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“The Old Man” star Jeff Bridges: “I didn’t think I was going to work again”

Jeff Bridges really is that chill. Within minutes of our meeting for the first time, he is recommending meditative breathing techniques and calling me by the name I reserve for close friends. And by the time he's left our "Salon Talks" interview, I've also received a big, encompassing hug, because he's a hugger.

Though he has played psychopaths and Marvel villains, there's every good reason to understand why Bridges' most iconic role is as The Dude in "The Big Lebowski." It's because no one else could have embodied a character with such a convincing level of easygoing wonderment, and done so with Bridges' seemingly effortless commitment and precision. "That movie has bloomed in beautiful, beautiful ways," he says. 

Now, after enduring non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a life-threatening bout of Covid, and a few entertainment industry strikes, Bridges is back at last for the second season in his Emmy-nominated role as resourceful, brutal former CIA agent Dan Chase in FX's "The Old Man." The Academy Award winner dropped by Salon's studio to talk about doing action scenes in his 70s, carrying the mantle of Dude for Kamala, and how recovering from his health scare got him to "fire up the old man again." The secret to his survival, in health and in Hollywood? "The L word, love," he says with a chuckle. "That corny thing."

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

It's been more than two years since the last season of "The Old Man" and we pick up right where it left off. For those who need a refresher, where are we with Dan and his journey? 

[My character] Dan finally gets together with John Lithgow's character, Harold, and they're off to Afghanistan to find their daughter. We left season one with him walking from the airport to the plane, and we open up and they're in Afghanistan, and the adventure begins. 

This is a high-energy project for you "old dudes." I want to ask what that feels like for you. This is physically demanding, this is travel, it's intense. What do you do to prepare for a role like this? 

Well, work out, do a little training so you can do some of the stuff that's required, which is a lot of fighting. Fortunately, we have Tim Connolly as our stunt coordinator and he's just so great to work with. Also, Tommy DuPont, my stunt guy who we've worked with in several pictures together. The basic assignment for a fight scene is like any other scene that you're doing where you want it to be interesting, but at the same time look very real and like it's happening just for the first time. In a dramatic scene, that's what you're going for, and that's what you're going for in a fight scene. Everything we're doing is an illusion. We're pretending, right? But we want it to seem as real as possible. To make that illusion, you practice, you figure it out. It's like a dance routine. You work it out and then you make it seem like it's happening for the first time after all of that work. 

This is really the little show that could, because you began production in 2019. It gets shut down for COVID. Then you unfortunately get diagnosed with cancer. You get diagnosed with COVID. Then there's the strikes. In terms of keeping the momentum for yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally, staying true to this arc, to these characters, to their story over five years while you're going through the wringer, how do you do it? 

Well, it's a good question, and I don't know exactly the answer. Something that pops into my mind is just momentum. We were off for two years, and you come back and you see all the same people and it feels like you just had a long weekend. You pick up where you left off, like muscle memory or something. That was fascinating to go through that experience. But talk about who you're coming back to: Amy Brenneman and John Lithgow and Alia Shawkat, it's a wonderful team. That makes all the difference. 

"I remember my doctor saying to me, 'Jeff, you're not fighting. You've got to fight.'"

You talk about coming back and picking up where you left off, but you've been through something truly life-changing. You had a very, very intense health scare with cancer and then Covid. How does that change your approach to the work that you're doing, and to the relationships you have on and off set?

Going through something like that exacerbates lots of stuff. Your philosophy of life, what's your strategy now, here, in this situation? You bring out everything that's ever worked for you in your life. A lot of that has to do with the L word, love. That corny thing. 

You realize how much you love your family, how much you love the nurses and the doctors who are there for you trying to get you better. And you feel all your loved ones, you feel their love. All of that is quite intense. It's interesting that everybody goes through it, I think, differently. Not only the people who are going through the illness, but the people who love you. Each one of them is going through it in their unique way. 

I remember my doctor saying to me, "Jeff, you're not fighting. You've got to fight." I had no idea what they were talking about. I was in surrender mode. I say, "Oh, people. That's right. People die. This is me doing that. Oh, okay, well what's this like?" 

Do you feel there's a difference between fighting and surrendering, because you can surrender to the process in a very constructive way? 

Absolutely. You can also surrender to fighting in a funny sort of way. They blend. It's like the particle and wave thing, quantum computing. That seems to be what life is about, it's a big paradoxical thing. 

When you talk about love, you got a trainer so you could walk your daughter down the aisle?

As soon as I got out of the hospital, I had a trainer and I would have these little goals. The first goal was, let's see how long you can stand, "…89, 90. 90 seconds, good, good." Then you walk around the hospital floor and you've got your oxygen. You've got the thing up your nose and the pursed lips breathing. That's a wonderful skill that pursed lips breathing. I still do that. 

Just to get yourself to the toilet, it's a good day.

That's a toughie, right? Defecating, oh my God. So I gave myself these little goals and I didn't think I was going to work again. "No, Jeff, if you live, you're not going to be able to do that." And then my daughter Hayley was getting married and she said, "Come on, dad, walk me down the aisle." This is an interesting thing about fighting and surrendering, surrendering to the idea of walking her down the aisle. That's what I was into. It was difficult. We go up to our edge where we think, "This is far," and then I like to do little experiments on myself. I say, "This is my edge. Wonder what would happen if I just go a little farther?" To reach that edge is a wonderful thing. That's where all the gold is really. That's where the treasure is, when you can mess around with that edge and see where it is. 

"Unlike a lot of showbiz parents, my parents dug showbiz a lot and wanted all their kids to get into it."

So the day came and I said, "Gee, I can do it. I can walk her down the aisle." Then I was walking her down the aisle and then the dance, "You think you've got enough to dance with your girl?" I said, "Well, let's see. I'll give it a shot," and surrendered to it. It is difficult, I raced back to my chair, put the [oxygen] thing on. But after that I said, "Maybe I'll be able to go back and fire up 'The Old Man' again." 

And I did. Zach, my trainer, worked with me to do that. He was so skillful at just enough challenges. But let me do that in my own speed. I appreciated that. 

When you've been through all of those things, it gives new context to this character that you're playing, to be able to own that phrase, "the old man." How does that feel for you to be the old man? 

Well, I qualify, 74 now, but Joel Grey, he trumped us all in his 90s. John Lithgow is older than me. But being an old man, fascinating thing. Having gone through that illness and stuff, one of the things that occurred to me is this doesn't go on forever. You're going to end. You've got some stuff to do. Now's the time, man. That's what this age has given me. It's like, "You got some stuff? Let's see it. Let's hear it."

And you've been doing this for basically 74 years, right? You started as a baby. 

Six months old. 

You come from a show business family: your father Lloyd Bridges, your mother Dorothy Bridges, and your brother Beau Bridges. Yet you've said you weren't sure you wanted to go into this profession. What made you change your mind?

Unlike a lot of showbiz parents, my parents dug showbiz a lot and wanted all their kids to get into it. That was the atmosphere I grew up in, and what teenager wants to do what their parents wanted them to do? So I resisted. I had a lot of reasons for my resistance, I didn't want to compete with my father and my brother. I was interested in music and painting and a lot of other creative endeavors. My dad said, "Jeff, don't be ridiculous. That's what's so wonderful about acting. All those interests? You're going to be called upon to use them in the work." I'm glad I listened to him. He was absolutely right. Now, as an older guy, a lot of those desires that were pushed down when I was a kid are kind of coming up now. 

I grew up with The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and [there's] nothing like getting a band together. Like my dad told me, "You're going to be asked to do some of these things." And "Crazy Heart" came along and my dear friend T Bone Burnett was doing the music. After the success of that, I thought, "Gee, I've got all these other tunes. Maybe I'll call up T Bone to see if he wants to get these done." So we made an album. And I said, "Yeah, I've got all these great musicians that live in Santa Barbara." And my dear friend Chris Pelonis, he's a wonderful musician, we formed a band called The Abiders. Then I got sick, then the strikes, and there was all this downtime. 

What I found coming up for me was, "Gee, Jeff, you've got all of these tunes in your music mine," [that's what] I call it. "Why don't you go in there and see if there's anything there that you want to realize?" I found a whole slew of songs, and I didn't feel like getting a band together and rehearsing. I'd say, "Just put this rough stuff out and juxtapose it to some interesting images that you shoot on your cell phone." I put out five volumes of that adventure called "Emergent Behavior," and if people are interested they can check it out on my website.

That's one of the things that has popped up, like saying, "Come on old man, what you got? Now's the time. You're going to wait until everything is perfectly polished? No, if somebody else wants to do that in the future, they can polish them up. Just put out what you got." 

"'I had my Beatles moment playing with my band, The Abiders, at a Lebowski Fest, playing to a sea of dudes."

I'm also a photographer. My wife's a photographer, and we've been married 47 years. For our wedding, she gave me the gift of a Widelux camera. There was a fellow, Mark Hanauer, who came to our wedding and took some pictures and I said, "Wow, what kind of camera is this?" The format's kind of like a 70 mm movie format. My wife gave me one of these, and I started taking pictures during the movies that I was making and made books for the cast and crew of these pictures, and put out a couple of books that are available to the public. 

Then I was upset because the camera was no longer being made. The factory burned down about 30 years ago. So I got this idea and started to talk to Sue. We got in cahoots with some Germans, Charys and Marwan, and we are remaking this camera. I can go on and on, I've got all these little side projects, it's fascinating. So, that's what old age is doing to me. It's funny. 

The Dude has become an institution and a way of life for people. I want to ask you about that because you lean into it. You are happy to be The Dude, you are happy to be The Dude for other people. What has he meant to you in terms of your life and your identity over the last 26 years? 

Oh yeah, gosh. Working with the brothers, that's the top. The Coen brothers and the team that they assembled, a lot of them have worked together many, many times. The experience itself was wonderful. I got my Widelux, and took a bunch of pictures. If I want to relive those times, I can just look at them. Then "Lebowski" has bloomed in all these different ways. I mean, there are these Lebowski Fests. I had my Beatles moment playing with my band, The Abiders, at a Lebowski Fest, playing to a sea of dudes. They're all dressed up like The Dude or bowling pins or whatever. That was wonderful.

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Then I'm having a dinner. I think it was Ram Dass, it was his birthday. Ram Dass is sitting to my right and to my left is a guy named Bernie Glassman, who happened to be a Zen master. He had an organization called the Zen Peacemakers. And he leans over to me and says, "Jeff, I want to let you know I really enjoy 'The Big Lebowski.' It's filled with Koans, and I'm all about bringing Buddhism to these days that we are living now." I said, "Koan, what do you mean?" He says, "Well, look who wrote and directed the movie, the Coen brothers. And the movie is filled with Koans."

You know what a Koan is? "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" These mind challenges.

I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He says, "Well, first of all, 'The Dude abides.' That's very Buddhistic." Both of our favorites was, "Yeah, but that's just your opinion, man." "Shut the f__k up, Donnie. That's a good Koan." He says, "Let's write a book about it." So that's what we did. We went up to Montana, I got a place up there for two weeks. We wrote "The Dude and the Zen Master," and it's a wonderful book.

Later, Bernie came to visit when we were doing "True Grit," and he asked the [Coen] brothers, "Are you guys into Zen?" They said, "No, no, no, no." When making "Lebowski," we never talked anything spiritual or philosophical. But that movie has bloomed in beautiful, beautiful ways. 

The Dude made a special cameo on a certain Zoom call this summer. Why was that important for you? You are a political guy, you are outspoken. You care a lot about things like childhood hunger and the environment. What are the stakes in this election, and why did you want to be involved in that? 

Life is so serendipitous. I was invited to White Dudes for Harris. I qualify so beautifully for all those things, particularly The Dude deal. That's what really drew me to it. Another example of "Lebowski's" blooms. I got on there and I didn't really realize it was a more serious thing, that it was white dudes. I still don't quite get it, are we not respected or something? What is the thing? Do you know? 

As a non-dude, maybe I shouldn't. 

I don't really understand about the white guys thing for Harris, but I'm certainly in support of Kamala. My gosh, she's wonderful. Loved her the other night on that debate. And we got all the support from Taylor Swift and the Cheneys. Liz Cheney is such a wonderful hero, I think, to all of us. It's exciting. 

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Russia was behind a viral video that falsely claimed Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run

Russian propagandists are peppering the internet with videos purporting fictitious and outlandish stories that nevertheless rack up millions of views, including one featuring an actor falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of a nonexistent hit-and-run that paralyzed a girl, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) said this week in a report on foreign efforts to influence American elections.

The hit-and-run video first appeared on a supposed San Francisco-based "news outlet," which quickly disappeared after passing the baton to an army of social media accounts that circulated the fabricated claim on X, where it drew 7 million views, as well as Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

Another video made up a story about an assault on a Donald Trump rally attendee, while a third depicted a fake billboard with vulgar language claiming that Harris wanted to change children's gender en masse. Microsoft said that two Russian groups called Storm-1516 and Storm-1679, believed to be linked to the Kremlin, were behind the production and circulation of these videos, and their efforts represented a renewed push to "discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign."

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The report comes on the heels of a Justice Department indictment of two employees at RT, a Russian state-run propaganda network, for allegedly laundering $9.7 million through shell companies to run a media firm that gushed out nearly 2,000 videos with the aim of "illegally [manipulating] American public opinion by sowing discord and division." Last week, the State Department confirmed that this was only one part of a broader RT-led covert information operation, with the U.S. government also seizing and shutting down a network of fake news sites intended to appear as legitimate outlets.

RT and other Kremlin proxies, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement, “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”

The Kremlin, for its part, denied any role in trying to influence American elections.

U.S. entities are scrambling to coordinate a response. On the same day as the indictment, the Treasury Department sanctioned 10 Russians and two Russian groups over "malign efforts" to influence the 2024 election. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced Monday that it would ban RT pages from its websites.

But far from being daunted by the exposure and potential retaliation, the Microsoft report said, Russian-backed groups are adapting by "attempting to create new infrastructure, with one threat actor already having moved media outlets from seized websites to new ones."

As the 2024 election nears its end, the report warned, those groups will "continue to use cyber proxies and hacktivist groups to amplify their messages through media websites and social channels geared to spread divisive political content, staged videos, and AI-enhanced propaganda."

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Missouri doctors say they’re tired of seeing people suffer because of the state’s abortion ban

Over 800 medical professionals in Missouri are endorsing Amendment 3, a ballot initiative upheld that would reverse the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

“Politicians are not more qualified than doctors to help our patients make decisions around their reproductive health care,” Dr. Betsy Wickstrom, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Kansas City, said at a press conference on Monday. “I think we can all agree that politicians should not have a say in our exam rooms. Voting yes on Amendment 3 will prevent that."

Also known as the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative,” Amendment 3 would change Missouri’s constitution to explicitly protect “reproductive freedom," defined as "the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care.”

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“The right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, interfered with, delayed or otherwise restricted,” the measure reads. It also states that the state government “shall not discriminate against persons providing or obtaining reproductive healthcare.”

The initiative was first introduced by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom and has faced a long and arduous path to the ballot. After gathering nearly 380,000 signatures from Missourians (constitutional amendment initiatives need a minimum of 171,592 to be included on the ballot), Amendment 3 was certified by Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft in early August.

Just days later. however, two Republican lawmakers sued Ashcroft for certifying the amendment, marking the first of several last-ditch attempts to block Amendment 3.

They nearly succeeded. In early September, a Cole County judge ruled the amendment violated state law because it failed to list what specific laws would be repealed if it passed, prompting Ashcroft to reverse his original decision and decertify Amendment 3. The decertification sparked outrage among reproductive rights advocates across the state. 

The case was ultimately sent to Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled earlier this month that Amendment 3 should be included on the ballot in November after all.

In 2022, Missouri enacted a near-total abortion ban. All abortions are illegal in the state, except in cases of medical emergency when there is a risk of “irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function,” a broad definition that has left both patients and doctors in limbo. 

“Any person who knowingly performs or induces an abortion of an unborn child in violation of this subsection shall be guilty of a class B felony, as well as subject to suspension or revocation of his or her professional license,” Missouri’s abortion law reads. 

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Over the last two years, Wickstrom has seen many patients turned away from emergency rooms and forced to travel out of state to get the care they need. She’s witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of the abortion ban on her patients, some of whom have heart disease and are at risk for complicated pregnancies. Even if a patient were “tugging for breath, literally suffocating in my exam room” and needed to terminate their pregnancy, by law she couldn’t help them, she explained. 

“Can I do anything about that here in Missouri? No, these are people that have to find their way out of state to get life-saving care,” Wickstrom said.

It’s ultimately contributing to people being concerned about starting a family and reconsidering the risks of being pregnant in the state, she said, explaining that patients often come to her wondering if it's even safe to have a baby in Missouri. They're nervous that they won’t be able to get the care they need if there’s a complication. 

“Why are we making people choose between their own lives and continuing a pregnancy in a forced birth situation?”

​​It’s the reality for many patients and doctors in red states across the country. Abortion bans have resulted in a mass exodus of obstetricians that’s left thousands of pregnant people without access to care. In Idaho, 22% of practicing obstetricians have left the state since its abortion ban took effect, according to a report by the Iowa Coalition for Safe Health Care. Months after Texas imposed its six-week abortion ban, applications to Texas-based OGBYN residencies dropped by 10.4%. 

Nationally, 5.5 million women live in counties “with no or limited access to maternity care services,” according to a recent survey by March of Dimes.

“That's the reality when doctors can be jailed and lose their medical license just for providing routine, safe medical care,” Dr. Jennifer Smith, an OBGYN in St. Louis, said at Monday’s press conference. 

That’s exactly why ballot initiatives like Amendment 3 are so important, supporters argue.

With the certification of Amendment 3, Missouri will be the 11th state to vote on a reproductive rights measure in November. To pass, the initiative will need 50% of the vote. 

“We have a chance to protect patients’ freedom, health and lives,” Smith said. “That's why doctors like us are speaking out on behalf of our patients, our fellow medical professionals and all Missourians, we are saying yes on amendment three.”

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Harris says she is “working to earn” the votes of Black men in NABJ interview

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris sat down for a face-to-face interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Tuesday where she said she is "working to earn" the vote of Black men, a crucial voting bloc in swing states this November. 

Speaking in front of a live audience, Vice President Harris fielded a range of questions from NABJ members while largely sticking to the script seen on the campaign trail. Harris discussed her plan to create 16 million new jobs and support first-time home buyers, called for a ban on assault weapons and reiterated her support for Israel’s right to defend itself while also calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The 45-minute interview was the polar opposite of former President Donald Trump’s tense conversation with the NABJ in July, in which he insulted and attacked the journalists interviewing him and called their organizations “fake news.”

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In contrast, Harris remained calm and at times even dry in her second high-profile national media interview since launching her presidential campaign. She also appealed to a specific group of voters: young Black men. 

“What is your message to young Black male voters who feel left out of the economy and how can your policies materially change their lives?”  moderator Gerren Keith Gaynor, White House correspondent for The Grio, asked the vice president.

“I think it’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris responded. “Black men are like any other group, you gotta earn their vote. So I’m working to earn the vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I’m Black."

Though 90% of Black voters supported Biden in 2020 and most have historically voted Democratic, recent polling shows Black men under the age of 50 may be more open to voting for Trump. Over a quarter of Black men under 50 plan to support Trump for President, according to an NAACP poll from early September. According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 17% of Black voters plan to vote Trump.

Joe Paul, executive director of Black Men Vote, told Politico that Harris needs to address Black men directly, particularly regarding changes to the criminal justice system and economic opportunities. “We need her to say: Black men, here’s what I’m willing to do for you,” he said.

That's what Harris tried to do on Tuesday. She pointed to her plan to support small Black-owned businesses and address the obstacles to Black families in building generational wealth like medical debt and housing policy.

“Part of my approach is understanding the obstacles that traditionally and currently exist to allow anyone, including Black men, to be able to achieve economic wealth,” Harris said. 

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“The politics of fear”: Springfield’s Haitian community stays indoors amid Trump-led smear campaign

Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, have spent the last week living in terror, their sense of normalcy upended by the wildfire-like spread of a right-wing conspiracy theory accusing them of killing and eating cats.

Their small city, just 45 miles west of the state capital, Columbus, has received more than 30 threats of violence in the week since former President Donald Trump repeated the false claim on the debate stage in Philadelphia. In the face of those threats, schools have evacuated and closed, local colleges have canceled on-campus activities and temporarily moved instruction online, organizers of the city's popular annual CultureFest have canceled the event and many Haitian residents have confined themselves to their homes out of fear for their safety.

"For now, I'm just careful because if I don't need [to go] outside, I don't go," said Evens Édouard, a Haitian resident of Springfield who works as a quality inspector for an automotive safety glass company in a nearby city. "I just go to drop my son at school and take him back, and then when it's time, go to work."

Édouard told Salon that he feels the U.S. citizens in his community have a "negative view" of their Haitian neighbors that they didn't have before the conspiracy theory's spread. While some still welcome migrant residents in the community and encourage them to ignore the vitriol, he said others approach them to ask if they actually do eat cats and dogs, or cast blame on them. 

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"I think we don't have the same value [to them], the same attitude [towards us], before we had this kind of speech about us," he said. "Now it's like they think we come here to take their jobs. We come here to eat animals, stuff like that. It's like we have a negative view in the town." 

Alongside the fears ignited by shooting and bomb threats, Trump's Friday pledge to start mass deportations in Springfield should he be elected have also left other Haitians in his community worried about their immigration statuses, Édouard said. Some are making plans to move, while others are hoping to save money before leaving town, he added.

"I think everybody's scared," he said, adding: "If you're Haitian you're concerned. It's like feeling scared for everybody that's Haitian."

The disruption has left Springfield's thousands of Haitian residents trapped in a fresh hell created by far-right conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis, the situation enflamed by their very own senator, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, and the former president. These attacks are also part of a broader right-wing effort targeting all forms of immigration, legal or not and spearheaded by Trump's commitment to large-scale deportations.  Allegations of what Trump claimed at the debate to be widespread "migrant crime" have also spread, fueling debunked claims of Venezuelan gangs commandeering apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, and most recently, dredging up falsehoods about African immigrants in Dayton, Ohio, another city some 70 miles west from the state capital, were grilling cats.  

As the far-right conspiracy theories circulate and Trump and Vance continue to espouse anti-immigrant rhetoric, they further ostracize Springfield, Aurora and Dayton's immigrant populations, posing a threat to their safety and impacting their quality of life. That harm, experts warn, can reverberate out to other immigrant communities and people of color. 

"Trump and Vance’s comments reflect the ongoing stigmatization of migrants through the lenses of race, illegality, and crime," Jamella Gow, a professor of sociology at Bowdoin College whose research focuses on how immigration, race, and Blackness intersect for Black migrants, told Salon in an email. "By casting Haitians (and other migrants of color) as potential or already criminals, they continue a tradition in immigration policy and rhetoric that divides citizens and non-citizens (real or imagined) and in doing so allows for the production of more stringent and harmful immigration policies that have deep impacts on communities." 

Carl Lindskoog, a history professor at Raritin Valley Community College and author of "Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System," said the xenophobic rhetoric serves to justify "both physical violence and exclusion," with white Americans encouraged to "take action" against a perceived threat to their way of life.

Several Springfield officials have spoken out to dispute the false claims about their community. The city manager and the city's police division have both said there is no credible evidence of Haitian immigrants harming or eating pets. On Sunday, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine further denied the claims, admonished the accusers and defended the Haitian migrant community.

"What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work," DeWine told ABC's Martha Raddatz. "Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies."

Despite repeatedly being informed the claim was a lie, Vance and Trump both doubled down during a Sunday CNN appearance and Friday press conference in California, respectively, and further spread the claims. 

Lindskoog speculated that the Republican candidates' purpose in boosting these baseless claims is energizing a political base that still responds to racism and xenophobia. The move is one of the "calling cards of Trumpism and Trump's politics," he argued, referencing Trump previously claiming immigrants crossing the border were "rapists" and referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as "shithole countries." 

"It's the politics of fear," Lindskoog told Salon. "Anxious Americans who are concerned about issues of race and the economy and all these things respond to these lies, sometimes about immigrants and criminality. It's a long playbook going back a long time."

That playbook extends back to the anti-Chinese sentiment of the late 19th century, when politicians were making similar false claims and sparking "tragic incidents of mob violence" against Chinese communities, he explained. Those attacks also "paralleled" acts or racial terror against Black Americans other migrant groups. 

"Spreading these lies and then doubling down on them is not just irresponsible, but it's very, very dangerous," Lindskoog said. 

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Despite the turmoil roiling in Springfield, Trump has dismissed the community's concerns over the threats, claiming they are but a distraction from the border. But the harm the falsehoods have brought to the city's Haitian residents in the aftermath of the debate has been immense. 

One woman, granted anonymity out of fear of reprisal, told the Haitian Times that her vehicles had been vandalized twice in the middle of the night, having windows broken on one night and acid thrown on one of the vehicles during the other. 

“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” she told the outlet last week. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”

Sophia Pierrelus, a community activist who has assisted Haitian migrants in Springfield, told the Columbus Dispatch that the daughter of a woman she knows "hasn't gone to school since this happened because at the school the kids are asking her about eating cats and dogs." She added: "They're afraid to go into the street because they feel they may be attacked."

While Springfield's immigrant community is living through the immediate dangers posed by the rhetoric from Trump, Vance and other far-right Republicans, history suggests the impact will extend beyond the city's limits and affect other Black immigrants and migrants, Gow told Salon. 

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The "demonization" of Haitian's migration to South Florida, especially in the 1970s and 80s, led to the U.S. implementing harsher laws policing migrants fleeing their nation by sea, she explained. Working-class Haitians and Cubans were also the first to "systematically be detained" as part of that immigration policy. Those practices carried over into the current detention and deportation strategies used against Central American migrants in the last decade and employed under the Trump administration, including “Remain in Mexico” program and Title 42, "all of which made it difficult for all migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to gain access."

"By focusing on migrants as the so-called problem, politicians can distract focus from the real problems people in the U.S. are facing such as access to affordable housing, consistent employment, and a fair cost of living," Gow added "Setting up migrants and Haitians as a well-trod 'scapegoat” allows politicians to skirt around real issues and ultimately make communities of color (migrant or not) less safe."

Trump and Vance's comments also must be understood as part of a longer history of the nation's attitude toward Haiti, she explained. "At the island nation’s founding, policy-makers and thinkers saw the nation and its people as 'dangerous,' 'rebellious' Blacks who (as evidenced by the U.S. occupation of the nation from 1915-1934 and later interventionist missions in the 20th century) are deemed necessary to occupy, “civilize” and control."

In Springfield, Haitian migrants comprise about a quarter of the population, amounting to over 15,000 of the blue-collar city's nearly 60,000 residents. The overwhelming majority live in the city legally, with many having settled there in recent years after receiving Temporary Protected Status (TPS) due to political turmoil, economic instability and environmental disasters in Haiti.

Haitians who've now built lives in Springfield were attracted to the area because of its relatively low cost of living and the wealth of employment opportunities bolstered by the city chamber of commerce's work to create jobs. City leaders have said the immigrant community has since boosted its economy and development. 

As his community and city continue to grapple with the vitriol, Édouard said he wants the rest of the country to understand that when Haitians leave their country to settle in the U.S. and elsewhere, they do so in search of a "better life," of jobs and economic opportunities, and a safe place to build a future — not to participate in "bad activities" or crimes.

In Springfield, they've been able to build a community much like what they had in Haiti, he explained. That includes supporting each other, helping each other find work and bringing with them the richness of their culture, including the "culinary art" — one that he felt he had to emphasize does not include eating cats or dogs — while contributing to the fabric and the growth of the city they now call home.

"We are people," Édouard said. When other Americans see Haitians like him, he would like them to see "hard workers," he added. "That's it."

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Trump’s campaign can’t get in the way of his new grift

There's been a lot going on this week so you may have missed Donald Trump introducing his latest business venture on Monday. You read that right. He may be in the final stretch of his third presidential campaign but he found the time to formally introduce his latest money-making scheme to the public. And what a scheme it is: The Trump family is getting into the cryptocurrency game.

It's obvious that Trump was completely clueless about how his new business, called World Liberty Financial, works. When asked during a conversation on Elon Musk's X on Monday why it is so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency, the former president started talking about how AI requires a lot of electricity. (Luckily he didn't digress into shark attacks.)

Later he extolled the expertise and brilliance of his 18-year-old son Barron, who he said has "four wallets" and is named as the new company's “DeFi visionary” (that stands for decentralized finance.) Trump himself is the “Chief Crypto Advocate" and Trump's oldest sons, the alleged movers and shakers of this deal, are both called “Web3 Ambassadors."

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The Trumps have a couple of very interesting partners in this new venture, exactly the kind of people you'd expect a president to be involved with. The first is a self-described "dirtbag of the internet" named Chase Herro who once famously said of the crypto market, “You can literally sell s—t in a can, wrapped in p—s, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it. I’m not going to question the right and wrong of all that.” The other partner is Zachary Folkman who, according to the New York Times, used to teach classes on how to seduce women. You can see why the Trumps jumped at the chance to get into business with them.

Both Trump's crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them.

It is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to launch a new business less than two months before the election. As those of you who were around before Trump poisoned all ethics and morals in politics will recall, candidates actually divested themselves of their businesses, often putting them in a blind trust in order to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. It all seems so quaint now.

Trump is also hawking bibles, tennis shoes, NFTs and even pieces of the suit he was wearing during the assassination attempt in August, as if it is a holy relic. And in a matter of days, he could conceivably come into a huge windfall when the "lock-out period" on his Truth Social stock ends and he can sell his shares. Wall Street has inexplicably valued the failed company at $3 billion and he owns 57% of the shares so if he decided to sell he'd finally be a real billionaire. The stock price would plummet even more than it already has and other investors, many of them his fans who've invested their nest eggs, would be ruined. But I think we know that would be of no concern to Donald Trump.

He claimed last Friday that he has no intention of selling and as you know he cannot tell a lie, so that's that. Also, now that he's said he won't do it, he could be subject to SEC investigations and shareholder lawsuits if he did. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that he isn't too worried about that. After all, they'll have to get in line.

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Both Trump's crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them. But Trump's criminality and corruption as president is already well established so what would be a major scandal for any other candidate is irrelevant when it comes to him. (One can't help but think about the Republicans dragging every member of the Biden family through the mud for four years over a legal business deal that took place when Joe Biden was out of office but that's just how it works in Trump's America.)

Trump's been getting away with scams, cons and crimes his entire life and always wriggles out of them. A new book by New York Times reporters Ross Beutner and Suzanne Craig called "Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success" says it all about Trump's long history of fraudulent business failures and his unique ability to convince people to keep giving him money anyway. They point out that Trump has had two big financial windfalls in his life, neither of them based on even the slightest talent for business. The first came via his daddy, who bankrolled him for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars and bailed him out repeatedly. He did manage some early success with Trump Tower and a couple of other buildings on which he'd been partnered with some people who knew what they were doing. But apparently, that was when the narcissism really kicked in so he bought into his own hype. He never listened to anyone ever again and virtually everything he touched — casinos, an airline, a football league, buildings in Chicago, a development for the world's tallest building in Manhattan, money-losing golf resorts, all of it — failed.

The second windfall came from "The Apprentice" which was picked up by NBC at a moment when Trump badly needed money. The illusion of wealth the show sold to America helped Trump cash in with an exclusive product placement deal that brought in a ton of money. (He even cheated his collaborator Mark Burnett, the producer who created the show, but they were all making money so they just let him do it.) Trump's personal licensing deals — the steaks, the vodka, the ties etc. — apparently never made much money, however.

He is simply terrible at business. According to the authors, he makes the same mistakes over and over again. He pays way too much, doesn't believe in research and always thinks that his name on a project is the magic that will make it work — yet it never does. And he's done the same thing in politics. He has one talent and that's convincing people that he's successful even though he's not. And he's been doing it his entire life. 

The big question is whether at the age of 78, he can pull it off one more time. Will he be able to cash in for more than a billion dollars with his failed social media company? Will he be able to parlay his political losses since 2016 into another term as president? We'd better hope that this loser's luck has finally run out.

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A black hole is literally “starving” a galaxy to death, new study reveals

For a galaxy at its age, Pablo's Galaxy is massive. Formed during an early period in the universe's history and officially known as GS-10578, Pablo's Galaxy received its nickname from a scientist who observed it in detail and noted its immense size: Its total mass is about 200 billion times the mass of our Sun.

"We now see that the culprit is the central supermassive black hole."

Yet like a spiraling whirlpool, a black hole is currently removing so much gas from Pablo's Galaxy that it can no longer normally form stars. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), University of Cambridge researchers led a study in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing the exact amount of gas being uncontrollably pulled into the celestial abyss by the black hole's gravity.

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"Even though everyone was expecting black holes to starve galaxies by heating or removing gas, measurements showed that the amount of gas we could see being removed was simply not enough," Francesco D'Eugenio, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology, told Salon. "​But before JWST, we could only see the hot, thin gas that shines most brightly. It turns out most of the gas being removed may be colder and harder to see."

D'Eugenio added, "JWST is so extraordinarily sensitive that we can observe much colder gas than with other telescopes." Detecting gases that had previously been too dark for them to identify and study, the scientists "measured how much gas is being removed from the galaxy, and how fast it is moving; the numbers show clearly that the amount of gas is sufficient to disrupt the normal star-forming activity of this galaxy."

Pablo's galaxyPablo's galaxy (Francesco D'Eugenio)

In explaining a great deal about galaxy formation, the new study also raises provocative questions. Cosmologists believe the early universe was teeming with galaxies — perhaps even some filled with alien life. But clearly it didn't take long (on cosmic timescales, at least) for some galaxies to reach the end of their life. Pablo's Galaxy stands out for being dormant despite its large size and advanced age.

“In the early universe, most galaxies are forming lots of stars, so it’s interesting to see such a massive dead galaxy at this period in time,” co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino, also from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, said in a press statement. “If it had enough time to get to this massive size, whatever process that stopped star formation likely happened relatively quickly.”

In terms of the quantity of the gas being expelled, scientists ascertained that ionised- and neutral-gas outflows measured by their equipment ultimately reached "0.14–2.9 and 30–100 solar mass per year, respectively."

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"In these early epochs, the amount of gas around galaxies is so large that continuous star formation is the norm. But in this galaxy this process is not happening."

If this much solar mass in a young universe was annually being forever lost into the gaping maw of a black hole, it would be less unusual. Yet according to D'Eugenio, "galaxies as massive as this one grow by attracting gas from a vast reservoir that surrounds them." This means that, especially for a galaxy formed early in the universe's history, gas would continuously fall into the galaxy, coil down and form large numbers of stars, which humans can detect even from thousands of lightyears away. "In these early epochs, the amount of gas around galaxies is so large that continuous star formation is the norm. But in this galaxy this process is not happening; there is a spanner in the cogs of the star-forming 'machinery.'"

The culprit is the central supermassive black hole, not unlike the one at the center of most galaxies, including our own.

"The [energy released from gas falling into the] the supermassive black hole is removing large amounts of gas very fast from the galaxy," D'Eugenio explained. "Without this gas, no new stars can be formed, so this galaxy is losing the `shine' of young and bright stars, and has already started it's long history of fading."

Scientists are regularly uncovering new insights into the violent nature of black holes. A 2023 study in The Astrophysical Journal revealed that black holes which suck up gases — forming what's known as accretion disks — do so in a manner of mere months, which is extremely rapid on an interstellar timescale, as well as 10 to 100 times faster than scientists previously believed.

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The researchers led by Northwestern University's Nick Kaaz, a graduate student in astronomy, used computer simulations to determine that the black hole causes rotations which warp the accretion disk in such a way that the gas actually starts caving in on itself. This drives the mass into the black hole at an even faster rate, strengthening the gravitational pull as the gas is continuously slurped into the black hole's center. Eventually the entire accretion disk is torn in half, with the black hole first consuming the inner disc and then the outer one.

Coming on the heels of that research, the study into Pablo's Galaxy can help transform our understanding of how galaxies and stars are both formed and destroyed. Yet aspects of the story remain enigmatic, even in the case of Pablo's Galaxy.

"The stars in this galaxy are going around in circles about the center of the galaxy, which suggests that this galaxy did not undergo any major cataclysmic event (like crashing with another big galaxy) which could disrupt the ordered motion of its stars," D'Eugenio said.

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“Get this under control”: Mark Robinson’s anti-birth control tirade spoils Trump’s Project 2025 spin

North Carolina's Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, now running to be governor of the Tar Heel State, rose to fame in the GOP by channeling the id of the typical MAGA voter. His speeches and social media presence channel a D-list shock jock mentality, filtered through a Christian nationalist lens, that's grown in popularity in the Trump era. He calls LGBTQ people "filth," "maggots," and "flies," insisting they should be forced to "find a corner outside" rather than be allowed to use public restrooms. He's denounced women's suffrage and argued that once a woman is pregnant, her body belongs to "the daddy." And before Tucker Carlson was embracing Holocaust denialism, Robinson was raving that it was "hogwash" to believe the Nazi genocide of Jews was precipitated by mass gun confiscation. 

So it's no surprise that another clip of Robinson being the worst has emerged. This time Robinson is caught on camera in a 2022 church appearance, going on a tirade about how women don't need birth control because — as he gestures to his crotch for emphasis — they need to "get this under control" instead.

"You don’t lay down and act like you’re making a baby til you’re ready to have a baby," he declared in a video first published by HuffPost. He explicitly sneered at the idea of birth control. "You don’t have what you do to make a baby until you’re ready to have that baby.” He followed up by insisting the only way to be "responsible with your body" is to reserve sex for procreation. 

Robinson's campaign hasn't responded to HuffPost's requests for comment, but it's safe to say he hasn't changed his opposition to birth control in the past two years. On August 26, Robinson was recorded ranting yet again about the evils of contraception, a service that has been used by over 99% of sexually experienced women. Robinson insisted birth control is "being forced on very young ladies" and agreed that women who use it are "more inclined to be promiscuous." 

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Donald Trump and his allies want voters to believe that Robinson's views are an outlier and not reflexive of what Trump intends to do if he wins office. (Though Trump adores Robinson, trollingly comparing him to "Martin Luther King on steroids.") The truth is this hostility to contraception is baked right into Project 2025, which was developed by hundreds of past and future Trump advisors as a replacement for a traditional policy agenda. Along with schemes to use executive orders to pass abortion bans without going through Congress, Project 2025 contains radical schemes to drastically restrict — and eventually outright ban — female-controlled contraception methods. This is why Republicans in Congress continue to block efforts to enshrine contraception rights into law. The end goal is to take birth control away. 

This is why Republicans in Congress continue to block efforts to enshrine contraception rights into law. The end goal is to take birth control away. 

Alice Ollstein and Megan Messerly at Politico detailed the various ways Project 2025 proposes that another Trump administration could strip women, especially working class and poor women, of birth control. The conservative plan outlines dramatically slashing funding for family planning clinics and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. There's also the scheme to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which covers birth control along with health care generally for millions of women. And if they can't do that, the fallback is rewriting the coverage rules of the ACA so that employers are no longer required to include contraception coverage in their health care plans. 

"I’ve been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception," complained Emma Waters, one of the architects of Project 2025. She added that having "an absolute right" to determine when you get pregnant is not what's "best" for women. Her Twitter feed shows more of the same: retweets of concern trolls who denounce reproductive technologies that allow women to wait until they're stable to have babies, sneering at mothers who use daycare, and insisting marriage only works when the wife submits to her husband. 

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As I wrote about in February, the reason the Christian right loathes in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is because they believe, falsely, women exploit it to "delay" childbirth. Irin Carmon of New York magazine fleshed this argument out more over the weekend, quoting anti-abortion leaders who complained that IVF is "encouraging families to delay childbirth" and, heaven forbid, allowing women to pursue "careers, travel, and finding themselves." As Carmon notes, the most common reason women "delay" childbirth into their 30s is they don't have money to raise a child or haven't met a man they wish to marry yet. It's easier for the right to blame "female selfishness," which is defined as any desire to have a life outside of giving birth and raising children. 

IVF, which Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked from protecting federally, doesn't allow women to "delay" childbirth, but contraception certainly does — and in an explicit way. Every single complaint that the right has about women who put off marriage and childbirth until after they're old enough to rent a car makes the most sense as a diatribe against birth control. They find it easier to gripe about IVF because it's still a technology used by only a small fraction of the population. Contraception, on the other hand, is a near-universal behavior, so attacking it directly is not politically popular. But these anti-IVF arguments make the larger philosophy clear: Any technology that allows women to time when she has children is wrong and should be taken away. 

As such, Project 2025 has language in it that subtly lays the groundwork for an eventual ban on nearly all forms of female-controlled contraception. As Reproductive Freedom for All pointed out in a campaign memo, "Project 2025 includes personhood language and policies that propagate the belief that life begins at conception." The same people perpetuate the false claim that hormonal contraception, from the birth control pill to the IUD, works by "killing" fertilized eggs. (These forms actually work by preventing fertilization.) The goal is eventually to marry the fake science to the "personhood" laws to argue that abortion bans also ban most forms of contraception. Recent Supreme Court rulings have laid the groundwork for this strategy by reifying the right-wing belief that "science" is whatever a Federalist Society-selected judge says it is. 

The dramatic shift leftward among young women already has the GOP worried, making Republicans especially keen to keep their designs on contraception out of public view. People like Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, will yell about "childless cat ladies" and insist that women should be having more children, but he won't admit publicly the anti-contraception implications of this argument. Occasionally, however, we see a GOP candidate with even less impulse control than Trump, like Robinson, say the quiet parts out loud. But it's in their behavior that we see that someone like Robinson is not an outlier. Republicans know that the best way to wage war on the childless cat ladies is to take away their birth control. They're now trying to figure out how to do that so quietly that the public doesn't rise to stop them until it's too late. 

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Kamala Harris has neutralized Donald Trump’s “high-dominance” advantage

Vice President Kamala Harris trounced Donald Trump during their presidential debate last week. For more than 90 minutes Trump had almost no substantive responses to her interventions and rebuttals as he lied, prevaricated, and acted like a broken computer spouting out conspiracy theories and obvious lies from some of the deepest sewers of the right-wing echo chamber. Harris’ victory was so complete, and Trump’s defeat so thorough, that the corrupt ex-president’s mouthpieces and other surrogates were basically forced to admit this reality. Of course, Trump who has shown himself to be an egomaniac and a narcissist, declared that he won. However, his actions suggest otherwise: Trump quickly declared that he would not participate in a second debate against Harris.

In total, Harris’ crushing defeat of Donald Trump is best explained by what political scientist M. Steven Fish describes as a “high-dominance leadership style.” Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and te author of “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

"During the debate, Harris scrapped the time-worn, fruitless Democratic practice of treating Trump mainly as a dangerous, imperious liar. Instead, she cast him as insecure, tiresome, and small."

In this conversation, Fish details exactly how Harris used high-dominance leadership to defeat Donald Trump and why she and the Democrats must continue with that approach going forward to win the election. Fish also reflects on how the debate revealed, again, that Trump and today’s MAGAfied Republicans and “conservatives” are really bullies and cowards who will fold when confronted directly and forcefully. Fish also predicts that if current trends continue Kamala Harris and the Democrats will defeat Trump and the Republicans on Election Day. 

Given these tumultuous last few weeks with two apparent assassination attempts against Trump, two conventions, Biden stepping aside and Harris now being the Democrats' presidential nominee and reversing the party's political fortunes (for now), how are you feeling?

I’m feeling better than I have in quite a while since it now seems possible that we’ll be able to relegate Trump to the status of a historical oddity. That said, Trumpism will survive this election even if Donald Trump is defeated. The Democrats will have to win a string of national elections — at least two or three in a row — to force the Republicans to return to real conservatism. We’ve got to be in this for the long haul. And the current race, of course, is a dead heat.

Kamala Harris utterly crushed Donald Trump during their debate. It was the inverse of Biden’s failure. And the debate seems like it was just part of the arc of the Democrats’ new approach.

“Crushed” is the right term, and it’s exactly what needed to happen for Harris to launch her fast start in July and then build on her momentum since then, including during the debate. The Democrats have long been seen as more caring, more knowledgeable, more likable, and so on. Trump’s main advantage has been that he’s regarded as a “stronger” leader. You don’t overcome that edge by throwing another rhetorical pity party for voters who are supposedly drowning in tears at the cost of a tankful for their Ford F-150s, nor by busting out another display of wounded indignation at your opponents’ insensitivity. You do it by showing you’re tougher, more resolute, more confident, and more committed to your own ends than your opponents are. You also ostentatiously delight in driving your foes to distraction. That’s precisely what Harris and the Democrats started doing, and it is what has resurrected their prospects.

There were many moments during the debate where I was literally yelling at the screen or commenting and doing play-by-play, as I was grinning and nodding. It was as if she were following the playbook I would have given her and that you spelled out in your new book “Comeback.” I have to ask: Do you know if Vice President Harris and her team read your book on high-dominance leadership?

I have no way of knowing, but I can say that I’m thrilled to see them doing just about everything I recommended in the book to overcome their dominance disadvantage, including many of the things you and I have discussed. At a minimum, what we have seen over the past two months is what scientists call a natural experiment, and the proof-of-concept is there: As soon as the Democrats shifted from almost a decade of abysmally low-dominance messaging to a higher-dominance mode, their fortunes improved overnight. And it was not just about Biden’s withdrawal or Harris’ relative youth. When Biden stepped aside, she was running further behind Trump than Biden in the polls and many Democrats considered easing her aside in favor of a stronger candidate as key to the party’s fate in November. In 2020 she ran an uneven campaign at best, and her tenure as vice president has been uneventful. 

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Right out of the gate in late July, Harris brought an entirely new high-dominance, patriotic message, and she further upped her dominance and patriotism game at the DNC and the debate. Even her exuberance, which many people just see as a feel-good part of her style, is something I consider to be a crucial aspect of high-dominance messaging. The bottom line is that Harris — and the whole party with her — have suddenly flipped the dominance script.

Trump repeatedly walked right into the traps and ambushes she set for him. When Harris talked about the crowd sizes she symbolically and psychologically castrated him, for example. It started with Harris going over to shake Trump’s hand. Trump wasn’t expecting it, and it was a move to get in his space. It showed she wasn’t afraid of him.

I agree, and then during the debate she scrapped the time-worn, fruitless Democratic practice of treating Trump mainly as a dangerous, imperious liar. Instead, she cast him as insecure, tiresome, and small. Playing on Trump’s crowd-size obsession, she invited viewers to attend a Trump rally, telling them they would see the crowds thinning out early as bored spectators headed for the doors. A stammering Trump responded, “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics!” and then launched into his conspiracy theory lies about how immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Rather than just calling Trump a friend of dictators, she got deliciously derisive. She mentioned that “It is well known that he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong Un” and pointed out that “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.” Turning to Trump, she said America’s enemies were rooting for him since “they can manipulate you with flattery and favors. And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.” 

Harris was not perfect. There were several times when she passed on delivering what could have become instant viral hits and lines for the ages that would have really put Trump away. Such lines are what get the most press coverage and are what we recall from presidential debates down through the decades.

Harris talked to the audience and, as you mentioned, directly at Trump. Trump did not make eye contact with her. Again, he looked totally beaten and flummoxed. What do you think was going through Trump’s mind?

Trump must have known Harris was owning him. Harris’ command was plain for all to see. While Trump was talking, Harris often alternated between gazing at him with bemusement and then looking away with a breezy grin as if to avoid bursting out laughing. The split screen captured it all.

Still, she never condescended to or attacked Trump’s supporters. In fact, she made the case that they would feel more at home in the Democratic Party than in the party of Trump. She mentioned the Republicans only to point out that she had the endorsement of hundreds who worked for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. For God’s sake, Dick — not to mention Liz — Cheney endorsed her. She listed top Trump administration officials who concluded that Trump was a threat to the nation, reminding him that he’d been abandoned by many of his own. It is no wonder he couldn’t bear to look at her go after him.

Here is another moment: A Freudian slip by Trump where he talked about ending the debate and going to the border right now. It appears that Trump actually did want to leave the debate. I was seriously wondering if he was going to come back out onto the stage after the commercial break/intermission.

Trump definitely wanted to get of there. But his very lowest moment might have come when he walked into the situation room after the debate. Nobody who didn’t know he got shellacked would have done that. Some journalists gathered around him to hear him toil and spin, but most just ignored the former and possibly future president of the United States and just kept milling around and chatting with each other.

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Sean Hannity finally swooped in to give Trump the fawning interview he was searching for. As soon as that ended, Fox anchors and guests canceled out Hannity as they mulled what an embarrassing night it had been for their man. As I watched it, I thought I even felt a pang of sympathy for all those Fox viewers who haven’t changed the channel since 2016 and had nowhere else to turn. The feeling didn’t linger long, since I switched from FOX back to MSNBC to join the party.

Trump has repeatedly shown that he is a racist and a white supremacist whose own nephew alleges he uses vile anti-Black slurs in private. He also reportedly calls Harris a “bitch” as well in private. 

We’ve known such things about Trump for decades, and ever since he entered politics the Democrats have been responding with cries of hurt and disbelief: Did you hear what he said?! Then a smirking Trump coyly admits what a bad boy he is and repeats his slurs and slights — but even worse. The Democrats keep taking the bait, and the liberal social media bubble swells with indignation — Can you believe he said it again?! MAGA media then rolls out bemused reports of the liberals’ swimming in pique.

Meanwhile, Trump’s doing all the punching, and the Democrats are just reacting. That enables Trump to turn even his vilest moments into dominance flexes. Liberals and the rest of the decent, non-bigoted majority sulk in exasperation. This was quite literally the story of American politics between late 2015 and July 2024.

"We must remember that the Democrats’ new strategy is less than two months old, and they could still revert to some version of their old risk-averse, defensive, passive, and weak messaging style."

Now it’s finally occurred to the Democrats that Trump and the Republicans are bullies and cowards who will fold if you hit back hard and fast. They started treating Trump’s bigotry as weakness and insecurity rather than callousness. Trump and his ilk suddenly went from being terrifying, offensive, and heartless to lame, ridiculous, weirdo whiners. 

Finally, the Democrats wiped away their tears of frustration and burst out laughing. Harris’ irrepressible, gorgeous grin symbolizes the shift and sums it up perfectly. I can’t get enough of it. My wife has taken to teasing me about how often I call the vice president things like “enchanting.” But she’s crushing on Harris, too.

Do you believe that Trump knows he was cowed and defeated by Harris in the debate? Or is he coming up with some other narrative to resolve the cognitive dissonance of being so humiliated before an audience of tens of millions by a Black woman?

He’s desperately trying to create a new narrative for himself for precisely the reason you mention. To that end, and to the chagrin of Republican leaders, he’s raging that he won the debate, returning with a vengeance to his claims he beat Biden in 2020, vaunting his warriors of January 6, and taking cues from Laura Loomer who said “the White House will smell like curry” if Harris wins. Mind you, this is someone Marjorie Taylor Greene called “appalling and extremely racist.”

Trump’s whole message now has an audience of one — his own rattled self. Why? Because the Democrats are no longer standing back and proclaiming, “Isn’t Trump terrifying?!” as he hogs the spotlight. Instead of marveling with dismay at how he gets away with it, the Democrats are finally peeling his Teflon off with their own hands. Consequently, I think more people are seeing Trump for what he is—which of course only drives him crazier. This could depress turnout for Trump, even if it does not show up in the polls. After all, he’s always been their revenge and nothing more. What good is he to them if the libs — the libs! — are owning him?

It's important to remember that Trump’s self-absorption runs so deep that his grasp on the reality of how others see him is often tenuous at best. This is a man who genuinely thinks Putin and Xi Jinping respect him and that Kim Jong Un loves him because that’s what they tell him and that’s what he wants to believe. (How I wish I could be a fly on the wall when Putin puts Trump on his muted speakerphone while surrounded by his guffawing cronies during what Trump thinks are their intimate man-to-man talks.) But Trump does feel it when people are laughing at him—provided, that is, they keep up the ridicule rather than recoiling when he slaps back. And like all bullies, Trump knows that once somebody finally decks him, his tough guy shtick and reputation as a winner can dissipate in an instant. That’s what he fears most now, and it helps explain why he seems to be going from merely off the rails to a headlong dash to la-la land. The Democrats’ high-dominance approach isn’t just affecting voters’ perceptions; it’s driving Trump’s meltdown as well.

Trump admires dictators and tyrants. This aspect of how he thinks about leadership and the public and legitimacy needs to be explored much more by the mainstream news media and punditry. You are a Sovietologist. When Trump talks so fawningly about dictators, authoritarians, and autocrats how do you make sense of it relative to that political tradition and style of leadership?

We know that Trump wants what they have — absolute power, office for life, a press that can’t scrutinize or criticize him, and the ability to turn the public treasury into his feeding trough. But I think there’s more to it than that. Trump senses that the leaders of America’s democratic allies think he’s a moron. Their media reports it too. Trump knows, for example, that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel dealt with him with their noses pinched between their fingers. Shortly after Trump was elected, French President Emmanuel Macron tried his hand at being Europe’s Trump whisperer and showed him some respect. But Macron quickly tired of the effort when it was clear it wasn’t going to do France or Europe any good.

Dictators are different. They can feign respect for Trump and prevent their media from spilling the beans. And they really do want him in office, since he discredits democracy in its most powerful stronghold, undermines American power in the world, and never calls out their atrocities at home. 

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And don’t forget this: Alone among world leaders in 2016, Kim Jong Un publicly endorsed Trump in his race against Hillary Clinton, and Vladimir Putin as much as did so. Practically every other leader of note loathed the prospect of a Trump presidency. Harris is right — the dictators are rooting for Trump. Now think about what that means to a man who has never given a thought to anyone but himself.

Does the apparent assassination attempt or whatever it turns out to be impact Harris' and the Democrats' pivot to high high-dominance leadership style? As you can imagine I have many concerns and worries here. Moreover, how can/should Harris navigate this and the predictable pivot by Trump and his propagandists to continue, now amplifying, their claims — which are not true — that this is somehow the Democrats' fault.

It need not have any effect on the Democrats’ strategy, and I doubt it will affect the race. Harris should just condemn it in the strongest possible terms and move on. Contrary to what so many Democrats feared at the time, Trump got no bounce at all from the first assassination attempt. Part of the reason may have been that Trump squandered his chance to take advantage of it. It happened just before the RNC, and had Trump come out and given his speech at the convention with his ear bandaged and said nothing about what had just happened to him, he would have looked like a boss. Instead, he spent the whole first part of his speech recounting in rich detail how brave he had been, how much his ear bled, how he raised his fist in heroic defiance, and on and on and on and he came off looking like an egomaniacal whiner. And his conspiracy theories about Democrats being behind it just sound like all the other nonsense he spews. I doubt the recent apparent assassination attempt or whatever it was will move the needle at all. We’re already past it.

What must Harris do next with her campaign to maintain the momentum and pressure on Trump? What must she avoid?

She must build on her newfound dominance advantage. That means staying on the attack and showing everybody what a great time she’s having cleaning Trump’s addled clock. It also means not getting bogged down in policy specifics but instead relentlessly pressing her broader vision of a better, greater, freer America that reclaims its place as the light and leader of the world. Harris should mention Trump only to ridicule and punch holes in him. Her central message should be about herself and her party — about their past achievements and all the great things they have in store for the country.

To that end, Harris should bear down hard on reclaiming the flag. That means casting herself as a mighty defender of the country’s national security, global preeminence, and the American way. The parts on foreign affairs in her DNC speech and the debate — including Trump’s subservience to Putin and her promise to preside over the world’s most lethal fighting force — weren’t just “foreign policy” statements. They were her hardest, highest-dominance flexes, and they appealed to a far broader audience than she can hope to reach by talking about her differences with Trump on economic policy. This is an area where Harris can most readily appeal to centrists and real conservatives and where Trump is most vulnerable with these voters. Harris has to bear in mind, every minute of the campaign, that Americans are hungry for a real leader and powerful protector who will end the chaos — not just a builder of roads and a deliverer of healthcare benefits.

Harris also should unremittingly embrace the prosecutor-versus-felon frame. It’s a great component of a high-dominance strategy and helps seize the law-and-order issue from the Republican goons who have wielded it to score dominance points for decades. In the debate, she said she and Tim Walz owned guns. Guess what? Trump, being a felon, is barred by federal law from doing so. I hate guns, but I still want to hear her say it.

Debates and conventions do not determine the outcome of an election — despite how many Democrats and others would like to believe that they do given Harris’ dominant performance and their enthusiasm for her. What do you think will happen on Election Day? Then what comes next?

It all depends on what the Democrats do now. Harris has to be the news every day. For almost a decade, the Democrats have intentionally yielded the spotlight to Trump, hoping against hope that if they just stood back and let him be himself voters would finally turn against him. It didn’t work. So now every time I log on to CNN or watch the news, I want to see Harris — whether it’s a provocative statement, a memorable quip, some cool new idea, or just her gleefully making fun of and diminishing Trump.

We must remember that the Democrats’ new strategy is less than two months old, and they could still revert to some version of their old risk-averse, defensive, passive, and weak messaging style. In that event, Trump might regain his footing, Harris will likely lose, and democracy’s days will be numbered.

But if Harris pours it on and Democrats downballot follow her lead, she can win by 100+ Electoral College votes and the House can be taken back. Of course, Harris has to defend Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but I think she should also pursue her own Southern Strategy — and that includes investing in Florida as well as really bearing down in Georgia and North Carolina. There’s an abortion referendum on the ballot in the Sunshine State, and Harris’ launch of the “Reproductive Rights for All” bus tour in Palm Beach, Trump’s hometown, was a good show. Forcing Trump to defend Dixie is the ultimate flex; it would throw him off what little game he’s got left in a way that a hundred trips to Scranton can’t. I can see it now: North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania report, and by midnight EST you and I can go to bed if we like, relieved and finally knowing for sure that we’ll still have a democracy and the opportunity to have another election in 2028.

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“It’s shocking”: Experts ring the alarm on a “kind of dissonance” following thwarted attack on Trump

Even though the two would-be assassins were reportedly both former supporters of Donald Trump whose subsequent politics can be best described as murky, President Trump and his supporters are now blaming the Republican nominee's political opponents for the recent assassination attempts against him. Trump accused both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, of taking "politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred." His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, claimed that the two attempts on Trump's life compared with none on Harris' is "pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out."

"Somebody’s going to get hurt by it, and it’s going to destroy this country," Vance warned. 

Perhaps an even more powerful Trump supporter, billionaire Elon Musk, similarly wondered in a since-deleted tweet why "no one is even trying to assassinate" Harris.

Trump "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations."

Significantly, Republicans have offered no specific examples of violent rhetoric from Harris or any of her mainstream supporters, grasping instead to conflate campaign language with incendiary speech. 

By contrast, experts who spoke to Salon saw an ominous precedent in Trump's words — namely, an attempt to intimidate political dissenters by linking them to violence against state leaders.

Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies," told Salon that the criticisms of Trump and his supporters reflect a "kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn't connect to reality." Finchelstein specifically pointed to "the idea that the person that has promoted violence through rhetoric, and even sometimes the glorification of that violence, the idea that that person can complain about the 'rhetorical violence' of his enemies. It's shocking."

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When asked about political leaders who have engaged in similar tactics, Finchelstein observed that Trump "does this kind of thing again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler." The former and possibly future president "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."

Ronald Collins, a former law professor at George Washington Law School and current editor of the weekly online blog First Amendment News, mentioned a different historical figure when describing the rhetoric of Trump and his anti-dissent backers. "Given Donald Trump’s unhinged temperament and his blistering and often unfounded attacks on any who are not subservient to his views, I do sense a dangerous Stalin-like streak in the man," Collins told Salon, referring to Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin.

"Democrats and others who see Trump as the threat he is need to keep saying why. His effort to silence criticism is off base and he will do more than argue if he regains state power."

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist and political scientist who authored "The Missing Middle," told Salon when asked about the comparisons to Hitler that "there are resemblances, especially when demonization happens. Or calling groups enemies or unclean." At the same time, Skocpol cautioned against Americans turning solely to foreign examples for the dangers of Trump's rhetoric. "During recurrent periods of nativist politics and/or at times of ideological extremism, opportunistic politicians have repeatedly used rhetoric demonizing entire groups of people – racial groups, German-Americans during WWI, liberals in the McCarthy era – so Donald Trump is replaying an old strategy," Skocpol said. "It is very dangerous, we already know from earlier episodes with him, because lone actors can grab a gun or bomb and kill innocent people. Social media makes this approach much more effective in misinforming and arousing millions of people."

Noting that America's founding fathers "believed and hoped that political leaders would care about the public good" and "saw people like Trump as corrupt threats and tried to create a Constitutional system to rein them in," Skocpol concluded that even though violence has no place in democratic politics, Trump and his backers are not really trying to stifle violence when they falsely connect it to political criticism. "Tough arguments and calling it like it is are not the issue," Skocpol said. "Democrats and others who see Trump as the threat he is need to keep saying why. His effort to silence criticism is off base and he will do more than argue if he regains state power."

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UCLA School of Law Professor Eugene Volokh was more understanding of Trump's rhetoric, characterizing it to Salon as "just speech, itself protected by the First Amendment" and "more comparable to other contestable claims about how 'toxic rhetoric' from one side or another caused an increase in political violence, and how people should stop especially harsh criticism." Volokh added that "there’s something to such calls to turn down the heat, though of course they do seem less credible coming from someone who harshly criticizes his own adversaries."

Volokh also rejected the premise that Trump is following Hitler's playbook.  "Isn’t comparing your political adversaries to Hitler and the Nazis itself 'demonizing' them?" Overall, Volokh said, each side in America's current political debate is guilty of both inflammatory rhetoric and (arguably un-self aware) calls for their opponents to cool off their own words. "More broadly, our political debate is full of people, Left and Right, who label their opponents Communists, Nazis, etc.," Volokh argued. "It’s also full of people who fault the other side for harsh speech that, the theory goes, stimulates criminal attacks by some small portion of the audience. The one thing that they have in common is that they generally condemn their adversaries for harsh rhetoric, but not their friends."

Former President Trump's National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Salon in response to this article, "It's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

Finchelstein perhaps best summed up the contrasting opinion — namely, that Trump and his time are quantifiably and qualitatively different and worse than the Democrats in this regard — through his analysis of Vance.

"Vance is a prop," Finchelstein said. "He will use whatever fantasies are out there to promote Trump's aims and desires."

"Then, of course, there is the context in this country, I would say an epidemic, of people out there trying to use violence against different politicians."

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“Scuba-diving” lizard evolved bubble-breathing trick to dodge predators

When Dr. Lindsey Swierk studies water anoles in Central and South America, she can feel their presence even when she doesn't see them.

The assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University studies Anolis aquaticus, the lizard best known for being semi-aquatic, color-changing and 5 to 8 inches long (13 to 20 centimeters.)

"When you walk out into the rivers where they live, you know that there are dozens of eyes on you, always," Swierk recalled. "They are so observant, always looking and watching, but staying very still on their favorite perches. I first noticed the lengths of their dive when I was trying to capture one, and it dove almost at my feet. I spent a long time just staring at it, in wonder."

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Swierk's observations aren't just idyllic. In a recent study Swierk published in the journal Biology Letters, she revealed her latest discovery: Water anoles are able to survive underwater for extended periods of time, despite lacking gills, because they form a special bubble over their nostrils.

In addition to allowing them to breathe underwater, the bubble makes it possible for them to stay still under the surface for lengthy periods and avoid the attention of birds and snakes who perceive them as "the chicken nuggets of the forest."

This is the first study to strongly indicate that a vertebrate species can use bubbles to breathe under water, a trait that several bugs and invertebrates are known to have adapted. To test whether water anoles are an exception to the rule, Swierk prevented the formation of normal rebreathing bubbles over the lizards' nostrils by applying a commercial emollient to their skin surface.

"Lizards that were allowed to rebreathe normally remained underwater an average of 32% longer than those with impaired rebreathing, suggesting a functional role of rebreathing in underwater respiration," Swierk wrote in the study. Speaking with Salon, Swierk said that the study demonstrates "there's likely a function to rebreathing. Lizards that rebreathe can dive longer, and lizards that dive longer are more likely to survive predator encounters." Skeptics of this hypothesis argue the lizards are just blowing bubbles as a side effect.

"My lab is very excited about understanding the mechanisms that allow this trait to work, and also any future materials applications," Swierk told Salon.

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Trump judge gives the right a big win on labor law, undercutting NLRB

A federal judge in Texas gave a major win to corporate employers seeking to disable or destroy the National Labor Relations Board Tuesday. This ruling came in a case brought by the tech company Findhelp, which mirrors other cases brought by companies like SpaceX and Trader Joe’s that are currently moving through the courts.

Judge Mark Pittman, who was appointed to the federal bench for Northern District of Texas by Donald Trump, is overseeing a case brought by Findhelp in which the company effectively argues that the NLRB is unconstitutional.

In this case, and others like it, employers are claiming that the employment protections afforded to NLRB judges are unconstitutional because such judges cannot be removed at will either by the agency head or the president. Instead, the NLRB head or the president must establish a proper cause for removal.

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In the Findhelp suit, the company filed for a preliminary injunction in hopes of stopping ongoing proceedings at the NLRB, the federal agency that adjudicates unfair labor practices. Findhelp claimed that if the unfair labor practices case against it were to proceed, the company would suffer irreparable harm. The injunction was filed in an effort to head off an NLRB hearing set for Sept. 23.

In his ruling, Pittman cited a decision by the conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Jarkesy v. SEC, a case that later made its way to the Supreme Court. In a parallel case related to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a different federal regulatory agency, the court ruled that SEC administrative judges had been unconstitutionally protected from removal.

Pittman wrote that in the current case, NLRB administrative judges "are afforded the same two layers of forcause removal protections that the Fifth Circuit found to be unconstitutional" with regard to the SEC judges. 

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This ruling on the injunction represents a major victory for Findhelp and signals that the court may be poised to rule in the company's favor in the near future. The case is one of many brought by corporate entities that hop to render the NLRB effectively useless by disempowering its administrative judges. 

Similar cases have been brought by Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and SpaceX, among other companies. One of these cases is likely to reach the highly employer-friendly Fifth Circuit on appeal in the years ahead, and could easily wind up before the Supreme Court.

This ruling also represents a striking victory for the conservative legal movement, which has pushed to have these kinds of administrative-law cases tried in regular civil or criminal courts, rather than agency-specific administrative courts where experts in the subject matter typically oversee the proceedings.

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Ryan Murphy casts Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein, continues trend of glamorizing serial killers

Horror aficionado Ryan Murphy is back with a third installment of his Netflix series, "Monster," casting actor Charlie Hunnam as the notorious 20th-century killer and grave robber, Ed Gein.

Murphy made the casting announcement on Monday at the premiere of his show's second season, "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," which offers a fictional account of two brothers who were convicted of the 1996 killing of their parents. The second season is set to debut on September 19, with Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch starring in the titular roles, and Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny playing the brothers' parents, José and Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez.

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Hunnam, who previously acted in the drama series "Sons of Anarchy," will transform into Gein — the Butcher of Plainfield from Wisconsin — who confessed to the killing of two women and reportedly robbed freshly dug graves to create a stockpile of anatomical paraphernalia, using human body parts to make lamps, masks, clothing, and more. Gein's morbid story would go on to serve as key inspiration for a number of popular horror films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Norman Bates in "Psycho," Leatherface of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Silence of the Lambs" killer, Buffalo Bill. 

"Monster" originally debuted in 2022 with another notable Wisconsin murderer: Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal known for murdering — and in several cases, consuming — 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991. Many of the victims were gay men of color. 

The series was widely acclaimed with lead performances from "American Horror Story" alumni Evan Peters and Niecey Nash, with each actor respectively winning a Golden Globe and Emmy Award for their portrayals. As noted by Variety, season one of "Monster" currently holds the position of the third most-watched show in Netflix history. 

Despite the popularity of Murphy's Dahmer, the show unsurprisingly stoked considerable controversy, leading many to question Murphy's consistent glamorization of very bad people. Much of the backlash came from families of Dahmer's victims, who claimed the series put them through hell all over again. Rita Isbell, sister of Errol Lindsey — who was among those Dahmer killed— wrote in a 2022 essay for Insider that she was "never contacted about the show," which re-dramatized the emotional victim impact statement she gave at the killer's real-life sentencing in 1992. 

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"I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it," Isbell said. "They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it.” Isbell added, “But I’m not money hungry, and that’s what this show is about, Netflix trying to get paid.”

Isbell and Lindsey's cousin, Eric Perry, tweeted about the show's "retraumatizing" effects in 2022, writing "I’m not telling anyone what to watch, I know true crime media is huge rn, but if you’re actually curious about the victims, my family (the Isbell’s) are pissed about this show. It’s retraumatizing over and over again, and for what? How many movies/shows/documentaries do we need?” 

"Like recreating my cousin having an emotional breakdown in court in the face of the man who tortured and murdered her brother is WILD. WIIIIIILD," Perry added in a follow-up post. 

"Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" also spawned an eccentric — and ethically questionable — trend of "thirsting" over Dahmer (but really, Petersen's good looks), racking up millions of TikToks pegged to the killer being "kinda cute," and actively sympathizing with him. It was another, unsettling iteration of the rockstar-ification of '70s serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy (played by another handsome dude, Zac Efron, in a 2019 biopic). As Kady Ruth Ashcraft opined for Jezebel in 2022, "While the true crime genre has rightly received its fair share of criticism for transforming gruesome crimes into entertainment at the expense of the well-being of survivors, people announcing they are 'unbothered' by Dahmer’s crimes feels like a new level of desensitization."

Now, with Hunnam — another blatantly attractive lead actor — set to helm a performance about Gein, we can only assume that a similar pattern of social media desensitization will ensue.

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Sean “Diddy” Combs indicted for sex trafficking and racketeering

Sean "Diddy" Combs, the music mogul embroiled in legal and civil troubles, has been indicted for puppeteering a "criminal enterprise" that fueled itself off of the coercion and the sexual and physical abuse of women for years, using silencing tactics to keep employees and victims compliant, an unsealed indictment revealed Tuesday.

Combs is being charged with three counts of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and transportation to engage in prostitution. The 14-page indictment accused Combs of using his businesses to commit kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice. For Combs to commit these acts the Southern District of New York's prosecutors alleged that Combs used his employees and businesses.

Reports have confirmed that Combs was arrested Monday in a Manhattan hotel room, nearly six months after the federal sex trafficking investigation that led to the raid of his properties in Miami and Los Angeles. He was denied bail on Tuesday afternoon after pleading not guilty to charges, The New York Times reported.

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The former head and creator of Bad Boy Records has been at the center of numerous sexual assault lawsuits, including a bombshell lawsuit and later settlement with former long-term partner and musician Cassie Ventura.

The most recent person to file a sexual assault lawsuit against Combs is former Danity Kane girl band member Dawn Richard. Richard filed the lawsuit against Combs on Sept. 10, alleging similar allegations of sexual battery and abuse, Variety reported.

Since the countless lawsuits, Combs has maintained his innocence, only admitting to fault and apologizing when a video of Combs physically assaulting Ventura in a hotel hallway in Los Angeles in 2016 was released to the public earlier this year. The document released on Tuesday painted Combs as a violent man who used physical abuse to hit and assault victims, which can be seen in the leaked video with Ventura.

The New York Times reported that one of Combs' attorneys said Tuesday morning, “He’s going to plead not guilty, obviously. He’s going to fight this with all of his energy and all of his might, and the full confidence of his lawyers. And I expect a long battle with a good result for Mr. Combs.”

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference Tuesday, “A year ago, Sean Combs stood in Times Square and was handed a key to New York City. Today, he’s been indicted and will face justice in the Southern District of New York.”

Williams stated that the investigation into Combs isn't over and urged the public to bring any more information to prosecutors. Williams concluded, "We are committed to bringing justice to everyone victimized by the defendant . . . I’m not taking anything off the table.” 

At the center of the charges is the alleged behavior many people including Ventura have described in lawsuits against Combs. The indictment alleges that Combs "engaged in a persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse toward women and other individuals,” which included physical violence “to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct." 

The indictment detailed that Combs drugged female victims and male sex workers to perform sex acts which were called “freak offs.” Combs would arrange, watch, and or film these acts as a way to coerce the victims into silence, the indictment said. Combs would also sometimes arrange flights for these women to ensure their participation through drugs, controlling their careers and his financial support and using intimidation and violence, according to the indictment.

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During the raid of Combs' properties in Miami and Los Angeles, law enforcement confiscated narcotics and seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s and more than 1000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant used for the "freak offs."

If Combs is convicted of these charges, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years to life in prison, Variety reported.

Earlier on Tuesday, Combs' attorney told TMZ on Tuesday that he will “fight like hell” to free his client on bail, emphasizing Combs is innocent. So far, Combs' attorneys stated he has been cooperating with prosecutors’ subpoenas.

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In Georgia, experts say this mother’s preventable death was caused by abortion bans

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

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Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light.

Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.

Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.

But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.”

Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.

When its law went into effect in July 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” and believed the state had found an approach that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”

After advocates tried to block the ban in court, arguing the law put women in danger, attorneys for the state of Georgia accused them of “hyperbolic fear mongering.”

Two weeks later, Thurman was dead.

 

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school.

The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.

Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.

At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.

Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.

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ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings. The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed. The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.

Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, which says it is staffed at all hours with an OB who specializes in hospital care, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica.

Her lower abdomen was tender, according to the summary. Her white blood cell count was critically high and her blood pressure perilously low — at one point, as Thurman got up to go to the bathroom, she fainted again and hit her head. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.

The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.

After assessing her at 9:38 p.m., doctors started Thurman on antibiotics and an IV drip, the summary said. The OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day.

But that didn’t happen the following morning, even when an OB diagnosed “acute severe sepsis.” By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.

Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine, the summary shows.

Doctors had Thurman tested for sexually transmitted diseases and pneumonia.

They placed her on Levophed, a powerful blood pressure support that could do nothing to treat the infection and posed a new threat: The medication can constrict blood flow so much that patients could need an amputation once stabilized.

At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.

At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.

At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.

Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.

By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.

During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.

Her mother was praying in the waiting room when one of the doctors approached. “Come walk with me,” she said.

Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.

Every state has a committee of experts who meet regularly to examine deaths that occurred during or within a year after a pregnancy. Their goal is to collect accurate data and identify the root causes of America’s increasing maternal mortality rate, then translate those lessons into policy changes. Their findings and recommendations are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and their states publish an annual report, but their reviews of individual cases are never public.

"“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”"

Georgia’s committee has 32 regular members from a variety of backgrounds, including OB-GYNs, cardiologists, mental health care providers, a medical examiner, health policy experts, community advocates and others. This summer, the committee reviewed deaths through Fall 2022, but most states have not gotten that far.

After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.”

It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.

Piedmont did not have a policy to guide doctors on how to interpret the state abortion ban when Thurman arrived for care, according to two people with knowledge of internal conversations who were not authorized to speak publicly. In the months after she died, an internal task force of providers there created policies to educate staff on how to navigate the law, though they are not able to give legal advice, the sources said.

In interviews with more than three dozen OB-GYNs in states that outlawed abortion, ProPublica learned how difficult it is to interpret the vague and conflicting language in bans’ medical exceptions — especially, the doctors said, when their judgment could be called into question under the threat of prison time.

Take the language in Georgia’s supposed lifesaving exceptions.

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.

There is also an exception, included in most bans, to allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors said. How can they be sure a jury with no medical experience would agree that intervening was “necessary”?

ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”

Republican officials across the country have largely rejected calls to provide guidance.

When legislators have tried, anti-abortion groups have blocked them.

In 2023, a group of Tennessee Republicans was unable to push through a small change to the state’s abortion ban, intended to give doctors greater leeway when intervening for patients facing health complications.

“No one wants to tell their spouse, child or loved one that their life is not important in a medical emergency as you watch them die when they could have been saved,” said Republican Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, a nurse who sponsored the bill.

The state’s main anti-abortion lobbyist, Will Brewer, vigorously opposed the change. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” he told a panel of lawmakers. Doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”

At some hospitals, doctors are doing just that. Doctors told ProPublica they have seen colleagues disregard the standard of care when their patients are at risk of infection and wait to see if a miscarriage completes naturally before offering a D&C.

Although no doctor has been prosecuted for violating abortion bans, the possibility looms over every case, they said, particularly outside of well-funded academic institutions that have lawyers promising criminal defense.

Doctors in public hospitals and those outside of major metro areas told ProPublica that they are often left scrambling to figure out on a case-by-case basis when they are allowed to provide D&Cs and other abortion procedures. Many fear they are taking on all of the risk alone and would not be backed up by their hospitals if a prosecutor charged them with a crime. At Catholic hospitals, they typically have to transfer patients elsewhere for care.

When they do try to provide care, it can be a challenge to find other medical staff to participate. A D&C requires an anesthesiologist, nurses, attending physicians and others. Doctors said peers have refused to participate because of their personal views or their fear of being exposed to criminal charges. Georgia law allows medical staff to refuse to participate in abortions.

Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.

For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.

The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.

They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.

On Monday, she would have turned 31.

Cassandra Jaramillo, Mariam Elba and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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

“All good here”: Last messages and new images Titan submersible implosion emerge as hearings begin

Hearings by the U.S. Coast Guard's Board of Investigations commenced Monday in South Carolina, as officials seeks answers about the deaths of five people killed in an undersea implosion of the Titan experimental submersible in June 2023. Investigative hearings will last two weeks, which have so far revealed new images of debris of the Titan submersible on the ocean floor, as well as the crew's final communication: "all good here."

On Tuesday, David Lochridge, a former employee at OceanGate, the private ocean exploration company that operated the Titan, testified to the U.S. Coast Guard panel that Stockton Rush, OceanGate's chief executive and founder, previously crashed another submersible into a shipwreck before angrily throwing the controls, as reported by the New York Times.

The submersible imploded in the Atlantic Ocean during an attempted tour of the wreck of the Titanic. The Titan's owners, OceanGate suspended operations following the implosion in which OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush was among those killed.

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A board statement said "hearing will examine all aspects of the loss of the Titan, including pre-accident historical events, regulatory compliance, crewmember duties and qualifications, mechanical and structural systems, emergency response and the submersible industry," as reported by the Associated Press in July.

Marine Investigations Board Chair Jason Neubauer told NBC News on Monday the hearings aim to determine the extent of any criminal negligence or misconduct which may then be referred to the Justice Department. And to provide necessary safety recommendations for federal and international agencies to consider so “no family will experience such a loss again.” 

As previously reported by Salon's Nicole Karlis, the Marine Technology Society was among several industry organizations which had for years issued warnings that the Titan's plans could lead to catastrophe.

"Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry," the Society said in its March 2018 letter.

Along with Rush, the four people who died in the implosion were 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, son of Pakistani and British billionaire Shahzada Dawood; British billionaire Hamish Harding; and French maritime expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

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Judge Aileen Cannon failed to disclose a right-wing junket

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

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the controversial jurist who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at a May 2023 banquet funded by a conservative law school.

Cannon went to an event in Arlington, Va. honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, according to documents obtained from the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University. At a lecture and private dinner, she sat among members of Scalia’s family, fellow Federalist Society members and more than 30 conservative federal judges. Organizers billed the event as “an excellent opportunity to connect with judicial colleagues.”

A 2006 rule, intended to shine a light on judges’ attendance at paid seminars that could pose conflicts or influence decisions, requires them to file disclosure forms for such trips within 30 days and make them public on the court’s website.

It’s not the first time she has failed to fully comply with the rule.

In 2021 and 2022, Cannon took weeklong trips to the luxurious Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, for legal colloquiums sponsored by George Mason, which named its law school for Scalia thanks to $30 million in gifts that conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo helped organize.

Current rates for standard rooms at Sage Lodge can exceed $1,000 per night, depending on the season. With both Montana trips, Cannon’s required seminar disclosures were not posted until NPR reporters asked about the omissions this year as part of a broader national investigation of gaps in judicial disclosures.

Cannon did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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In response to questions from ProPublica, the clerk in the Southern District of Florida wrote in an email that Cannon had filed the Sage Lodge trips with the federal judiciary’s administrative office but had “inadvertently” not taken the second step of posting them on the court’s website. She explained that “Judges often do not realize they must input the information twice.”

The clerk said she had no information about the May 2023 banquet.

“Judges administer the law, and we have a right to expect every judge to comply with the law,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Cannon’s husband, Joshua Lorence, a restaurant executive, accompanied her to the 2021 and 2022 colloquiums, which featured noted conservative jurists, lawyers and professors as well as lengthy “afternoon study breaks,” according to records obtained by ProPublica. Cannon emailed university staff to submit airport parking expenses and inquire about rental car reimbursement.

The rule for paid seminars is among the policies set by the Judicial Conference. Federal judges are also required by law to file annual financial disclosures, listing items such as assets, outside income and gifts.

Cannon’s annual disclosure form for 2023, which was due in May and offers another chance to report gifts and reimbursements from outside parties, has yet to be posted. (Cannon reported the two Montana trips on her annual disclosure forms, but the required 30-day privately funded seminar reports had not been posted. In 2021, Cannon incorrectly listed the school as “George Madison University.”)

The court’s administrative office declined to say if she requested a one-time extension to give her until Aug. 13 to file. A spokesperson would not discuss whether she met the deadline or the status of her disclosure, which must be reviewed internally.

Cannon’s performance during almost four years of a lifetime appointment has drawn criticism from lawyers, former federal judges and courtroom observers who told ProPublica that she doesn’t render timely decisions and has made unpredictable rulings in both civil and criminal matters. On July 15, she threw out the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith that alleges Trump mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence; Cannon called Smith’s appointment unconstitutional since he was not nominated by the president and approved by the Senate.

Smith is appealing to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has asked the court to remand her decision and replace her.

By contrast, Trump, who appointed Cannon in 2020 to the Fort Pierce courthouse, has praised her brilliance, and Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi called her a heroine for throwing out the criminal case against Trump.

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For decades, judicial education programs sponsored by George Mason’s Law and Economics Center have drawn in 5,000 state and federal judges and four current Supreme Court justices, according to its website. The school says its programs strive for balance and intellectual rigor. But conference agendas and speaker lists that the university must file with the courts detail lectures and panel discussions built around Federalist Society principles that are associated with conservative legal movements.

Ken Turchi, associate dean for external affairs, said the law school plays no role in judicial disclosures. “Judges’ decisions to submit (or not submit) disclosure forms are theirs alone — it’s a self-reporting process,” he said.

The guest list for the May 2023 Scalia Forum included William H. Pryor Jr., chief judge of the 11th Circuit, which is now hearing Smith’s appeal. Pryor and dinner speaker Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit judge, did file their required disclosures for the Scalia dinner.

Pryor’s court has overruled Cannon twice in the Trump case. It sided with the government in September 2022 on a motion for a stay and found that it “had established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.” In December 2022, it ruled that she erred in naming a special master to examine classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. After that decision, Cannon had to dismantle an expensive operation set up by her special master, a senior federal judge in New York.

Gabe Roth, who directs Fix the Court, a nonprofit judicial reform group, said compliance with the privately funded seminar rule has improved in some circuits since his group pressed for compliance with the Administrative Office of the Courts.

“They’re a more effective way for litigants and the public to get a sense of what types of individuals and groups a judge might be hanging out with and learning from,” he said.

Records show that Cannon submitted minor reimbursement requests related to the Scalia Forum trip after she returned, including the 158 miles she drove round trip to the airport. She inquired with George Mason staff about details for an Alaska excursion recommended by a former lawyer in the Trump-era White House Counsel’s Office.

Cannon registered for George Mason’s Hill Country Colloquium at a Texas resort in December 2023 but had to back out for scheduling reasons.

“I hope to join that event, and others, in future years,” she wrote.

If you have information about Judge Aileen M. Cannon, please contact Marilyn W. Thompson at marilyn.thompson@propublica.org.

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Chappell Roan shared her thoughts on Hailey Bieber’s Erewhon smoothie: “This is just a milkshake!”

Chappell Roan — better known as your favorite artist's favorite artist — had some strong opinions to share about Hailey Bieber’s viral Erewhon smoothie.

In a recent interview with The Face, Roan offered her review of the $19 beverage, which has sent the health, beauty and wellness communities into an online frenzy. “And you know what? All you b*tches think this is healthy, but this is just a milkshake!” Roan said while taking a sip from her Erewhon matcha latte.

The smoothie, formally named Hailey Bieber's Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, contains almond milk, vanilla collagen and organic produce, including strawberries, bananas, dates and avocados. It’s enhanced with maple syrup, vanilla and stevia, along with sea moss, organic coconut cream and an organic strawberry glaze. The fancy ingredients are where the drink’s alleged health benefits come from, although many taste-testers have said that the smoothie is incredibly sweet.

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In a 2023 GQ report, Erewhon’s executive vice president Vito Antoci said the upscale supermarket chain has managed to appeal to “the demographic of the girls flying from San Francisco to stand in front of Erewhon Beverly Hills with Hailey Bieber smoothies, taking a picture of Erewhon and tagging Hailey. The fan girls really make these drinks viral.”

As for how the smoothie was created, the story is quite simple. “What actually happened was that I went into Erewhon just to order a regular smoothie, and then I posted the smoothie on my [Instagram] story,” Bieber told GQ’s Eileen Cartter. That same week, Bieber “went back into Erewhon and they were like, ‘You don’t understand how many people have come in here and ordered the thing that you posted.’” She ultimately convinced Erewhon that her go-to smoothie — named after herself, of course — would be incredibly successful.

Indeed, she was right — though Roan is ostensibly not included as one of those "fan girls."

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Jordan Chiles appeals “unfair” Olympics bronze medal decision

Team USA gymnast Jordan Chiles is still fighting to get her bronze medal back.

The Paris Olympian filed an appeal of the decision that saw the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) force her to cede her third-place title in the floor event to Ana Bărbosu of Romania, per an announcement made by her attorneys on Monday. 

Chiles is now appealing the decision in Switzerland, where CAS is headquartered. 

“From start to finish, the procedures leading to the CAS panel’s decision were fundamentally unfair, and it is no surprise that they resulted in an unjust decision,” the athlete's lawyers said in a statement, per CNN. “Chiles believes in competing fairly and with integrity and holding these organizations to the standards and rules that were established to ensure fairness,” Chiles' legal team continued. 

“Jordan Chiles’ appeals present the international community with an easy legal question—will everyone stand by while an Olympic athlete who has done only the right thing is stripped of her medal because of fundamental unfairness in an ad-hoc arbitration process? The answer to that question should be no,” said Chiles' lawyer, Maurice M. Suh. 

“Every part of the Olympics, including the arbitration process, should stand for fair play,” Suh added," Suh added.

The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) had openly supported Chiles in her mission to see her medal reinstated. “Due to the egregious errors and oversight by CAS in handling the case and overlooking clear evidence of Jordan’s rightful Bronze win, we are determined to ensure she receives the recognition she deserves. Our commitment to truth in this matter remains steadfast,” the USPOC told CNN. 

The FDA wants to place warning labels on food packages to combat obesity and other health conditions

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is looking to propose the inclusion of front-of-package warning labels that detail the calorie, fat, sugar and salt content of various processed food and drink products.

The agency plans to make a formal proposal in October, a little over two years after the FDA first considered implementing a new nutrition labeling system. In August 2022, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), along with the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA) and the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists (ASPHN) urged the FDA to “use its authority to establish a simple, standardized, evidence-based, and mandatory front-of-package labeling system for all packaged foods sold in the United States.”

Since then, the FDA has assessed several front-of-package label options, including a “Traffic Light” system that would use red, yellow and green color codes to denote the levels of sugars, sodium and saturated fats in certain food products. Red would indicate the highest levels while green would indicate the lowest levels. Another option foregoes the color codes and explicitly details the high content of such ingredients.

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The FDA has yet to send a draft of the proposed rule to the White House budget office for review, The Washington Post reported Friday. White House spokesperson Kelly Scully told the outlet that front-of-package labels are “one of the many key deliverables” in the Biden administration’s public health strategy.     

Front-of-package labels hope to fight rising obesity rates and reduce the prevalence of other health conditions, like diabetes and heart disease.

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Food is a huge source of methane emissions. Fixing that is no easy feat.

An international team of researchers found that global emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, rose faster than ever in the three years ending in 2022. In a new report from the Global Carbon Project, dozens of scientists reviewed many different emitters of methane and found that two-thirds of methane emissions came from human activity in 2020, while the rest came from natural sources like wetlands.

The way we eat, and the way we dispose of food, play a huge role in humanity's growing methane problem. The report zooms in on roughly two decades of data: one from 2000 to 2009, and another from 2010 to 2019. (It also includes analysis of emissions in 2020 and beyond where data was available.) The authors found that agriculture and waste — including landfills and wastewater management — were responsible for releasing almost double the methane emissions into the atmosphere as fossil fuel production and use from 2010 to 2019. 

The trend is hardly surprising to experts tracking global greenhouse gas emissions. This is the Global Carbon Project's fourth report tracking the sources and sinks of methane emissions, and in the last global methane budget, published in 2020, agriculture and waste also contributed roughly twice the methane emissions as the methane that leaked into the air during the extraction of oil, gas, and coal. But the findings come at a time when more than 155 countries have committed to slashing their methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, indicating the amount of work left to do to reach this climate goal has grown. That's both a problem and a potential opportunity, said one report author. 

The figures detailed in the report, especially from the agricultural sector, are not "fixed numbers," said Peter Raymond, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of the Environment and one of the dozens of scientists who contributed to the methane budget report. 

Agricultural production uses up just under half of the planet's habitable land, which represents plenty of room for intervention. Animal agriculture is an especially big contributor to global methane emissions: The largest source of methane emissions within the agricultural sector is livestock. Ruminants like cattle and sheep release methane into the atmosphere when they burp. This source of methane is technically known as enteric fermentation. 

Cutting meat consumptions — particularly red meat, particularly in high-income countries — represents an opportunity to lower methane emissions. "There's a place for shifting our diets," said Richard Waite, director of agriculture initiatives at the World Resources Institute. 

For regions that "consume more meat than the global average," said Waite, "shifting away from meat especially toward plant-based foods" presents a real opportunity to cut back methane emissions. 

Raymond noted that other climate solutions are emerging that target enteric fermentation; these include animal feed additives like seaweed, which can reduce cattle's methane production. 

The other two major sources of methane from agriculture are manure management and rice production. In those areas, too, there's a number of potential solutions that would reduce methane emissions, such as separating animal waste by liquids and solids and finding alternatives to flooding rice paddies. 

Raymond pointed out that governments are especially interested in solutions to reduce methane emissions because "it's also seen as a possible way to buy time" while governments and the private sector undertake the monumental task of replacing fossil fuels with renewables. CO2 represents more than 99 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by concentration, and it's responsible for 64 percent of the heat trapped in the atmosphere. That, he said, makes carbon "a much bigger nut to crack."

Methane spends a lot less time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide; about 20 years after it's released, most of it will have decayed, while carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. But methane also generates heat much more readily than carbon dioxide — about 80 times more in its first 20 years in the atmosphere — meaning it contributes significantly towards global warming in the short term. It is good news — sort of — because by the same token, any reductions in methane emissions will have more of an impact on the climate right away. 

The fact that researchers have found that a majority of methane emissions stem from human activities is "a blessing and a curse," said James Gerber, a senior scientist focused on agriculture and land use at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit. "It's sobering that so much of that is the fault of humans," he said. But "we can actually do something about it if we're a big part of the problem."

The differences between the agriculture and the energy sector really illustrate the challenges of decarbonizing food systems. The greatest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions is the energy sector, and within that, the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal to create electricity. Therefore, the path to decarbonization is obvious: Shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. 

For consumers, that transition will almost happen in the background; once necessary changes are made to power grids, "you flip a switch, and the adoption is automatic," said Mario Herrero, a professor at Cornell University's agricultural science school. With agriculture, decarbonization will likely require the adoption of technological solutions by farmers, as well as dietary shifts by consumers. These kinds of behavioral changes are tricky; Herrero points out that policy incentives might be needed to get farmers onboard with new practices. "The adoption of novel technologies in the livestock sector has been around 20 percent over 15 years," said Herrero. "So it takes forever."

Still, when it comes to food, change is possible, said Waite. "Food is something that we can all talk about," he said. "We're all familiar with it. We all make our own decisions about it three times a day or more." Systems-level change is required to make a difference at a global scale — but that can start at the consumer level, said Waite. 

Our food systems also play an important role in potentially reducing emissions from landfills. The methane budget report found that waste was responsible for nearly a fifth of global methane emissions in 2020. And while not all of that comes from food waste, a good portion of it does. For example, in the U.S., 58 percent of methane emissions from landfills come from food waste, according to the EPA. 

The role that waste systems play in methane emissions is getting more attention, says Emily Broad Leib, who heads the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. "I think there's growing awareness that this is something we need to address if we really want to make an impact on methane emissions," she said.

Certain countries have made significant strides in diverting food waste to make compost, like South Korea, which has basically eliminated food waste by making organic waste in landfills illegal. In France, a ban on throwing out unsold food from grocery stores has led to a decrease in waste. But agriculture and waste — which in some way, represent the beginning and end of our food systems — are still major emitters of methane in the Global South, according to the methane budget report. 

The imperative, then, is scaling and translating solutions to work in even more environments. "There is a known playbook that's emerging around the policy tools that can get food out of landfills," said Broad Leib. "And we need to be rolling those out more quickly."


                 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/article/food-is-a-huge-source-of-methane-emissions-fixing-that-is-no-easy-feat/.

                                  

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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“Rotten and creepy”: Clinton praises Swift and defends against gross Musk comment

Hillary Clinton has choice words for Elon Musk after his gross comments following Taylor Swift's endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The former first lady took to Kara Swisher’s podcast to weigh in on Musk's post on his platform X Tuesday, where he wrote, “Fine Taylor . . . you win . . . I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

Clinton said that Musk's proposition to have kids with Swift is “kind of another way of saying rape I think,” calling it “rotten and creepy."

"I can’t understand why he says what he says. It just is beyond my imagination,” Clinton said to Swisher.

Musk's post — which has been viewed nearly 117 million times — has been met with stark backlash from people online likening the comment to “sexual harassment,” Variety reported.

"So-called masters of the universe in the technology world . . . misogyny is such a part of their worldview, and they gravitate toward toughness and brutality and machoism," Clinton said. "And here’s Taylor Swift, a self-made billionaire who brings joy to people and who imparts life lessons, particularly to girls and women. They can’t stand it.”

The former presidential candidate stated, "[Swift's] a singer who charts the course of her life which they relate to as their own lives, but she’s also someone who stood up to a guy who groped her and stood up to get her music back from someone she thought had illegitimately had taken it from her."

“She has demonstrated a resilience in taking control over her own life that sends a strong message. I’m a huge admirer. I think [her endorsement] has real impact,” she said.

“Our hearts are broken”: Jane’s Addiction cancels reunion tour after fight on stage

Jane's Addiction is calling quits on their big reunion tour after a fight between guitarist Dave Navarro and singer Perry Farrell broke out on stage at a show in Boston last week.

On Monday, the band announced on its Instagram page that they "have made the difficult decision to take some time away as a group," and that they're pulling out of any remaining dates for the tour. 

Jane's Addiction, which rose to fame in the '80s and '90s, was halfway through its reunion tour in the U.S. when the confrontation between Navarro and Farrell occurred on Friday.

Rolling Stone reported that this reunion tour was the first time the original band members had played together in 14 years, joining the new trend of rock groups like Oasis putting their differences aside to hit the road together. 

However, the tussle between Navarro and Farrell led to Navarro sharing that “the mental health difficulties" of the band's singer were the main reason for ending the tour. The message was co-signed by the group's members Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins, who said, “Our concern for his personal health and safety as well as our own has left us no alternative.”

The message concluded, “Our hearts are broken.”

Farrell also addressed the incident with a statement on Monday, writing, “This weekend has been incredibly difficult and after having the time and space to reflect, it is only right that I apologize to my bandmates, especially Dave Navarro, fans, family and friends for my actions during Friday’s show."

“Unfortunately, my breaking point resulted in inexcusable behavior, and I take full accountability for how I chose to handle the situation,” he said.

Harris jumps to 6-point lead over Trump in post-debate poll

After last week's debate, Vice President Kamala Harris' 3-point lead over Donald Trump doubled, according to the latest survey by Morning Consult, with 51% of likely voters siding with the Democratic nominee versus 45% for the former president.

The survey is based on polling conducted from Sep. 13 to 15 among a sample size of 11,022 likely U.S. voters.

Although the GOP nominee insists that he beat Harris in last week's debate, those surveyed beg to differ, with 61% of likely voters who watched last Tuesday's debate saying they believe the vice president beat Trump. Harris' 28-point margin exceeds the 25-point advantage Trump had over President Joe Biden in Morning Consult's June post-debate survey.

Related

"Rigged and worthless": Trump trashes Fox News over poll that shows Harris leading in swing states

“Vice President Kamala Harris is enjoying a positive news cycle among the likely electorate this year that's earning her positive marks and aligns with her best numbers yet in the head-to-head contest against Donald Trump,” Eli Yokely, a political analyst at Morning Consult, said in a statement. He added that Harris’s 3-point, post-debate bump “appears to be crystalizing her national lead over the former president.”

The survey also marks record-high support for Harris among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18-34-year-olds and millennials.

Morning Consult’s polls are consistent with other national polls that have found the Democrat in the lead, albeit by smaller margins. According to the 538 polling average, Harris leads Trump by 2.9 points, 48.3% to 45.45%.

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