book is restricted, even for a short period of time, that is a restriction of free speech and free expression,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America's Freedom to Read program.

Regardless of statistical differences, however, the organizations are aligned on the premise of Banned Books Week.

“We observe Banned Books Week, but we don’t celebrate,” Caldwell-Stone said. “Banned books are the opposite of the freedoms promised by the First Amendment.”

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John Oliver shreds JD Vance for perpetuating pet-eating myth

An impassioned John Oliver is calling out Sen. JD Vance's false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets.

The conspiracy has been repeated numerous times, picking up steam after the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. However, following Trump touting the claims on television to 67 million viewers across the U.S., Oliver shared his findings on Sunday evening's episode of "Last Week Tonight" that Vance helped orchestrate some of the hysteria around the pet-eating lies.

“There’ve been plenty of cat-eating jokes since. But I still want to talk about this, both because the chaos Trump stirred up in Springfield is ongoing, and because it feels emblematic of his campaign,” Oliver said.

The host reiterated that Springfield city officials have stated there is no evidence to back the claims that Trump and Vance have made about Haitian immigrants. But that hasn't stopped schools and hospitals from being shut down because of bomb threats. Springfield's Haitian population has also stated they are now living with fear due to the national attention on them. Even Trump has said he plans to visit the town despite the mayor insisting he keep his distance.

"Couch-f***er energy": John Oliver mocks JD Vance's "terrible" first week on campaign trail

Oliver explained that this xenophobic rhetoric existed long before Vance's time, but that the senator is exaggerating the already glaring social constraints that have arisen after Haitians have immigrated to his state.

“Far from just repeating claims he’s heard, Vance has actually helped create much of the chaos he’s now trying to exploit,” Oliver said.

Oliver pointed out that issues arose when Springfield city officials sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. This committee just happened to be one that Vance sits on. The letter asked for federal funding to support local programs to alleviate “a significant housing crisis” and additional services for the Haitians who had moved to Springfield.

However, many have stated that businesses in Springfield have recruited many Haitian migrants to hire them in jobs that locals weren’t filling. That didn't stop people like Vance from spreading misinformation about the letter, painting the city official's claims as an unmanageable “migrant crisis,” instead of a housing one.

Oliver then played a clip of Vance mispronouncing Haiti as he fanned the flame of an ongoing migrant crisis in Ohio.

“I guess we now know it is a mistake to expect precise wording from Vance when it comes to anything Haitia-related," Oliver joked, using Vance's pronunciation flub. “First, there is only one Haiti-related mispronunciation we recognize in this house, and it’s Alicia Silverstone in 'Clueless,' delivering the iconic line: ‘And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haiteeans.'”

By July, the damage had been done with Vance's spread of misinformation and the claims spread to Fox News and X, with even Elon Musk tweeting about Springfield. It even led to a neo-Nazi group marching through the town with swastika banners.

To add insult to injury, a photo went viral of a Springfield man walking with a goose in his hand, which people twisted into a false narrative. According to TMZ, the man was actually from Columbus and was holding two geese injured by a car. The photo was reposted to Facebook and more false claims about missing ducks and cats were circulated online without any evidence.

“This pet-eating panic was built on nothing,” Oliver said. But Oliver found that Vance had verified the veracity of the claims. "Here's the thing. He did check. It turns out that not long after his first post about Haitians eating pets, his campaign actually called the Springfield city manager, who remembers Vance’s staff asked point-blank: ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’ and he said: ‘I told him no.’”

“So Vance knew it was a lie this whole time. But instead of just admitting that, he and his campaign have been scrambling to dig up new bulls**t evidence. All of which either bears no resemblance to the claims he’s made or falls apart at the slightest scrutiny.”

While also insinuating that Haitians were spreading diseases like TB and HIV, Vance also claimed that a Haitian murdered a Springfield boy who was accidentally killed in a school bus accident. The boy's parents asked for people not to use their son's death to spread more hatred towards immigrants.

“That man didn’t need any of this bulls**t and neither did Springfield. They didn’t ask for attention. they asked for help. Vance is the one who wanted attention," Oliver said.

"It turns out he’s pretty good at parroting racist lies like the spineless dips**t that he is,” the host concluded.

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Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?

Early into his new book The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter poses a playful, but loaded, question: "How could a morning piece of toast or a plate of dinner pasta be such a world-altering culprit?" This, like many ideas Easter digs into in his illuminating debut, is a glimpse at how the author goes about breaking down the climate toll of the U.S. agricultural system: One dish at a time.

Seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and pie are just some of the quintessentially "American" kitchen table staples Easter structures the book around as he tries to help readers understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of soils and plants on land across the country. Each of the nine chapters examines how a single dish is made; from the soil needed to grow the ingredients, to the people who manage the land and the laborers who toil to get it to the table, and the leftovers that remain — documenting the emissions created each step of the way.

The Blue Plate also takes a look at some of the innovative practices being implemented around the U.S. to make such culinary favorites more climate-friendly. Stopping off at an Arizona produce farm, a Wyoming fertilizer plant, a Colorado landfill, an Idaho fish farm, and several dairies, Easter shows how small businesses are making conscientious changes to how they work. He theorizes how each could be applied at scale while quantifying how the widespread adoption of such techniques, and minimal shifts in consumer purchasing and consumption habits, could reduce agriculture's gargantuan role in warming.

It's a topic driven by Easter's own family history. His great-grandmother was a farmer during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s who, along with others growing grain at the time in the Great Plains, unknowingly contributed to the release of one of the greatest known pulses of carbon emissions. The book uses her story to probe how the Great Plains was transformed from one of the planet's most carbon-rich grasslands into one of its largest agricultural complexes.

By analyzing the emissions released when food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped, The Blue Plate makes the case that curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won't require an agricultural revolution. It's already happening, in bite-sized cases across the country.

Grist sat down with Easter, a research affiliate at Colorado State University, to discuss what his vision of eating our way out of the climate crisis would look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: In The Blue Plate, you dig into the emissions impact of the production and consumption of everything from husks of corn to hunks of meat. What led you to decide to focus on the ingredients of, in your words, "a typical meal at an American weekend dinner party"?

A: I sat down one evening with a plate of food in front of me, and I looked at it, and I realized that there were critical stories tied to the climate crisis in every single item of food that was on the plate. I also realized I've been working with farmers and ranchers around the world who were already implementing the practices that could help reduce and actually reverse those emissions. And I saw the basis for the book in that moment.

Q: At Colorado State University, you belonged to a team of "greenhouse gas accountants" who tally the tens of billions of tons of carbon that move each year between the Earth's plants and atmosphere — a huge focus of the book. What, exactly, does that look like?

A: It's very much like what an accountant for a business or a bank does. We're basically trying to tally the flow of carbon and nitrogen back and forth between the Earth and the atmosphere and try to understand, "Do we have too much flowing in the wrong directions?" And that's basically what's been happening. Not just from the fossil fuel industry, and for generating electricity, for heating homes, for transportation, but also from the way we've been growing food and managing forests. We've been essentially exhausting the ecosystem capital of organic matter and sending that into the atmosphere. When really, what we need is for that flow to be stabilized and reversed, so that we have that flow of carbon back into forests, into pastures, into crop fields, and into the plants that sustain us through agriculture.

The carbon and nitrogen in ecosystems, they're really like the capital in businesses. If you're burning through your capital, that's a warning sign for business, and they can't sustain it very long, eventually they'll go bankrupt. And that's essentially what's been going on with agriculture.

Q: Let's talk more about that, through the lens of bread. Something that has stayed with me is a line in the book where you note that although humans eat more of it than any other food, bread and grains have some of the smallest carbon footprints, on average, of any food — about a pound and half of CO2 equivalent for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas. But you argue that the emissions impact of producing bread and grain is larger than that, because of its soil impact.

A: This is one of the most interesting stories when we think about the food that's on our plates: the role that carbon, organic matter, has in the soil, supporting the crops that we grow. The more organic matter we have in the soil, the more fertile the soil is going to be, the more abundant the crops will be, the more resilient the plants will be in terms of being able to fight off disease and be able to deal with drought.

It's part of that ecosystem capital. The carbon that's in the soil there accumulates over millennia. It can take five to ten thousand years for that ecosystem capital to build up and fill what we call the soil carbon vault that sustains the ecosystem. If we're not careful, we can burn through that soil carbon vault over a short time. We essentially exhaust that capital. Burning through that vault, and that's just an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, that is essentially a climate burden that comes with every loaf of bread.

Q: In The Blue Plate, you visited a Colorado farm where the farmers have eliminated things like mechanically tilling the soil or leaving land fallow, both of which degrade soil. They've also weaned off of chemical fertilizers and planted cover crops. In what way are these compounding practices restoring the carbon that past generations of farmers have mined from their soils?

A: What these growers are doing is reversing that process of degradation that started when the land was first settled, and what we now know as industrial agriculture was brought to those fields. And they are restoring it through these really straightforward practices that have been around in some form or another since the beginning of agriculture, and they're implementing it at a scale that's very focused on ending that cycle of degradation and actually restoring, regenerating, the soil.

A story I tell in my book is of Curtis Sayles, who talks about how his soil had hit rock bottom. His focus has pivoted entirely to looking at the health of the soil, and he tracks that through the amount of organic matter, the carbon, that's in his soil. And he's steadily adding back the carbon into his soil. It's extraordinary to see it come back to life.

Q: What would scaling this require? The book notes that many U.S. farmers still intensively till cropland every year. Is it feasible to imagine large-scale changes?

A: It's important to understand that the decisions to regenerate soil, and to improve soil health, and to increase the organic matter in the soil, happen one farmer at a time, one rancher at a time, one field or pasture at a time. And there are hundreds of thousands of farmers and millions of pastures and fields around the country where the effects of those decisions can play out.

There's been a tremendous emphasis upon soil health within the farming and ranching community today. As soon as the U.S. Department of Agriculture started talking about this in the context of soil health, it really started getting people's attention. And now, we see some of the fastest-growing practices in the country are changes to reduce tillage and to start to incorporate cover crops. There's still a lot of barriers to it, and those barriers are cultural and social. And some people are uncomfortable with change. But that said, farmers are increasingly seeing this as an opportunity for them to increase their yields.

Q: In the book, you pay homage to your great-grandmother and how she lost her farm during the Dust Bowl. How do you see her story, and historical accounts of farmers like her, reflected in how we talk about the role of agriculture in driving climate change?

A: The story of my great-grandmother Neva and the story of her farm was a story that played out on literally billions of acres across the world. And not every farmer at the time was generating the kinds of emissions, degrading the soil, the same way that she was. But her story was not unique. What she did on that 160 acres of land in southeastern Colorado was similar to what was happening on farm parcels everywhere across the U.S., especially where people were homesteading under the Great Plains.

In the process, they emitted as much carbon dioxide from the soil as we produce in a single year, in total, for all the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The magnitude of that was just extraordinary. And that is what really made my great-grandmother Neva's story so personal to me. To realize that one of my ancestors had played a role there, unwittingly, in just trying to live a good life and fight for herself, and for her family.

Q: Soil is a cornerstone of the global food system, and very much a focus of The Blue Plate. But it's not the only focus. For one, you examine the emissions footprint of things like steak and salmon, but you notably do not advocate for Americans to stop eating meat or seafood or dairy altogether. In fact, you explore what the solutions could look like if these emissions-intensive foods remain on kitchen tables. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?

A: A lot of people are asking me about meat and their consumption of meat and "Do we need to stop eating meat?" I think what's become clear is that we eat too much meat, whether it's cattle or pigs or poultry. But I don't think the answer is as simple as stopping eating meat. In some parts of the world, where millions of people live, trying to grow wheat or tomatoes, or other crops, would be an environmental disaster. It would completely deplete the soils. And some of those places, the best choice for the landscape, where it's compatible with local wildlife and with the ecosystem as a whole, is to graze livestock. We have to be cognizant of that.

I think the message that I'm trying to get across to the public is that if they eat meat, they need to consider pastured poultry, or try to source from regeneratively grown livestock herds and dairy products, wherever possible. And farmed shellfish, which can help restore oceans, estuaries, or our coastlines. People should search for foods in the grocery store that have a "regeneratively farmed" label attached to them. Finally, to avoid foods that travel by air, and the carbon emissions that come from that. And I know that's not possible for everybody.

Q: The through line of The Blue Plate is this question: "Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?" You wrote that the answer is "a partial yes" but that we need to reframe the question. How would you like to see it reframed? And how would you answer it?

A: How can we end the process of burning fossil fuels? And then what role can the way we grow, process, ship, cook our food, and deal with the leftovers, play in reducing the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels?

We are burning fossil fuels at such a high rate and the impacts are so large we have to stop, as quickly as possible. Growing food differently, using regenerative methods, using these carbon farming methods, has the greatest potential to draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and back into the soil, back into the Earth, where we need more of it to lie. In that process of drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we're going to be helping to cool the planet, and reduce the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels.

Editor's note: Patagonia, the publisher of The Blue Plate, is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist's editorial decisions.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/can-we-eat-our-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Former CIA chief Leon Panetta accuses Israel of “terrorism” over Hezbollah pager attack

Former CIA director and U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has accused Israel of engaging in "terrorism," leveling a charge against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that's typically reserved for enemies of the Israeli state.

The Obama administration fixture, not exactly a favorite among antiwar activists, used the "terrorism" label to describe a suspected Israeli operation to rig pagers and walkie-talkies used by the militant group Hezbollah with explosives. The act of sabotage killed at least 37 people and injured thousands more across Lebanon, including operatives and civilians alike. The coordinated attacks, which preceded a wave of devastating Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, have been widely attributed to Israel.

Speaking with CBS News on Sunday, Panetta said Israel's tactics risk engulfing the region in a full-scale war and expanding the scope of warfare into dangerous territory.

Hamas, Israel and "terrorism": If we have to use the label, at least let's use it honestly

"The ability to be able to place an explosive in technology that is very prevalent these days and turn it into a war of terror, really, a war of terror — this is something new," Panetta said on CBS News Sunday Morning. "I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism. This is going right into the supply chain, right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, what the hell is next?"

Current and former intelligence officials have described the operation as part of Israel's efforts to gain "red-button" capability, or the penetration of an enemy that can be held in reserve long before activation, sowing chaos and paving the way for a broader offensive. The recent attacks on Lebanon threaten to further escalate an already dangerous situation into a regional war, and the U.S. is preparing for the worst by sending an unspecified number of reinforcements to support the 40,000 troops already stationed in the Middle East, the Pentagon announced Monday.

Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade blows by conventional means as well. Israeli missiles slammed into southern Lebanon on Monday morning, killing 356 people and injuring 1,200 others, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Health, in what Israel said was an effort to take out weapons hidden in residential buildings. The escalating attacks have forced around a million Lebanese to flee from the bombed areas. Hezbollah fired its own rockets and drones into Israel, with most of them falling into open areas or getting intercepted by Israeli defenses. At least one Israeli person was reported by Israeli media as injured. Previous attacks attributed to Hezbollah, including a July strike that left a dozen children dead, have led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people in northern Israel.

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Israel did not tell the U.S. about its pager operation in advance of the attacks that began last week, perhaps fearing a "freak-out" by Pentagon officials who would "pull every lever they think they had to get them to not do it,” Ralph Goff, a former CIA official, told The Washington Post. Only after the first wave of attacks last Tuesday did Israel notify Washington that it was behind it all, according to U.S. officials.

In carrying out the operation, experts say that Israel, already under heavy criticism for its war in Gaza and deadly incursions in the West Bank, may have violated international treaties and protocols to which it is a signatory. Article 7(2) of the Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons prohibits the use of booby traps, which Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, defines as "objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use."

"The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction," Fakh said in a statement.

Panetta, speaking Sunday, stressed the importance of stopping such forms of warfare from spiraling out of control.

"I think it’s going to be very important for the nations of the world to have a serious discussion about whether or not this is an area that everybody has to focus on," Panetta said. "Because if they don’t try to deal with it now, mark my word: It is the battlefield of the future."

about Israel

Jill Stein paid $100,000 to a Republican consulting firm led by a suspected January 6 rioter

Allies of former President Donald Trump and others affiliated with the GOP are supporting the Green Party's Jill Stein in the hopes that her presidential bid will divert attention and votes away from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Stein, now in her third race for the White House, has fought to secure ballot access in multiple battleground states and has been represented by Trump-affiliated lawyers, the Journal reported. Indeed, Stein's campaign has paid six figures to a Republican-tied consulting firm led by a man accused of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol

In Nevada, the Democratic Party initiated a lawsuit to exclude the Green Party from the ballot, claiming the party used the wrong form to collect signatures from voters. The Green Party appealed the case and was represented by Jay Sekulow, an attorney who defended Trump throughout his impeachment trials (last week, the Nevada Supreme Court rejected Stein’s bid to be put back on the ballot).

In Wisconsin, Democratic National Committee employee David Strange sought to remove Stein from the ballot by arguing the Green Party can’t nominate presidential electors without legislative candidates eligible to do so. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Stein was again legally represented by a Trump-affiliated lawyer, Michael D. Dean, who was involved in lawsuits that attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the Journal reported.

AOC is right: Jill Stein is not serious

Stein's campaign also paid $100,000 to a consulting firm, Accelevate, that has worked with Republican campaigns for signature-gathering services. The head of the firm, Trent Pool, appears to have taken part in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, The Intercept reported last week. The same firm was also paid millions of dollars by the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who endorsed Trump last month.

A spokesperson for Stein said she was unaware of Pool's reported connection to Jan. 6; a lawyer for Pool insisted his client was filming a documentary, not taking part in the attack.

The boost from Trump allies is part of a larger coordinated effort by the GOP to support third-party candidates as an alternative to Harris, seeking to divert attention and ultimately votes from the vice president, the Associated Press reported earlier this month. Similar efforts have been made to include independent candidate Cornell West on the ballot in Arizona.

For her part, Stein rejects the argument that her candidacy is enabling a Trump path to victory, positioning herself as a left-wing alternative to the country's two major parties. But she has repeatedly been criticized by Democrats for taking away votes, most notably by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who called Stein’s candidacy “unserious” and “predatory.”

In a recent NBC News poll, 2% of registered voters said they would vote for Stein in November.

about the 2024 campaign

Cheryl Hines celebrates her birthday without RFK Jr. in wake of Olivia Nuzzi scandal

Cheryl Hines, wife of politician and MAGA supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., seems to have started distancing herself from her husband following his still unspooling scandal with former New York Magazine Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi.

Nuzzi was placed on leave by New York Magazine last week after disclosing that she had "engaged in a personal relationship" with a former reporting subject who was "relevant to the 2024 campaign," per a note shared by the outlet. As reported by The Associated Press, the newsletter that first broke the story, Status, and the New York Times both cited unnamed sources who identified the reporting subject to be Kennedy, who dropped out of the presidential race in August.

Hines was subsequently seen at a Fashion Week afterparty on Friday without her wedding ring, per PEOPLE. The following day, the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star celebrated her birthday with her daughter Catherine Young and Kennedy's daughter Kyra Kennedy, sharing images of the trio together on her Instagram stories. Kennedy, meanwhile, spent the weekend rallying for Trump with former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in Las Vegas.

A representative for Kennedy told The Washington Post that he had only met Nuzzi once, "for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece,” referring to a November 2023 story titled "The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr's Spoiler Campaign."

Nuzzi, in a statement shared with CNN, said that “the relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”

Inside the “very, very guarded” agreements that dictate what’s sold in grocery stores — and the cost

With food prices up 25% over the last four years, it may be worth asking – what determines the cost of food?

It’s a complicated question, involving supply costs, crop yields, public policy, the availability of raw materials, supply chain issues and animal and plant disease, to name a few factors.

But in our grocery stores, supermarkets and food manufacturers often determine the final label price consumers pay. Many consumers are unaware of the clandestine cooperative marketing agreements between supermarkets and food conglomerates that influence how food is stocked, how aisles are arranged, what products are highly promoted and, ultimately, what foods consumers get to choose from, and how much we pay.

"They're admitting it": Experts say megamerger helps corporations that used pandemic to raise costs

“Manufacturers are able to really control and dictate the retail environment, to the detriment of consumers and consumers’ health,” Sara John, deputy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told Salon.

Those systems are particularly harmful to small food brands; a best-case success scenario for those brands often ends in acquisition. And those structures stand to potentially blossom under a proposed $24.6 billion megamerger between Kroger and Albertsons, America’s two largest supermarket brands, that the Federal Trade Commission is suing to block over concerns the deal would create a monopoly.

“Absent antitrust enforcement and fair competition enforcement, it's really hard to imagine how these companies at the top ever get knocked off, or how three companies controlling 80% of the mayonnaise ever actually changes,” Claire Kelloway, program manager for fair food and farming systems at the Open Markets Institute, told Salon.

Lawyers from both Kroger and the FTC gave closing arguments in the FTC’s antitrust case last week; the judge overseeing the case is expected to issue their ruling as early as October. Kroger did not return a request for comment.

‘A really big source of profits' for grocery stores

Supermarkets’ cooperative marketing agreements are often “very, very tightly guarded documents,” John said. Outside of a handful of public data points, little is known about them.

One example of such an agreement is slotting fees, which have existed for decades but are shrouded in secrecy – a reality put on full display in 1999, when two small-business owners testified in a Senate hearing on slotting fees “in black hoods,” their voices electronically disguised for fear of retaliation.

“Because it's so guarded, I do think it is such an important part of the retail business model,” John said of the agreements.

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Grocery stores charge slotting fees to brands for favorable shelf space, as well as for things like end-of-aisle placements and special displays. Often, these fees can amount to millions of dollars in extra payments and “effectively elbows out smaller brands,” according to a 2021 report from Food & Water Watch. In 2016, the owner of a small condiments brand said he was charged between $5,000 and $20,000 per item in slotting fees, according to a CSPI investigation into the practice.

Bemoaning the power imbalance between conglomerates and their competitors, the owner of a small canned tomatoes brand said the biggest canned vegetable companies can pay those fees “just to keep us off the shelf,” per a Federal Trade Commission report on grocery industry marketing practices, published in 2001. (Despite its long shelf life, the report remains one of the more comprehensive sources on the subject.)

The FTC report found that, at the time, slotting fees typically ranged between $75 and $300 per item, per store, and could be “likely to increase the wholesale price of a product, because the manufacturer must raise its price to cover the expense.” Bedrock Analytics, a consumer goods data company, offered an updated estimate in 2019, describing slotting fees in a report as “typically ranging from $250 to $1,000 per item per store.”

“There are all these different ways that brands are paying grocers for promotions, for slotting, for a display in the middle of the store,” Kelloway said. “That has become a really big source of profits and revenue for grocers dealing more in promotions and deals and coupons.”

Slotting fees helped Kroger reduce its annual costs by roughly $6 billion between 2010 and 2012, according to a Food & Water Watch report. Kroger did not return a request for comment.

‘A very clever strategy’

Another common pricing arrangement between supermarkets and food brands? Category captain arrangements, in which the top-selling food manufacturers dictate where their products – and their competitors’ – are placed on the shelves.

In grocery stores, category captain arrangements are “widespread, and likely the dominant mode for many European and U.S. based retailers,” according to a 2020 report in Industrial Marketing Management. Under these agreements, the top manufacturer in a given product – using, prevailing wisdom says, their competitive marketing insights – will create visual layouts dictating how to arrange all the products in that given category.

"There are all these different ways that brands are paying grocers for promotions, for slotting, for a display in the middle of the store."

“A captain that is able to control decisions about product placement and promotions could hinder the entry or expansion of rivals, leading to less variety and possibly higher prices,” states a 2018 report on grocery captain agreements from the American Antitrust Institute.

In the 2016 CSPI investigation, an owner of a small ice cream brand said he feared his products being relegated out of customers’ sight by category captains, “behind a hinge . . . so you can barely see it.”

Nestlé, he said, was the category captain in frozen desserts in 22 of the country’s largest 25 supermarkets. Nestlé did not return a request for comment.

Smaller brands ‘just hoping to get acquired’

Such arrangements – slotting fees, category captains and perhaps other structures publicly unknown – creates a food ecosystem in which the best business move for a smaller brand is getting gobbled up by a larger one, experts say, further shrinking the number of companies controlling the food on our grocery shelves in an already consolidated system.

“Most new food businesses, they really are just hoping to get acquired, because that's how you're going to get your product the best shelf placement,” Kelloway said.

It’s a two-way street, experts say – a growth strategy the biggest food manufacturers employ to add brands “already vetted by the market,” Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist at New York University, told Salon. Recent small brand acquisitions include General Mills’ $204 million acquisition of Annie’s in 2014 and Danone buying Silk’s parent company for $10 billion in 2016.

In 2020, Mars acquired the maker of KIND Bars for $5 billion.

“It's actually a very clever strategy,” Dimitri said, adding that consumers often assume they’re supporting smaller brands not owned by a major food conglomerate.

“If you let small entrepreneurs develop these new products, they're taking all the risk,” she said. “Then, when they have a successful product, Frito Lay or Pepsi will come and buy you out. And then, they keep the same branding.”

about this topic

Missouri prepares to execute Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors saying he is “actually innocent”

Just one day before a Missouri death row inmate is scheduled to be executed, the Missouri Supreme Court will hear his case and decide whether to delay his execution for a third time.

Marcellus Williams was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001 and sentenced to death in 2003 for the killing of 42-year-old Felicia Gayle in her home just outside of St. Louis. In January, St. Louis County’s top prosecutor, Wesley Bell, filed a motion to vacate Williams' conviction, stating that "new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is actually innocent." The Missouri Supreme Court will hear the case on Monday, just 24 hours before Williams’ scheduled execution on Sept. 24 at 6 p.m. CT.

Williams has long professed his innocence and argues that his due process rights were denied throughout his legal battle.

Dems go silent about death penalty

Following Gayle’s murder in 1998, two witnesses named Williams as the culprit. Despite no forensic evidence tying him to the crime, a jury convicted Williams of murder and burglary. His attorneys argued that both witnesses — who have since died —benefitted from cooperating with prosecutors.

Williams was twice before set to be executed, in January 2015 and August 2017, but both times the killing was delayed to conduct further DNA testing. His second execution was halted indefinitely for further investigation by former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, just hours before the execution was scheduled to take place.

But when Gov. Michael Parsons took office in 2017, the Republican “abruptly terminated the process,” just putting the 55-year-old back on death row. Williams’ attorneys argue that the governor’s decision violates William’s constitutional rights.

“Taking the life of Marcellus Williams would be an unequivocal statement that when a White woman is killed, a Black man must die. And any Black man will do,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson wrote in an open letter to Parsons.

"Governor Parson, you have the power to prove that Missouri is better than its ugly history of racism and unspeakable treatment of its Black residents. The NAACP urges you to do the right thing – stop the execution of Marcellus Williams,” the letter reads.

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., has also sent a letter to Parson asking him to grant Williams clemency. "You have it in your power to save a life today by granting clemency to a man who has already unjustly served 24 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. I am urging you to use it,” she writes in the letter.

Parson, who is also a former sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions and has never granted clemency.

about capital punishment

New report accuses Citibank of funding fossil fuel projects amounting to environmental racism

While many approach the subject of fossil fuels through the lens of finance, science and politics, Roishetta Ozane, a Black single mother with six children, spoke with restrained emotion when discussing the extraction of liquid natural gas (LNG). Ozane has a much more personal and painful connection to the multi-billion dollar industry.

"From an ethical standpoint, banks and investment firms should no longer be financing new fossil fuel infrastructure."

"I gave birth to seven children, but one of my children was born into heaven because I had him prematurely and he did not survive," Ozane said. Two of her other children have asthma, and she believes that is also a factor. "I know that the premature births is linked to the industrial pollution that we're bringing in every day in our community."

Climate change activists urge attorney general to prosecute fossil fuel industry

In the face of her tragedy, Ozane became the founder, director and CEO of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a small mutual aid and environmental justice organization. Most recently, she contributed to a new report by the grassroots environmental group Stand.Earth that details how four LNG facilities are linked to $1.6 billion in Citibank funding and allegedly caused "over $36 million in health costs, two deaths, and more than 1,600 incidences of asthma symptoms per year" in both Louisiana and Texas. The bank’s financed emissions related to these facilities is equivalent to over 6 coal plants or 6 million gasoline cars annually.

"From an ethical standpoint, banks and investment firms should no longer be financing new fossil fuel infrastructure," University of Pennsylvania climatologist Dr. Michael E. Mann, who was not involved in the report, told Salon. "No less than the rather conservative IEA [International Energy Agency] has, in essence, said as much."

Mann added, "This is also a matter of ethics. It is those with the least wealth and resources — who contributed least to the problem — that are suffering the worst consequences of fossil fuel extraction and burning and the resulting climate impacts."

A Citi spokesperson strongly disputed the findings, accusing Stand.Earth of a report that "misrepresents and distorts our financing, exhibiting a disregard for the facts." Citi claimed to have met with the activists several times and been unable to engage in a productive conversation "based on factual understanding of financial products."

"Our position on our work to address climate change through our financing is clear," the spokesperson added. "Citi supports the transition to a low-carbon economy through our net zero commitments and our $1 trillion sustainable finance goal. Our approach reflects the need to transition while also continuing to meet global energy needs – these activities are not mutually exclusive."

Although Citi declined to comment on the LNG facilities in question, the spokesperson claimed that the bank "engages with our clients according to our Environmental and Social Risk Management Policy, which outlines our expectations for clients and requires enhanced due diligence around activities with elevated risks related to human rights and environmental issues."

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"This report is offering new data to back up what Gulf Coast communities already know, which is that fossil fuels are killing them."

Surprisingly, Dr. Kevin Trenberth — one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change who has published more than 600 articles on climatology — sided with Citi on the issue and described the report to Salon as "poor quality."

"There are really two issues: LNG and LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] terminals and the use of [liquefied natural gas], and the funding of them," Trenberth said. "The article blames the entire thing on Citi. But that is not entirely fair. The issue is really use of fossil fuels and its export and the growth in that area. It is really a separate issue on who funds those efforts and that is perhaps all Americans — or as the story says, they are complicit."

He added, "The funding is or should be separate from the activity or industry."

Hannah Saggau, the senior climate finance campaigner at Stand.Earth, countered this criticism by pointing out that "this report is offering new data to back up what Gulf Coast communities already know, which is that fossil fuels are killing them and making them sick, and financiers like Citi are complicit." According to Saggau, "we're showing that Citi is complicit in environmental racism through both quantitative analysis as well as community stories, to offer examples of the real health and climate impacts of city's financing."

Saggau described Citi's response as blatant hypocrisy, saying the company is "publicly touting its contributions to racial equity and climate chaos, and at the same time refusing to address the impacts of its fossil fuel financing on communities of color." Saggau added, "Citi wants to have it both ways and not actually address the real harms that its fossil fuel funding is causing in Texas and Louisiana in particular."

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Ozane said she would welcome the leaders at Citi to her community so they can directly experience the results of their investments.

"Living here in this community and being a mom, all I've asked Citi is to sit down and meet with me in person," Ozane said. "Come to my community and see what we're dealing with. Smell what we smell every day. Breathe in this air. Drink the water. Meet with us. And Citi has refused to have those sit-down meetings with community members. We continue to get virtual meetings or get pushed to the side, as if we're not important. We're not a sacrifice zone. We are real people, living in this community where they've decided to dump all of this pollution for profit."

Ozane concluded, "Enough is enough. They can no longer put a profit before people."

about climate change

Kim Kardashian and “Monsters” actor Cooper Koch visit Menendez brothers in jail

Kim Kardashian took to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego over the weekend to speak about prison reform to a group of incarcerated people, including brothers and convicted killers Lyle and Erik Menendez.

Accompanying Kardashian was actor Cooper Koch, who portrays Erik in Ryan Murphy's recently released "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," a dramatic recounting of the brothers' 1989 murder of their parents.

Kardashian, who previously starred in Murphy's "American Horror Story: Delicate," has consistently spoken about prison reform and rehabilitation, even visiting the White House in 2018 to discuss the topic with former president Donald Trump.

"Monsters" sparked outrage amongst many viewers after its debut for an incestuous subplot. Before Kardashian's visit, Erik criticized the series in a statement shared by his wife Tammi Menendez on X/Twitter on Thursday. “It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward — back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Erik’s statement read. “Those awful lies have been disrupted and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out. So now Murphy shapes his horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.”

“Is the truth not enough?” the post continued. “How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma.”

During the brother's 1993 trial, they alleged that their father had sexually and physically abused them. They were ultimately convicted of fatally shooting their parents.

New York Times poll shows Trump beating Harris in Sun Belt battleground states

Despite being deemed the clear winner by voters in this month's presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris is trailing Republican nominee Donald Trump in key battleground states, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.

Though Harris leads nationally, 50-47, the poll shows Trump up 50-45 in Arizona and 49-45 in Georgia, two states that President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020.

In North Carolina, which has voted Republican for over a decade, Trump leads Harris by just 2 points, 47-49.

Harris agrees to second debate on CNN

According to the Times' polling average, Trump leads by just 1 point in North Carolina and 2 points in Arizona and Georgia. Harris leads by 2 points in Pennsylvania and Michigan and 1 point in Wisconsin and Nevada.

The Sun Belt states are three of seven key battlegrounds that will decide November’s election. If Harris wins in Pennsylvania and all other states where she currently leads in the polls, she would win the election, according to a Times analysis.

However, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada — three states where he's currently trailing — as well as the states he currently leads, he would return to the White House,

about the 2024 campaign

Most of Mark Robinson’s campaign staff quits after reports he made pro-Nazi comments on a porn site

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, R-N.C., has survived scandals over defending the Kent State Massacre, describing the civil rights movement as a communist plot to "subvert capitalism" and comparing homosexuality to cow manure. But it's the candidate's vulgar, racist comments on a pornographic forum called "Nude Africa" — revealed last Thursday by CNN — that was too much for most of his staff.

According to a campaign press release on Sunday, Robinson's top four staffers have quit working for him: Conrad Pogorzelski, a political consultant who's worked for Robinson since 2020; Chris Rodriguez, his campaign manager; Heather Whillier, his finance director; and Jason Rizk, his deputy campaign manager.

North Carolina Public Radio reported that other staffers such as political director Patrick Riley also joined the exodus, leaving only two campaign spokespeople and a bodyguard remaining on Robinson's full-time payroll.

"Silly memes": Mark Robinson claimed history of settlers killing Natives was "exaggerated"

Sunday's press release said that new staff would be hired in the "coming days," the Robinson campaign left scrambling just six weeks before the election. That's not the only fallout from the CNN report, which revealed a slew of comments by a user named "Mark Robinson" on Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. Among other things, Robinson described himself as a "Black NAZI," called for the reinstatement of slavery, expressed pleasure over watching transgender pornography and described a time he spied on women taking showers in a locker room.

Though Robinson denied making those comments, CNN found that the profile on Nude Africa used the same alias and email address used by the gubernatorial candidate across his other social media platforms. Other comments by the profile also revealed personal details that match the biography of Robinson, who is currently the lieutenant governor of North Carolina.

Robinson's comments have split Republican officials, who must decide whether to keep their distance, cautiously express concern, privately urge him to suspend his campaign or, like the North Carolina GOP, defend the candidate against "the Left's" attempts to "demonize him via personal attacks."

Robinson himself has remained defiant and is continuing to hold campaign events. In a statement, he thanked his departing staff.

"I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors," he said.

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Republicans may need to ditch Donald Trump to save MAGA

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans got a little bit of good news over the weekend with some highly respected polls coming in showing that Kamala Harris is continuing to grow a lead over Donald Trump.

What was considered to be the most disciplined, professional campaign Trump has ever run has devolved into yet another edition of the Trump show.

According to the NBC poll, Harris leads by five points nationally and has received a mind-boggling 16-point bump in favorability since July. NBC reports that it's “the largest increase for any politician in NBC News polling since then-President George W. Bush's standing surged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks." It appears that the more people see her, the more they like her. The CBS News Poll found Harris up 52-48 percent nationally and 51-49 percent in the battlegrounds. Importantly, the poll found that views of the economy have improved a bit and her numbers on that issue have improved with them. Those who are voting on personal qualities favor Harris 66-33% and those who are voting on "policy" are 50% for her and 50% for Trump.

Pollster G. Elliot Morris of 538, concluded that "Harris modestly leads this race but a normal amount of polling bias could see Trump win."

Harris up 3 nationally per our 538 average; 2.7 in Michigan, 1.9 in Wisconsin and 1.5 in Pennsylvania. Plus GA, AZ, NC and NV all within a point. Harris modestly leads this race but a normal amount of polling bias could see Trump win (or Harris 350 EVs)https://t.co/cdR35ysBkE

— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) September 23, 2024

That throws some cold water on any euphoria Harris supporters might feel. The race remains very close and it's hard to understand how that can be after everything that's happened over the past nine years of Trump dominating our politics. In fact, it's downright disorienting.

Kamala Harris has neutralized Donald Trump's "high-dominance" advantage

The good news is that he has, for the first time, said that he won't run again. Of course, he's not exactly a man of his word so I wouldn't take that to the bank. If he loses this time and disputes the results and continues to run a shadow government from Mar-a-Lago I'd say the chances are pretty good that even at the age of 82 he'll be primed for another comeback, especially if the GOP is still drowning in weirdo extremism.

Despite the Trump campaign insisting that their own polls are showing that he's far ahead in the battlegrounds, Trump's behavior indicates that he knows he's not running away with it. And he's very disappointed about that since he had probably already told Melania she could make plans to follow up her hideous destruction of the White House rose garden with plans to dig up the rest of the grounds and turn them into a putting green and Christmas tree sculpture garden. He thought it was a foregone conclusion and he didn't expect that he would have to actually do anything. And so far, he has not been able to rev himself up to campaign very much.

Axios reported on his low energy rally schedule compared to the past:

Trump holding far fewer rallies than in past runs https://t.co/CBU1kj8GMT

— Axios (@axios) September 22, 2024

He was even doing more rallies in 2020 during the pandemic. And, as Harris pointed out in the debate (much to Trump's chagrin) they just aren't the raucous, fun events they used to be. Harris described how people are leaving early, "bored and exhausted." That is absolutely true. Trump held a rally this past weekend in North Carolina that once again had people streaming out while he was still speaking. The MAGA magic isn't what it used to be. And Trump isn't the candidate he used to be.

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The Washington Post reported on the state of the Trump campaign as we head into the final stretch and it's looking pretty frayed around the edges. Not only is Harris outraising and outspending them, the Trump campaign is experiencing serious internal problems. What was considered to be the most disciplined, professional campaign Trump has ever run has devolved into yet another edition of the Trump show. The Post runs down some of the events of just the past two weeks, pointing out that Trump's "chaotic and widely criticized debate performance" didn't happen in a vacuum. He had already brought back the troublesome Corey Lewandowski into the fold, who had immediately challenged the authority of the campaign leadership and Trump was traveling around the country with far right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. That's not all:

Trump picked a fight with the international icon, posting last Sunday on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — the sort of impulsive, impetuous display that has become increasingly common in recent weeks. In a single 24-hour span at the end of last month, for example, he amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act; falsely accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden; promoted tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory; hawked digital trading cards; and became embroiled in a public feud with staff and officials at Arlington National Cemetery.

One Trump insider told the Post, "The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump. It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

Imagine what he'll be like when he's back in the White House, knowing that he has immunity from virtually any criminal accountability and will not need to seek the approval of the voters ever again. I can't imagine that Donald Trump will spend much time worrying about his "legacy." He believes that he will be remembered as the greatest president in American history and probably the greatest leader in world history. And if others disagree he will spend the rest of his life saying it on a loop, sure that if he just says it enough people will agree it's true.

According to the New York Times, Trump's antics have the rest of the party worried.

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He agitated for a government shutdown under the ignorant assumption that because he was blamed for one when he was president, President Biden and Harris would be blamed this time. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., apparently defied Trump last week and agreed to a deal with Democrats to avert a shutdown without the voter identification provision Trump demanded. No word from Trump yet, but his protege Laura Loomer had angry words for Johnson.)

Now Trump's incoherence on the stump is threatening to bring down the rest of the Republican slate, the Times reports:

Some Republicans worry that the collective impact could alienate more moderate Republicans, whose support could prove to be decisive in such a tight contest, as Mr. Trump perhaps reminds those voters why they denied him a second term.

As Harris said in the debate, he's having a very difficult time processing that he should have been disqualified from the presidency and would have if the party had been willing to take responsibility and convict him in the second impeachment trial.

People often comment on social media about Democrats being nervous nellies about the election, never able to feel confident while the Republicans just march on regardless of how daunting the electoral challenge is. But Democrats know that despite Harris's slight lead and the fact that her campaign is operating smoothly while the Trump campaign is a chaotic mess, Donald Trump could win this campaign.

And that's the problem. Considering all we know and everything that's happened, how in the world is it even possible that it's this close? Even if Harris wins and Trump finally shuffles off into obscurity, that's the question that will haunt us as a country for many years to come.

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The downside to selling hatred as a MAGA commodity

I used to be a Republican. Right out of college, I worked for the legislature, then governor, of a conservative state. Governor Robert Orr, R-Ind., was disciplined and kind and his ethics were beyond reproach. Fast forward three decades and time spent among different cultures. After seeing trickle-down up close, and how it benefits wealthy donors but few others, my perspective changed. When I ran for Congress in 2020, it was as a Democrat.

There’s a wide chasm between policy disagreements and hate, and although my viewpoint evolved over the years, I never hated conservatives. Indiana Republicans, back then, saw political disagreements as healthy conduits to better outcomes. I never heard Orr, or other Republican officials, express hatred for their opponents. They sometimes disparaged them, especially over plans that would leach money from their own pockets, but I never once heard the word "hate," even behind closed doors.

Enter Donald Trump and JD Vance, who package and sell hatred as a national commodity.

Hatred hurts its host most of all

Trump’s belief that he can foment hatred and infect half the country with it— without falling victim himself—reflects a lack of emotional intelligence.

Political hatred is an addiction headed for rock bottom.

From the beginning, Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric has been spiked with violence. Reciting a list is like shoveling the walk while it’s still snowing, but last week’s second Trump assassination attempt in as many months sparks a flashback. Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted his hecklers; suggested peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square be shot; mused that “Second Amendment people” could take out Hillary Clinton; encouraged a violent mob who sought to hang Mike Pence, now calls them “patriots” and “hostages;” and laughed about the vicious hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband. Now we have bomb threats in hospitals and elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio after he and Vance falsely claimed that lawful immigrants there are eating their neighbors’ pets.

From "stand back and stand by" to complimenting "very fine people on both sides" of a Nazi demonstration, Trump’s coded vitriol against judges, prosecutors, poll workers, critics, democrats and his own former staff has led to multiple death threats, and yet he persists.

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Trump habitually projects his own criminal impulses onto his opponents, so it’s not a leap that he’s now blaming Democrats’ rhetoric for the assassination attempts. It is apparently irrelevant that both would-be assassins were Republicans with mental health problems: Crooks was a registered Republican; Routh voted for Trump in 2016 then supported Ramaswamy in the last primary. Both had guns, while Trump himself revoked mental health checks for gun owners.

Vance, who is young, has said that Republicans are “hating the right people,” as if hatred is a finite and targeted commodity. How old will he be when he learns that once hatred takes hold, it can’t be contained, directed or controlled?

Hatred triggers the addiction center of the brain

Hatred becomes a powerful addiction, and Trump’s followers are hooked. Hatred affects dopamine receptor binding such that addiction to hatred is as strong as an addiction to cocaine, except it’s more destructive. A shared addiction to hatred forms a strong social bond because listening to someone spew hatred triggers the same gratifying chemical hit, whereas watching someone else snort cocaine does not.

Extreme hatred also creates motivational bias, which means adherents can only see evidence that supports their beliefs. At the addictive stage, they are blind to any information that challenges their narrative. That’s why reasoning with a hate-infected person won’t work.

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When it comes to juicing neurochemical hits in the brain, the target of hatred doesn’t matter. It’s hatred itself that’s addictive, as our brain pays more attention to negative than positive thoughts as an evolutionary, flight or fight response. Hatred operates in the same parts of the brain, the cortex and subcortex, that manage aggression; the path between political hatred and political violence is obvious. When wielded as a political tool, hatred of “other” has re-shaped continents.

In encouraging hatred for legal immigrants, trans people, racial minorities, gays, women and anyone else they can “other,” Trump and Vance know exactly what they are doing. When asked about the bomb threats in Springfield Ohio, Trump doubled down. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing … now they’re going through hell.” He left off that he and Vance created that hell.

Drawing from Zen Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle teaches that angry and violent people are addicted to their thoughts. They hear them on repeat, over and over, and can’t shut them off. Hatred and negativity are so consuming, they look for others to infect. Hatred, like all untreated addictions, consumes its host in the end. Until then, the addicted part of the country will keep marching toward rock bottom, from where, eventually, they will begin the ascent back toward sanity.

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How Donald Trump turns a profit on political violence

Donald Trump, like the other autocrats, dictators, and tyrants he admires, will not let a crisis go to waste. Trump takes every opportunity to advance his own needs and interests despite (if not because) how many other people may be hurt in the process. This is both learned and natural behavior for the corrupt ex-president. It is who and what he is; he will never stop.

Trump is the first former or sitting president to be charged and convicted of criminal felonies. Instead of moderating his behavior, Trump became more antisocial. He even went so far as to sell pieces of the suit he wore to court during his New York hush-money trial.

Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania during which he was hit in the ear. Trump would turn that incident into “proof” that he is blessed and chosen by God to be the country’s first dictator and a type of God-king. Trump’s now iconic “Fight! Fight! Fight!” reaction to the shooting turned slogan is emblazed on t-shirts and other paraphernalia sold to MAGA cultists and other devotees. Trump was also immortalized on other items after the attempt on his life, including action figures and "collectibles."

Forbes magazine describes Trump’s power over the MAGA people in the following way: “In politics, he has developed an enormous group of followers, the most hardcore of whom are more loyal than any of his previous customers, eagerly buying whatever the former president offers, at almost any price he’s willing to sell.”

Fascism expert Jason Stanley on how "joy" can win: "We need to counter that atmosphere of fear"

Last Sunday, Donald Trump was targeted by an assassin who appeared to be lying in wait near his golf resort in Florida. The Secret Service and local law enforcement acted quickly to protect Donald Trump and arrested the would-be assassin. As he did with his first assassination attempt, and any other opportunity that presents itself, Trump and his surrogates almost immediately started sending out fundraising emails and other communications to the MAGA people.

As part of their opportunistic and exploitative nature, Trump, his propagandists and other agents are trafficking in violence and chaos. This is central to Trump’s fascism, demagoguery, political opportunism, and feral politics. Instead of toning down the levels of extreme political tension in the country, Trump and his surrogates have chosen to use this most recent assassination attempt (as they did with the first one) as an opportunity to attack, threaten, and incite “retaliatory” violence against Kamala Harris, President Biden, other leading Democrats and any other people deemed to be the “enemies” of Trump and MAGA.

Moreover, Trump and his propagandists are using the standard fascist and authoritarian strategy of projection and deflection as they blame the Democrats and “the left” for the increasing political violence in the country. The facts show the opposite. It is Donald Trump, the MAGA people, “conservatives” and the larger right-wing who are mostly responsible for serious acts of political violence during the Age of Trump (and in the last few decades as well).

For example, Donald Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly, and incorrectly, described Kamala Harris as being an anti-American “communist”, “socialist,” and a “fascist” who must be stopped at all costs.

During an interview with Fox News, Trump said that the would-be assassin in Florida, “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it…. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

These are just a few examples of a much larger pattern of violence, stochastic terrorism, and other violent and antidemocratic behavior by Trump during the last nine years.

To wit. Donald Trump is continuing to channel Adolph Hitler with his threats and promises to purify the blood of the nation by eliminating the human vermin. The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio is the most recent target of Trump’s eliminationist threats. Trump and other right-wing hatemongers are accusing Haitians of hunting down and eating (white) people’s dogs and cats. This is in addition to spreading diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. These are old white supremacist lies and conspiracy theories that have little to no basis in fact.

JD Vance and other Trump propagandists are now admitting that they are telling lies about the Haitian community in Springfield. This has not stopped them from continuing to spread their racist screeds and rumors. As a direct result, there have been several days of bomb threats and other terrorist menacing against Haitians and other people of color in Springfield.

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Unrepentant, during his New York rally on Wednesday, Donald Trump said the following about migrants and “illegal immigrants”:

For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, and I’ve been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let them in, it’s going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country, their people that their countries, who are very smart, they don’t want them. That’s why, all over the world, a lot of people coming from jails, out of the Congo in Africa.

‘Where do you come from?’ ‘The Congo…Where in the Congo?’ ‘We come from jail.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘We will not tell you’”….“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world, Asia, lot of it coming from Asia, and what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot. You will have a safe New York within three months. Three months…..For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, November 5 will be your Liberation Day. It’s going to be liberation because you are living like hell. You’re living a life like hell.

Trump has plans for the largest deportation campaign in American history — what he describes and delights in as being “a bloody story” — when and if he takes power in 2025 and becomes the country’s first dictator.

The mainstream news media (especially the elite agenda-setting news media such as the New York Times) does have occasional moments of clarity where instead of normalizing Trump and his MAGA movement’s aberrant and extremely dangerous behavior they choose to properly sound the alarm about it. For example, during a recent panel discussion on CNN, Tim Naftali, who is a leading historian, told this direct truth about Trumpism and violence –- which was met by protests from a Trump surrogate who tried to blame Democrats as the most responsible for the country’s toxic political environment.

“There's no place in this country for violence. But let's be honest about why we have so much tension in this country," Naftali began. "When you dehumanize people, you are using the rhetoric of the '30s. I'm not going to say which country in the 30s. But when you dehumanize people, you make it easier for disturbed minds to do the wrong thing….The constitution won't exist. There will be a bloodbath. He's going to be a dictator. When you effectively radicalize millions of people into believing that if an electoral outcome doesn't go our way, they’re no longer going to be living in the country they thought they were, what do you expect to happen?"

In a recent essay, also at CNN, Stephen Collinson continued to warn the American people public about the existential dangers of Trumpism to the country’s democracy and future:

And the connection between a politician’s rhetoric and actions taken by isolated individuals is often hard to pin down even if the fear is always that a small minority of people might be motivated by a leader’s comments to provoke violence.

But Trump’s claims that Biden and Harris bear direct culpability underscore the extreme nature of his own political instincts.

His claim that their warnings about his supposed threat to democracy risk getting him killed is particularly stark. By implication, he’s saying that it is illegitimate for his opponents to point out the truth: that his past behavior — in seeking to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s voting will be corrupt — suggests that he poses a danger to America’s democratic system. His position, which looks like an attempt to stifle free speech, may also be a dark harbinger of how he would behave if he won a second term….

In his interview on “State of the Union,” Vance said that any suggestion that he or Trump had acted in a way that caused such threats was “disgusting.”

It’s also disgusting that anyone would consider assassinating a former president running in a democratic election. Yet the historical record shows that while Trump has become a victim of a toxic political culture, he’s also one of its primary instigators.

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In a frontpage story in the New York Times on Monday, Peter Baker wrote forcefully, and with great insight and candor, about Donald Trump and his unique role in encouraging (and legitimating) political violence:

At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.

While Mr. Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.

Mr. Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words. Just last week, his false pet-eating accusations against Haitian migrants during his debate with Ms. Harris were quickly followed by bomb threats that turned life upside-down in Springfield, Ohio, and he did nothing to discourage them. After 33 bomb threats, Ohio’s governor said Monday that law enforcement would conduct daily sweeps of schools in the town.

Asked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats, he demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

These are outliers. Such moments of pro-democracy journalism and bold truth-telling are, for the most part, inconsistent and quickly retreated from as the mainstream media defautls back to its bad and obsolete habits of false equivalence, “bothsidesism,” “objectivity,” and horserace politics.

In some of the worst examples of media malpractice in the Age of Trump and the democracy crisis, the mainstream news media will platform Trump and his propagandists’ claims that they are the “real victims“ of political violence in America instead of doing the basic work of exposing the lies and distortions of facts and reality such claims are based upon.

In a recent essay, Rick Wilson, who is one of the founding members of the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project, intervenes, as he highlights the absurdity and danger of allowing Trump and his agents to squash dissent by claiming fictive victimhood status:

The emerging MAGA conflation that every criticism of Donald Trump is a call for his assassination is a logical, moral, and political fallacy of the most sublimely stupid nature, a false equivalence so profoundly wrong in every dimension that only the people with a political death wish (and, perhaps, the American media) could buy it.

It is an argument made only by Trump’s most mendacious enablers and propagandists, believed only by fools, and embraced only by the damned and the doomed who would unilaterally disarm in the face of the most dangerous fascist leader to have ever cursed the American body politic.

They say calling Trump what he is — a pendant authoritarian, a convicted criminal, an enabler of the worst and most dangerous elements of our body politic — constitutes a death threat, not a description. Sorry, MAGA, but if the jackboot fits, wear it: he is an authoritarian, a statist, a racist, an aspiring fascist, a hateful, mendacious, corrupt traitor, a fool, mentally ill, and frankly evil.
I’ll spare you the irony of people who grunt about “muh First Amendment rights” when they’re confronted with the rotten sickness of their online cruelty and conspiracy theories, now being the leaders of the most potent assault on political speech and expression in the last hundred years.

With less than 60 days left until Election Day, the mainstream American news media needs to quickly learn and internalize the following rules and realities about Donald Trump, the MAGAfied Republicans, "conservatives," and the larger right wing and neofascist movement.

They are malign actors who do not believe in American democracy and the country’s democratic traditions, institutions, or culture. They are especially hostile to both the concept and reality of multiracial pluralistic democracy. As malign actors, they will do anything to get and keep power including acts of lethal political violence as seen on Jan. 6.

They routinely engage in political and other behavior that constitutes a “moral hazard.” For example, there is a reason why a person cannot buy fire insurance on their neighbor’s home or take out life insurance on a stranger. Such a person is incentivized to cause harm because it will be financially and personally rewarding – and they are generally safe from the negative consequences of their behavior. In their approach to politics, society, and life more broadly, Donald Trump, the MAGA people, and today’s Republicans and “conservatives” and the larger right-wing are guided by the same unethical principles.

I conclude this essay with the following wisdom, advice, and warning for the mainstream American news media, the responsible political class, and the American people in this moment of democracy crisis and ascendant fascism. In his book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” philosopher Jason Stanley writes:

Joseph Goebbels once declared, ‘This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.’ Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

You have been warned again. It is your choice to listen and act accordingly or to believe that denial will save you.

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The challenge of “The Choice”? Figuring out Kamala Harris, fast

One would think “The Choice 2024” would have been, if not easier for “Frontline” producer and director Michael Kirk, perhaps a slightly easier lift.

Every four years since 1988, the recurring special offers what may be the most evenhanded side-by-side portrait of the two major party candidates running for president of the United States. Kirk has directed six of the seven versions produced since the 2000 race, perfecting its winning production method to a formula that suits any year or political era.

This time would have been a rematch of Trump versus Biden. Between the previous special and all the investigative documentary series’ individual pieces about each man, all the main pieces were present. The tough part would have been to find a new angle, a somewhat tougher task for former president Donald Trump, the first candidate to co-star in “The Choice” three times, than President Joe Biden – another repeat, and a staid one by comparison.

Kirk had a rough cut of the original special ready to go, and “Frontline” editor-in-chief and producer Raney Aronson-Rath had tasked him with getting started on a version of “The Choice” profiling the candidates for vice president, a first for the series.

Usually, these portraits take months, even when one of the candidates has been profiled in a previous edition of “The Choice” and other Frontline episodes.

Then in July . . . well, you know. Biden was out, Vice President Kamala Harris was tapped to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket, and Kirk realized, "Oh my God, we have about seven weeks. It would normally take four months. A new character is coming from who knows where. Two weeks to shoot, 27 interviews.”

That’s all before “the weave,” Kirk’s term for editing thematically similar narrative segments about each candidate next to each other to emphasize commonalities and contrasts between the two.

This may be the third time “The Choice” features Trump, but it’s the first long-form documentary to examine Harris’ life. Despite the brief turnaround, Kirk’s profile does a solid job of revealing her to be a study in political pragmatism – someone who learns from setbacks, evolves her strategy, and figures out how to win the next round. It achieves what opinion writers and pundits have insisted voters need from her, in that it illuminates a more nuanced understanding of who Kamala Harris is.

“I love the weave because I think there are secrets that it reveals that you didn't know were secrets,” Kirk told Salon in our recent conversation. "I'm thrilled with the narrative structure, and the way it reveals things that I didn't even know were coming. There's an alchemy that happens, and it's just delicious when you watch it.”

Kirk shared more details about that alchemy and other aspects that made “The Choice 2024” uniquely challenging and rewarding in a lengthy conversation, the highlights of which are featured here.

"Every single family has been touched by this": "#Untruth" director Dan Partland diagnoses Trumpism

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is the first time that you've profiled the same candidate three times for "The Choice." . . . Can you remind me about the process from when you begin producing “The Choice” to locking it? How long does it usually take?

We started this one in January. We’d just finished a film called “Democracy on Trial.” It aired in the third week or fourth week of January, and we had already sort of moved the research over. We knew we had a backlog of Trump, so the idea there was, how can you make the Trump stuff feel new and fresh and different or useful? And we had Biden from 2020, so we had a lot of that in the bank too.

So we kind of were like, let’s do something extravagant: let's do three hours and try to get everything we can in for both of them. And that's really what we made in July. . . I can't remember when Biden dropped out because my life became a blur at that moment, but I think it was the 21st of July. I don't remember, Melanie. I cannot remember time anymore.

Nobody can.

OK, good. It’s not just me.

But actually, I do want to ask you about what you call “the blur.” You have your method, you already knew there were going to be some specific challenges for both, in terms of finding a new way to tell Trump's story that isn't a retread.

Yeah. I'd already played that magic trick once, right there. In the “Trump vs. Biden,” the meta-theme on both sides is how they faced crisis. The film starts with the country in crisis, in the pandemic, and how did these men who are asking us to vote for them in the midst of a crisis and a divided country, how have they reacted to crises in the past?

So I want to return to that, but what I want to know about now is your reaction at the moment when you saw that Biden dropped out. Because if I were in your situation, I probably would have disassociated.

Well, maybe. Are we having this conversation? Maybe I never made it. I never finished. It's possible, I suppose.

The Choice (WGBH)Really, though, what did you do in that moment? There was, what, a period where you had your content in the can, and then Biden announced he was dropping out, and there was a brief period when nobody was quite sure what was going to happen.

So the week before, or two weeks before, we had shown a rough cut to Raney Aronson. It was a four-hour rough cut of “Trump Vs. Biden,” and it was good. It was big.

. . .But we'd been interviewing all of his people and his family, and we knew things were right on the edge. And his campaign was very . . . you know, if you've been doing this long enough, you could tell things were not all in right over there in Wilmington.

Raney had also made the decision in January to contract with us to also make a “Choice” about the vice presidential candidates. And I said, “Nobody cares about the vice president . . .Come on, that's crazy. It’s just a worthless job.”

And she said, “Well, I think it might be interesting, especially because they're both old, so people might want to know who the vice presidents are.” Fair enough. So we said, we would do that as soon as we finished the big three-hour “Choice.” So we had started researching Harris. . . and the hints we were getting from people inside the Biden group, who shall remain nameless, were, “If he goes, it's her. It's obviously her.”

…When it happened, oh, it was a Sunday afternoon. I'm sitting in this room, on the screen back there is CNN, and bang. And I called Raney and said, “Here we go . . . I'm going to see what's the fastest I could make a two-hour Biden film. I've got some new stuff that I haven't used. I'll throw it together, and I'll get two hours up.” We did it in nine days, and she put it on the air, on PBS. “Biden’s Decision” aired.

Meanwhile, the research team, the reporters, were out there grabbing everything they could on this person, Vice President Harris. No documentary had ever really been shot. Abby Phillips did something at CNN, but . . . there was no definitive biography. There was very little that the archivist could find.

. . . Many of Harris' friends . . . those people had never done an interview before on television. They were all excited and thrilled, and she said, “Sure, go ahead and talk to them.” Fortunately, they came prepared to talk not about everything, but about what they thought they should say.

And we shot in two weeks, and we cut it in five weeks, and we did it. I don't know how. Then we did the weave, which is the hardest part.

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When I interviewed you in the past, you said that the point is to show these portraits that are complimentary and contrasting. No one's putting their thumb on the scales here, and I think that's one of the most useful things about it, this ability to weigh these candidates impartially.

And yet, when I was watching this edition, I was very much aware that from at least Trump's side of “The Choice,” that must have been uniquely difficult. Not only do you have the challenge of telling the story you've already told twice in a different way, but he is a documentary character who, as you know, time, experience and exposure have made the public see him in a specific way. I wonder if that weighed on you differently this time.

Absolutely. The thought process I went through was a hard one. Why go all the way back to when Donald Trump was throwing birthday cake and kicking over blocks, and try to bring him through military school and up to where we sort of know who Donald Trump turns out to be?

But because we didn't know anything about Harris, I thought, well, we have the things we should keep from Trump’s life story and reevaluate some things about his childhood that we hadn't really hit before, because we knew we were going to have to hit her childhood, because of the composite of who she is.

That we would emphasize Trump's dad, and we would emphasize her mom, became an obvious thing right away. Berkeley, CA., is very different than the Trump household in Jamaica, Queens. So place started to become something we were really interested in: Berkeley versus Jamaica, Queens, for example. Mom, Shyamala, versus Dad, Fred Trump — what a vast difference between the two!

Forgetting, even if you will, race and gender for just a little while, because those are sort of obvious givens . . . the implications for Harris' life are very different than I think Donald being an old white guy. And how does Donald react to race throughout his life, from lots of things?

. . .I have this thing hanging on the wall. You're not gonna be surprised by this: “A president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of their own life.” And if you know that's what you're doing, you're trying to just draw an underline and build a little five-minute, six-minute sequences about a lesson in their life along the way.

It was a little bit like — everybody always says three-dimensional chess. I think of it as Scrabble. You're moving these little tiles around and trying to come up with an interesting word. And that's the challenge.

Who is that quote attributable to?

You know, I said that quote for years to people, and I never knew who it was. And I was doing a radio interview just 20 minutes ago, and I said, I don't know who said this, and a listener wrote in. It was Mark Twain.

There you go. The ever-quotable Mark Twain. It's always either him or Benjamin Franklin.

I’m actually sorry it was Mark Twain. Well, a little bit, I mean. Everybody has a Mark Twain quote that they pull out, it becomes such a trope. I thought, what if it was somebody else? I don't know who that would be.

Let’s return to that question of the meta-theme. What is the meta-theme of this edition of “The Choice”?

I think it's about struggle, you know. Her struggle. I mean, they both have plenty of struggles. His struggle is living with this idea that you cannot lose. That's been with him forever, but it became so manifest after January 6 and the Stop the Steal movement.

What's the struggle of Kamala Harris? Part of the struggle, of course, is as a Black, South Asian female in the 1980s '90s, and 2000s, who wants to make a change, who grows up in a family, around Huey Newton's trials, all of that, with a mother and father — especially mother, who is just an amazing movie in herself. I mean, we couldn't do what we started out to do, which was a big Shyamala story, because it's just fantastic.

. . . The struggle for Kamala, what her heart and soul and her view of justice have become, is an inside war, a kind of fight from the inside. Well, that's a challenge in the '80s. As the women around her tell us, it was hard enough to be a woman trying to break into the power centers of America. How about a Black and Indian woman breaking into the power centers of America? Then on top of all of that, she makes a controversial choice against the wishes of her mother and becomes a prosecutor and works in law enforcement at a time when the primary people being scooped up on the streets of Alameda County in San Francisco were Black people. Her mother was outraged. Couldn't believe it. Her family couldn't believe it. Her friends were shocked. But there she is deciding that's her core struggle. How do I fight from the inside?

To me, that was it, with sort of both of them struggling in different ways. This was the meta-struggle that they were fighting.

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Owing to the extraordinary nature of this particular election, I wonder if you have some thoughts about the meaning and utility of “The Choice” this year, versus in 2020 or even 2016.

Part of the task of the film, as opposed to Biden versus Trump, was presenting a whole new person who has genuine star power, political star power.

And I've been doing politics all my life, and when you're in the room with somebody who has it, you just kind of know. Maybe they live up to it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do some interesting things. Maybe they make mistakes. Maybe they can't handle it. That's the kind of core of who she is, and I thought people need to know that.

Also, we're not doing policy and issues, but it's implying things about policy and issues you're really introducing in a way that even her DNC speech didn't do. The real Kamala Harris. It's a big challenge because, as I say, there's no archive, there's no long history. There's no record to go back and examine. There's political record, and there's law enforcement record, but nothing that you really put your arms around and say, “Oh, that's her.”

… Donald Trump doesn't and didn't represent any Republican values at all, apparently. He pulled the party apart and created his own party and most of his actions are ideology-free. They're about Donald and what he wants to do so that he can win.

I'm just taking that part of the story that nobody does which is, what were they like when they were little kids? And how does that emerge as you grow, as you learn and as you make mistakes, and as you find a mentor — like Roy Cohn, in Trump’s case? How do we evaluate them as presidents, knowing that that's what's going on inside their heads, and maybe, if we're lucky, inside their hearts and souls?

"The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump" premieres Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 10 p.m. on PBS member stations and on YouTube, and is available to stream on the "Frontline" website and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly asserted that no candidate had run for president three times. Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon are previous major political party nominees who ran for office three times.

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Update: Janet Jackson’s apology for calling Harris “not Black” was not authorized by her

In a twist, an apology credited to Janet Jackson over the weekend — after saying that Vice President Kamala Harris is "not Black" in an interview with The Guardian — was not actually authorized by the singer at all.

According to an update from Variety issued on Sunday night:

The unauthorized “apology,” first reported by Buzzfeed and repeated by multiple major outlets, was made by a man named Mo Elmasri who — apparently inaccurately — claimed to be the singer’s manager. It reads: “Janet Jackson would like to clarify her recent comments. She recognizes that her statements regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity were based on misinformation. Janet respects Harris’ dual heritage as both Black and Indian and apologizes for any confusion caused. She values the diversity Harris represents and understands the importance of celebrating that in today’s society. Janet remains committed to promoting unity and understanding.”

In an interview published by The Guardian on Saturday, Jackson balked at a question about the possibility of a Black woman being president.

"[Harris is] not Black," Jackson said. “That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian. Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”

Harris is the daughter of Jamaican-American professor Donald Harris, who is Black, and Indian-American scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris.

"I didn't know she was Black": Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and skin-color racism

The now-discredited statement made by Elmsari, who is not the singer’s manager, said Jackson's response was "based on misinformation."

"She deeply respects Vice President Kamala Harris and her accomplishments as a Black and Indian woman," she added. "Janet apologizes for any confusion caused and acknowledges the importance of accurate representation in public discourse."

It's not the first time that Harris' ethnicity has been questioned this election season. Donald Trump falsely accused the vice president of "turn[ing] Black" at some point in the last few years.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black," he said at a Black journalists conference in July. "So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

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