What the FDA’s ban of BVO — a soda additive and flame retardant — says about food safety in America

For many years, brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, existed in something of a regulatory gray area. When added in small amounts, the product serves as a stabilizer in some orange-flavored beverages and prevents the citrus flavoring from floating to the top. In the early 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration placed BVO on the agency’s original “GRAS” list, which encompassed ingredients that were “generally recognized as safe.”

BVO also contains bromine —an ingredient found in brominated flame retardants, which are added to products like textiles and building materials to prevent the spread of fire. These wildly disparate uses raised questions among consumer groups and health advocates over whether BVO, while generally recognized as safe by the federal government, was actually safe, and for decades, the FDA maintained that it was (though eventually heavily restricted the amount that could be added to beverages).

However, earlier this month, on July 3, the FDA issued a final rule to revoke the regulation allowing the use of BVO in food. So, how did we get here and what’s next?

Why did the FDA ban BVO?

While BVO had been used as a food additive since the 1920s, the FDA, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, decided to reassess the ingredient’s safety for human consumption in 2014.

After several years of experiments, researchers published their findings in Food and Chemical Toxicology in 2022.

“Past studies have raised concerns about potential toxicities from consuming BVO,” researchers wrote, noting that prior research on BVO’s toxicology in rats had design limitations, such as not evaluating both sexes and insufficient sample sizes. These studies, conducted from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, highlighted various toxic effects, but lacked comprehensive analysis.“To investigate further these toxicities, we conducted a 90-day dietary exposure study in Sprague Dawley rats and analyzed tissue distribution of the main metabolites.”

"Toxic chemicals in our food": California bill would ban additives already prohibited in Europe

Feed meal was blended with varying concentrations of BVO to create test diets for rats. Researchers eventually found that high doses of BVO disrupt the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis, confirming its potential toxic effects on the endocrine system. This is in addition to past research that has suggested consuming BVOs could result in neurological and memory loss, according to Psychiatrist.

“High levels of bromine have been associated with neurological symptoms such as memory loss, tremors, fatigue, and headaches — a constellation of effects known as bromism,” they write. “Scientists worry that long-term exposure to BVO could exacerbate these symptoms, potentially leading to more serious and persistent neurological conditions.”

In 2023, while federal action had still yet to be taken, California became the first state to ban BVO under the California Food Safety Act. Then finally, in a statement issued on July 2, the FDA wrote that “the agency concluded that the intended use of BVO in food is no longer considered safe after the results of studies conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found the potential for adverse health effects in humans.”

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“The FDA took this action consistent with our regulatory authority over ingredients added to food, which includes reassessing previously evaluated food ingredients and addressing safety concerns,” it continued. “Reassessing the safety of food ingredients as new, relevant data become available, is a priority for the FDA and a key part of our food safety mission.”

How many food products in the United States currently use BVO?

Many American beverage manufacturers had already phased out using BVO in their product formulations, in part because it’s a chemical that’s banned in many other parts of the world. However, according to Scott Faber, senior vice president of governmental affairs at the Environmental Working group, it is still used “especially in so-called off-brand products, including store-brand products and lesser-known, smaller brands that are sometimes sold regionally.”

Notably, PepsiCo announced in 2022 that they had removed BVO from Mountain Dew.

What’s next?

According to the FDA, the rule is effective on Aug. 2, and companies need to be compliant within a year of that date. This provides “the opportunity for companies to reformulate, relabel, and deplete the inventory of BVO-containing products before the FDA begins enforcing the final rule.”

While several consumer groups have lauded the FDA’s decision, others say it feels like too little too late, and called for more research into the effects of other food additives.

“The FDA’s decision to ban brominated vegetable oil in food is a victory for public health. But it’s disgraceful that it took decades of regulatory inaction to protect consumers from this dangerous chemical,” Faber said. “It's outrageous that for years Americans have been consuming a chemical banned in Europe and Japan. The FDA’s belated action on BVO underscores the urgent need for more rigorous and timely oversight of food additives.”

about this topic

“Unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets”: Jon Stewart mocks GOP’s “new tone” at convention

Jon Stewart on Tuesday's episode of "The Daily Show" harangued Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for delivering a speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that trafficked in divisive and inflammatory political language, despite bipartisan calls to tone down the rhetoric in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump over the weekend.

The comedian kicked off his monologue by airing a montage of clips of conservative figureheads and lawmakers — including Johnson, who urged for the convention to be a "moment that helps us down that path of healing and unity" — requesting solidarity in the wake of Trump's close encounter with death. Stewart followed by showing a portion of Johnson's speech, in which the far-right politician claimed that "today's Democrat agenda — their policies — are a clear and present danger to America, our institutions, our values, and our people."

"Democrats have forgotten American families," Johnson said. "They have abandoned the hardworking middle class. But with president Trump and Republicans, those forgotten Americans are forgotten no more. Republicans are the party of opportunity, liberty, and prosperity for all. We proved we know how to make life better for all Americans, and we can do it again with a secure border, smaller government, less regulation, and lower taxes."

"We've repaired the damage caused by Democrats before and we will do it again," the senator continued. "We will complete the mission president Trump first articulated in 2016 to make America great again."

"I cannot believe this is real": Maddow stunned senator read wrong speech at Republican convention

“I guess he’s what’s known as unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets,” Stewart quipped.

“But, to be fair, and I wanna be fair in this new environment," the late-night host added. "Senator Johnson did not mean to stoke anger. His teleprompter did."

Johnson said after the speech that his teleprompter displayed an old speech instead of an updated one that called for unity. Stewart played a voiceover of a political commentator who attempted to clarify Johnson's position, saying, "What he wanted loaded in the prompter was that we needed a somber moment in history, we should heed president Trump's call to unite, to be strong, to be determined. We must heal. He said, 'I don't know how the other one got in there and screwed up the teleprompter.' But again, he went ahead and read it."

"What a d***hebag!" Stewart exclaimed, before leaning into the bit by putting on his glasses and jesting, "Sorry, I didn't mean to say that. That was in my teleprompter. I apologize."

Continuing to harp on the feigned unity theme, Stewart then turned his focus to conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., who was unsurprisingly one of the most outspoken figures present at the Republican Convention.

"Rogue teleprompters weren't the only ones having trouble adjusting to the Republicans' new tone," he alleged. "One particularly fiery member of Congress struggled mightily, as her body rejected the unity theme, as though it were transplanted like a monkey heart," he added, before playing a clip of Greene speaking at the event. Between remarks, Greene smiles uncannily, raises her fist in the air, and makes a series of throaty noises as the crowd cheers.

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“She knows she’s making that noise, right?” Stewart asked. “Or is that the noise when the interior monologue is going, ’Marjorie, there’s gonna be plenty of time to talk about Satanic Democrats, just keep it in, Marjorie, just… ” he added, feigning his own version of the congresswoman's odd sounds.

Greene was among a number of Republicans who accused President Joe Biden and Democrats of being at fault for the Saturday assassination attempt, writing in a series of tweets on X/Twitter that the country is embroiled in "a battle between good and evil."

She baselessly claimed that Democrats tried to "murder President Trump,” — despite the fact that the shooter was a registered Republican — and accused them of being "a party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars.”

"The Daily Show" airs Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central and streams on Paramount+

about this the Republican National Convention

“It’s the latest thing”: RNC attendees wear ear bandages in solidarity with Trump

Attendees of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee are sporting what some of them call “the newest fashion trend” in support of Donald Trump: ear bandages.

After Saturday’s assassination attempt, in which his ear was injured, Trump entered the RNC auditorium on Monday with a bandaged ear. The crowd erupted in cheers and chants of "fight."

Now, Republicans at the convention are also bandaging their ears in solidarity with the former president, The Daily Beast reported.

One woman styled the bandage with a cowboy hat and a red lanyard, while a man dressed in a Uncle Sam costume wore a fake bandage on his ear while performing “God Bless the U.S.A.” on the harmonica, according to a video posted on X.

CBS News interviewed Arizona delegate Joe Neglia at the convention, who also sported a fake bandage that appeared to be a folded up envelope.

“This is the newest fashion trend. I’m getting this going. Everybody in the world is going to be wearing these pretty soon. It’s the latest thing. My wife calls me and tells me I dress like an engineer, but I’m setting new fashion ground here,” Neglia told CBS.

The Trump campaign has not officially announced what he was treated for following Saturday’s shooting, but Trump's doctor, Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, said a bullet took off a bit of Trump’s ear in an area that “bleeds like crazy,” The New York Times reported.

“The dressing’s bulked up a bit because you need a bit of absorbent. You don’t want to be walking around with bloody gauze on his ear,” Jackson said.

Trump Media just made a little-noticed deal that could help Trump cash in on Truth Social

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

After markets closed the day before the Fourth of July holiday, former President Donald Trump’s social media company made a disclosure that got little notice.

“The Company entered into the Standby Equity Purchase Agreement,” Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Trump’s Truth Social platform, said in a filing.

The jargon represented a major development that allows Trump Media to create and sell up to $2.5 billion worth of new shares. The plan, securities experts said, is a way for the company to convert its astronomical value on paper into actual cash. That could secure a windfall for Trump, who owns a majority of the company. Even if excitement for the stock deflates, his company might still retain billions in cash value.

Trump Media has seen its value on paper skyrocket into the billions despite losing money and having almost no revenue, thanks to enthusiasm from Trump supporters who are betting the former president will return to the White House.

Trump’s nearly 60% stake in the company represents the majority of his personal fortune, according to Forbes’ estimate.

Any sale of shares by the company could help the former president solve two problems that stand in the way of transforming what is now a $4 billion stake on paper in the company into something more tangible, experts said. A so-called “lockup” agreement prevents Trump from personally selling his shares in the company until late September. Even after that point, many observers believe a move by Trump to sell shares could be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the company by its owner and namesake, spooking other investors and sparking a sell-off that would crash the company’s share price.

Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions from ProPublica, including whether the company intended to limit public attention by announcing the agreement after hours before the holiday.

“These outlandish and nonsensical conspiracy theories about TMTG’s routine, transparent business practices constitute legally actionable defamation, and we will take legal action in response,” a Trump Media spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about the statement.

Shares of a company are essentially slices of a pie. If a company wants to raise cash, it can re-slice the pie, creating more slices but making existing slices smaller. The percentage stake of the company represented by each share shrinks.

There are a number of ways a company can raise money by selling shares. A traditional version involves the company hiring an investment bank such as J.P. Morgan to play middleman. The bank finds big investors like pension funds to buy the new shares of the company.

Trump Media has chosen a different route, one more common with small, high-risk “penny stock” companies as well as “meme stock” companies, whose shares are the subject of Reddit-fueled hype and speculation by retail traders, experts said.

This alternative route is attractive to companies that might be seen as too risky by top investment banks or that believe that the demand for their stock will be driven by a fan base of retail traders.

Instead of hiring J.P. Morgan or another bank, Trump Media has entered into a deal to sell stock with a small New Jersey financial firm called Yorkville Advisors.

The firm has done similar deals with a number of small biotech companies, such as a firm trying to develop “cannabinoid pharmaceuticals” to treat autism and Alzheimer’s. In 2021 it inked a high-profile deal with a meme stock electric vehicle startup called Lordstown Motors, whose stock has crashed from a peak of more than $400 to under $2 today.

Companies like Yorkville that offer such deals are not typically intending to hold on to the stock, experts said. They are playing a version of the middleman role, allowing Trump Media to easily sell shares when it wants to. The basic arrangement works like this: Trump Media has the option to sell Yorkville shares of itself up to $2.5 billion, a significant chunk of its current market value. Yorkville was paid a fee up front, and if Trump Media decides to sell shares, Yorkville will also get a discount — 2.75% — off the market price. Yorkville typically would turn around and immediately sell those shares to other buyers, pocketing the difference.

In the July 3 press release announcing the deal, Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, the Republican former congressman, suggested any share sale would be used to buy assets to build the company’s business. “We've secured a great deal to guarantee access to additional capital, if necessary, to pursue big strategic opportunities as we look to build out our portfolio by acquiring assets and technologies in the Patriot economy,” he said.

Xavier Kowalski, a securities lawyer who teaches at the University of Florida, said even if Trump Media didn’t spend the cash it raised building its social media business, “you could think of it as a diversification strategy: diversifying away from Truth Social and into just being a pot of cash.”

The company would have no obligation to spend the money purchasing an asset. It could distribute cash to shareholders — including Trump — in the form of a dividend, for example.

Kowalski and other experts said Trump Media would be following other meme stocks if it moves forward with a share sale. “Is this what I would expect for a company that is losing money and a stock that most people think is overvalued? Yes,” he said.

Yorkville did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal’s ultimate impact on existing shareholders is unclear. The creation of new shares means their shares represent a smaller percentage stake of the company. But if Trump Media uses the money to, for example, buy a company that brings in significant profits, that could create stability for the value of Trump Media long term.

Other meme stocks have taken similar approaches, with mixed results. The CEO of AMC, the theater chain whose shares soared during the pandemic because of a Reddit-fueled buying spree, defended issuing new shares: “Now, if you thought — well, dilution is bad. Then, you were wrong, because foolish dilution is bad. Smart dilution is smart. And our share price went up.”

But frequently deals that dilute shares hurt existing shareholders. In its filing announcing the deal, Trump Media acknowledged as much: “There are substantial risks to stockholders as a result of the sale and issuance of shares to Yorkville. … These risks include the potential for substantial dilution and significant declines in the share price of the Company’s securities."

At least in the short term, the deal seems to have had that effect. The company made another filing about the deal Monday, and this one seems to have caught investors’ attention, with shares falling about 10% in after-hours trading immediately after Monday’s announcement.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.

“Neither courage nor convictions”: Trump’s former rivals offer homage at the RNC

A slew of Donald Trump's former rivals took the stage at the Republican National Convention this week to proclaim their loyalty to the man they once ran against. The most notable turnaround was that of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who stayed in the 2024 race the longest and battered Trump as "unhinged" and his potential election to a second term as "suicide for this country."

The decision by Trump to invite Haley, and Haley's acceptance, came just hours after an assassination attempt on the former president, perhaps underscoring the unifying effect it's had on the Republican Party, though she had already agreed to release her delegates to him before that. On Tuesday night, she told her supporters in her speech that "you don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him.”

“I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” she said, with Trump watching from his VIP suite.

Other presidential rivals also paid homage, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott, who eulogized Trump as an "American lion" who was saved by God from a gunman's bullet.

One 2024 candidate who did not join the lineup was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was among the first mainstream GOP candidates to endorse Trump in 2016 after his first failed run that year. Instead, he went on ABC News, where he is a regular contributor, to criticize Haley for her opportunism.

"What we saw in her speech tonight was neither courage nor convictions, it was really tortured ambition," Christie said. "She was on that stage because she is tortured by her own ambition. She had to go up there if she wanted to run again in 2018 — in her own mind. And that was more important than standing up for the things she represented in the Republican primaries about Donald Trump being unfit, unhinged, unqualified to be president of the United States."

Haley's supporters, some of whom voted for her in primaries even after she had dropped out, are "not going to be persuaded by Nikki Haley to vote for someone, they're going to be ashamed they voted for her in the first place," Christie continued.

Haley's not the only MAGA convert trying to run away from her history of criticizing Trump. The former president's own pick for vice president, JD Vance, once called Trump a "moral disaster" and possibly "America's Hitler," but strove to make amends since running for a Senate seat in 2022.

“I lost a ton of respect for him”: Biden’s latest performance leaves Democrats more worried

Put aside the alarming debate performance, the concerning polls and the god-awful vibes: The reason Democrats are still in disarray over the viability of President Joe Biden’s candidacy is because President Joe Biden keeps demonstrating, in each and every public appearance, that the concerns about his fitness and ability to campaign vigorously for the next four months — to say nothing of governing for another four years — are devastatingly valid.

Speaking Monday with NBC News’ Lester Holt, Biden looked and sounded all of his 81 years, conceding it’s a “legitimate question to ask” if he can keep doing this until “he’s 83 years old, or 84 years” (he’d be 86 when a second term ends). Asked about his June 27 showing, and what happens if “you have another performance on that par,” Biden was both incoherent and in denial.

“What happened,” he asked, mumbling something that the transcript describes as “INAUDIBLE.” Asked the question again, he answered: “I don’t plan on having another performance at that level.”

Biden team resorts to Trump's "Access Hollywood" playbook as Democrats signal looming revolt

The concern among Democrats is that no one planned on him performing at that level last time around, particularly not after the president had 12 days to rest and prepare. The Biden campaign had long sold the debate as the moment the race would “reset”: voters would see Trump as unhinged, Biden as normal, and the polls would soon reflect that — all the president had to do was appear more “with it” than six-second clips on right-wing social media would suggest.

Biden’s performance shattered the trust that many Democrats had in him and his campaign. Although he has smartly cast doubts about his candidacy as stemming from “elites,” both in his party and the media, polls suggest a majority of Democratic voters have also lost confidence in his ability to win this November. Not even Biden is confident enough in his abilities to have another showdown with Trump in the coming weeks: “I’m gonna debate him when we agreed to debate,” he told NBC.

That means September, or: after the Democratic National Convention, the party’s last-best chance to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris or someone else more capable of communicating their agenda and the threats a second Trump presidency poses to democracy, at home and elsewhere.

Biden, who insists he doesn’t need to watch his June debate performance to understand what others saw because “I was there,” gave more reason to doubt his abilities in an interview with Complex’s Speedy Morman. A clear attempt to appeal to the youth, conducted about 12 hours after a solid if not gaffe-free press conference, he was once again slow, quiet and at times dishonest, such as when he insisted his administration is only providing Israel with “defensive weapons” (he resumed providing the Netanyahu government with 500-pound bombs this month).

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But forget the fact checks: the interview, just in terms of optics, was excruciating — it’s hard to see anyone under the age of 30 sticking with it more than three minutes, which would be enough time to hear Biden claim that, “in 2020,” Obama had “asked me to be vice president.”

Teleprompters aren’t much better these days. Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Biden told the nation that it should address political disputes not with violence but at the “battle box.” In an address before the NAACP on Tuesday, Biden boasted about his proposal to cap rent increases by corporate landlords to just “$55”; in fact, he has proposed capping them at 5%.

Biden’s calls with skeptical Democrats are reportedly much worse. Speaking to Puck’s Julia Ioffe, an anonymous Democratic lawmaker said the president only validated criticism in a Saturday call with moderate members of the House caucus.

“The president was rambling, dismissive of concerns, [and] unable or unprepared to present a campaign strategy,” the lawmaker said.

“The call was even worse than the debate,” said another participant. “He was rambling; he’d start an answer then lose his train of thought, then would just say ‘whatever.’ I lost a ton of respect for him.”

So far 20 Democratic members of Congress have explicitly called on Biden to drop out. The number all but calling on him to drop out is much higher.

“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., recently told donors, according to The New York Times. That’s a sentiment reportedly shared by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has been “working the phones” to organize opposition to Biden’s candidacy, fearing he won’t just lose the White House but cost Democrats the House and Senate.

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The Biden campaign, in turn, has leaned on brute force, its allies in the Democratic National Committee planning to plow ahead with formalizing the president’s nomination as soon as this month, weeks before the convention. That comes as brutal swing-state polls suggest Biden is lagging behind other Democratic candidates by more than 10% — on track for a landslide loss in the Electoral College — and comments from the president suggesting he doesn’t take them seriously (and reports that he’s surrounded himself with people who may be incapable of delivering the uncomfortable truth).

Some Democrats have resigned themselves to loser talk, telling reporters that they have no choice but to stick with Biden and lose in November. Others are organizing, Axios reporting that members of Congress — including Reps. Susan Wild, D-Pa., Mike Quigley, D-Ill., and Pat Ryan, D-N.Y. — are circulating a letter pushing back on the DNC’s effort to make Biden the party’s nominee as soon as possible.

“[S]tifling debate and shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket through an unnecessary and unprecedented ‘virtual roll call’ in the days ahead is a terrible idea,” the letter states. “It could deeply undermine the morale and unity of Democrats — from delegates, volunteers, grassroots organizers and donors to ordinary voters — at the worst possible time” (after news of the letter broke, the DNC announced it was backing off).

The debate over Biden’s viability cannot go on forever. But the strongest argument against the president’s candidacy can be found not in any poll or letter from nervous lawmakers, but in the fact that his candidacy asks Democrats to campaign on a lie that is exposed by just about every public appearance: that he can keep doing this until January 2029.

about Democrats' Biden debate

Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as running mate is a sign of weakness

Before South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem blew herself up with Puppygate, I had assumed she would be Trump's pick for running mate. She has the Mar-a-Lago Barbie look, which Trump obviously loves, and putting a woman on the ticket might have helped with those suburban moms who don't like him very much. When she fell out of contention I figured Trump would choose North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a "central casting" guy who looks like he could be on money and would be the other half of a "successful billionaire" ticket. These were choices that made some political sense in a way that even Trump would see as useful to his campaign. There were others — Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina could theoretically attract some Black voters, but more likely might reassure some white suburban types who are uncomfortable with all the racism. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio might have been a draw for the Latino vote and, again, some of those squeamish suburban voters who are a little freaked out about the anti-immigrant rhetoric and see Rubio as more of an establishment type.

Trump's been openly begging the anti-abortion zealots to back off (temporarily) because he has "to win elections." And the word was that after the assassination attempt on Saturday, he had ordered that all the speakers tone down their speeches so that they could exploit the moment and "bring the country together" in its time of crisis. (The first two nights of the convention and several nasty Truth Social posts by the candidate quickly proved that to be a fleeting idea.) In several interviews, he has shown that he understands where his campaign's weaknesses are which would argue for him to use this most high-profile decision in the campaign to try to shore them up.

So of all the choices discussed over the past few weeks, Senator JD Vance of Ohio was the guy who made the least sense. He's a very aggressive MAGA extremist and his state of Ohio is already in the bag. Most importantly, he appeals to none of the constituencies Trump needs to get him over top. Trump's not the sharpest tool in the shed on many levels but he usually has a feral instinct for branding and this ticket is the "ultra-MAGA" ticket which seems like the least likely to gain him any votes he didn't already have. As the Washington Monthly notes, it may not be a very good bet:

The JD Vance pick is a "double down," like Clinton's of Gore. But while Clinton's appealed to swing voters, Trump's will repel them. "This is a ticket Democrats can beat soundly, if they can only get their own act together" writes @billscher @monthly https://t.co/liXCyWkDrY

— Paul @glastris.bsky.social Glastris (@glastris) July 16, 2024

MAGA energy takes over the RNC: Republicans are riled up over Donald Trump's shooting

Vance was a vociferous Never Trumper until he decided to run for the Senate and assessed that jumping on the Trump train was his best bet to win it. There are seemingly hours of interviews and articles filled with insulting quotes from Vance about Trump and harsh criticism of his character, intelligence and policies. These are going to be played over and over again in the campaign and many have already gone viral. Considering Trump's penchant for vengeance it's hard to imagine why he is rewarding such behavior by offering Vance this plum job.

Of all the choices discussed over the past few weeks, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio was the guy who made the least sense.

It's not unheard of for powerful men to reward former enemies if they are properly remorseful and are willing to demonstrate their newfound fealty in the most public sycophantic fashion. Often they even prefer it if the supplicant is insincere and only doing it because they have been forced into the submissive position. It shows dominance and serves as a lesson to others. Trump may very well feel that way toward Vance, whose abrupt abandonment of his conspicuous Never Trump position to immediately morph into an ardent MAGA cultist has been startlingly flamboyant, even among a great crowd of former mainstream Republicans who've given up every shred of personal integrity to seek his favor. But does he really believe he can trust him? (Could anyone?) On the other hand, he trusted his most faithful lapdog, former Vice President Mike Pence, to follow his orders to usurp the Constitution and look where it got him. Maybe he sees Vance's raw ambition as a better bet.

According to the New York Times, advisers such as Kellyanne Conway tried to convince Trump that someone like Rubio would be the best choice and none other than Rupert Murdoch himself apparently begged Trump not to pick Vance in favor of Burgum. The decision went back and forth for weeks. But Vance was championed by three people Trump apparently trusts above all the others. One was Tucker Carlson, who lobbied hard for Vance, who'd been a regular fixture on his Fox News show, impressing Trump with "those beautiful blue eyes" which he apparently mentioned frequently. Carlson is more enamored of Vance's embrace of authoritarianism and when he found out that Trump might be souring on Vance last month he called him from his roadshow in Australia, according to the New York Times:

[Carlson] delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted — that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.

Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.

Trump apparently found that convincing which is terrifying in itself.

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The other two top advisers who sealed the deal for Vance were Trump's sons. Don Jr. and Eric. Don Jr. had been friends with Vance since he won his Senate election and both he and Eric are steeped in the online MAGA world and are participants in the lucrative MAGA "conference" and speech circuit. Vance is their kind of guy. NBC reported that in the final days before Trump made the decision, Trump was leaning in the direction of Burgum, causing the boys to go ballistic:

“Don Jr. and Eric went bats—- crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News. “They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.

It's unknown how much influence Tucker Carlson would have in a new Trump administration but it seems pretty clear that Don Jr. and Eric will be heavily involved even though they will be carrying on the family business with lucrative overseas ventures cropping up all over the place.

Don Jr. explained that he will be exercising veto power over personnel decisions that don't carry the MAGA party line:

Don Jr tells Mike Allen he wants veto power over all of his dad's personnel decisions pic.twitter.com/YuosMhs8yD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2024

I have to say that in all the articles written about this decision, what comes across to me is that Donald Trump has lost a step. Maybe he's just so cocky about winning that he doesn't think it matters, which is possible. But from the way it sounds, he let himself be steamrolled into picking someone who on some level he knows wasn't the best choice for his electoral prospects. Maybe the 78 year old Trump is just as weak and tired as that other old guy he's running against.

“Trump is able to turn bullets into gold”: Experts on MAGA’s “mythology of Trump the superman”

For more than nine years, I have been chronicling and warning about the Age of Trump and the harm it has and will continue to do to American democracy and society. But these last three weeks, the surreal nature of the Age of Trump and its never-ending story—one where the next chapter begins with Donald Trump and the Republican fascists winning the 2024 election and then ending multiracial pluralistic democracy— had twists and turns that are (almost) unbelievable even by the standards of the Trump era.

Donald Trump destroyed President Biden in their first debate. Trump’s victory was so total and complete that senior leaders in the Democratic Party are now convinced that Biden will not be able to win the 2024 election and must be replaced.

The right-wing extremist justices on the Supreme Court then decided that Trump is a de facto king who is above the law. Donald Trump, and his Republican fascist successors, now have the power to order their political and personal enemies killed without consequence. In a democracy, no person should possess such power.

The following week, Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was wounded by a bullet that hit his ear. Instead of cowering, Trump rose from the ground, the side of his face covered in blood, defiant, and pumped his fist in the air while saying “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The image is iconic and may win Donald Trump the presidency for a second time.

"The state of American politics at the moment is a mixture of despair, delusion, and unbridled panic."

Because the story that is the Age of Trump is so badly written and obvious, the assassination attempt against Trump took place two days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The convention is Trump’s coronation. He will be greeted by rapturous applause, screams, tears, and howls for a man who is viewed like a type of martyr, Lazarus, and immortal unstoppable conquering hero by the thousands of people in attendance at the Fiserv Forum. I would not be surprised at all if some of the attendees fainted, real or pretend, when Donald Trump accepts the party's nomination on Thursday night.

In a chilling preview of what will come next, on Monday, delegates at the Republican National Convention were raising their firsts in unity and yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!” like their hero Donald Trump did on Saturday. The so-called “civility” and “turning down the temperature” that the Republicans supposedly embraced in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Saturday have already been shown to be a transparent camouflage and attempt to distract and confuse the mainstream news media and the Democrats. For anyone with even a passing knowledge of twentieth century history, the images from the Republican Convention are terrifying.

Always the showman with a keen eye for the dramatic, on Monday, Donald Trump announced that Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame (or infamy depending on one’s opinion of his autobiographical book and movie) will be his vice presidential running mate.

MAGA energy takes over the RNC: Republicans are riled up over Donald Trump's shooting

In another moment of rising action and a plot “twist” and non-surprise, also on Monday, Judge Cannon threw out Donald Trump’s trial in Florida for stealing classified documents. Experts quickly attacked her decision as specious and not likely to stand on appeal. Cannon was appointed by Donald Trump. She is repaying that debt with an eye on the United States Supreme Court. Cannon truly is “Trump’s judge.”

In an attempt to better navigate the seemingly unending Age of Trump, I recently spoke with a range of experts about the country’s democracy crisis, where we are in this story, and what may happen next with the 2024 election and America’s political life.

Jason Van Tatenhove served as the national media director for the Oath Keepers. He documented his experiences with the Oath Keepers in his book "The Perils of Extremism: How I Left the Oath Keepers and Why We Should be Concerned about a Future Civil War."

The last two weeks have been a series of momentous and disastrous events. The assassination attempt on former President Trump on July 13, 2024, where shots were fired at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, has undoubtedly shifted the political landscape, galvanizing his base and potentially cementing his campaign. The images captured this weekend will become some of those that define our generation. The power of the pictures alone, I think, has already won the election for the former president. Meanwhile, the Biden debate fallout and recent SCOTUS decisions have only added to the turmoil.

Navigating this period as a journalist and sole parent feels like being a trapeze artist without a net—each day teetering on the edge of madness. In some ways, I feel like a conspiracy junkie who has relapsed, mainlining paranoia and dread. The threats are real enough. Trump has previously stated that he intends to go after and possibly round up those he deems his enemies, including journalists, the January 6 committee, and certain key witnesses. That puts me squarely on that list (albeit lower in importance). As much as I want to dismiss the whisperings, I am getting from some Washington insiders as crazy conspiracy fodder, history shows us that when authoritarians get into power, things don’t go well for authors, journalists, and intellectuals.

While I am not packing up and heading toward the Canadian border just yet, I am currently working on an article researching the processes of seeking political asylum, just in case. Hopefully, the recent toning down of rhetoric across partisan lines from both the Biden and Trump camps will firm up and set back into the cement of our national foundations, and we can return to a sense of normalcy. But recent current events make me think that might be a Rocky Mountain high-pipe dream.

We are in a critical chapter of what can be called the Age of Trump, a time marked by unprecedented political divisions and challenges to democratic norms. The media and political class have often underestimated Trump's resilience and the loyalty of his base, leading to repeated miscalculations about his political demise.

Looking ahead, the next two months leading to the election will be crucial. We may witness further polarizing events, a GOP convention that attempts to solidify Trump's position, and perhaps more significant challenges to our democratic institutions.

Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism."

The recent attempt on Trump’s life, by what appears to have been a young male gun enthusiast, is abhorrent and has been rightly condemned by people across the political divide. But we should not lose sight of the fact that a win for the GOP would be even more impactful than it was the last time. That’s not just scaremongering. This time there’s a well-organized cadre of professionals behind Trump's campaign and behind Project 2025. The people behind Project 2025 have thought through how to best exploit the next presidency to advance their agenda.

For one, this could mean a huge setback for national security. Our NATO allies are already preparing for what they see as a worst-case scenario. The GOP front-runner has already demonstrated his inability to secure state secrets, which puts our nation at risk. Replacing competent and experienced civil servants with loyalists, as the Project 2025 leaders intend to do, is not a recipe for national strength.

Although the Republican Party touts itself as the party of “fiscal responsibility,” the implementation of Project 2025 would undermine the economic security of most working Americans, with tax cuts for the rich, deregulation at the expense of worker safety, and the potential for massive levels of corruption.

And finally, we have to consider the terrifying impact on the courts and on our civil rights, the further harm to our system of education, and the reversal of even more of women’s rights.

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As for the news media, the question of fitness for office shows double standards at play. Although the question of age for any candidate for political office is indeed a legitimate topic of coverage, when it comes to Joe Biden the obsessive focus on that issue comes at the expense of coverage of his actual performance as president and that of his teams. Meanwhile, is someone with a criminal record including multiple felony convictions fit for office? Is someone facing additional felony charges, who has been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse, who lies consistently, are they fit for office? Many journalists have raised those questions, but it’s striking that the coverage of the fitness question focuses overwhelmingly on the Democratic candidate.

Jared Yates Sexton is a journalist and author of the book "The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis."

The state of American politics at the moment is a mixture of despair, delusion, and unbridled panic. Biden's debate performance was halting. Disturbing. Because I believe vulnerable communities and democracy as a whole deserve a robust defense, I called for him to step aside the very next morning. The problem, of course, is that this isn't a sure-fire solution and, if it was going to happen, it needed to happen fast. If the party was going to pressure him to step aside, it needed to happen fast and uniformly. Instead, we have seen weeks now of foot-dragging, leaking, and piecemeal intraparty fighting. It is the worst possible thing that could have happened given the present circumstances, including the trajectory of the country, the Court's authoritarian bent, and what it is that we are facing going forward. But it is, and has been from the start, defined by panic and the coping mechanisms that accompany panic. So, I don't feel great.

The unfortunate truth is that we are in the stage of Trumpism in which the system has not only enabled him but is now actively changing itself to better fit him. Everything that we are experiencing right now is a body that is actively devouring itself and changing into another form that, for anyone who actually studies this stuff, understands is an authoritarian form. It's what we've been telling people for YEARS now. And to be in the thick of it, without much in the way of denial left, is startling for those who wanted to deny it all along.

The media and political class are incapable of wrestling with their own actions and place in all of this. They have continued to enjoy the privileges given to them by this deformed and intentionally unequal system, so their concepts of politics and reality are absolutely skewed in this direction. To actually understand what is happening they would have to reappraise not only themselves but the entire concept of the world that has brought them to this point. There's a lot of incentive not to do so. In fact, all the incentives save for grasping reality, which would also mean risking the privilege they've been given.

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We're teetering on the brink of something very large and very damning. I have seen nothing from the Democratic Party that gives me confidence they can meet this challenge. The Biden situation is just a very, very loud example of this. All of the momentum is with the right and their wealthy donors. If the 2024 Election somehow works out in a way that Trump is denied, it will happen because the people rejected him, not because the Democratic Party defeated him. In that case, it will require mass movements that force the party to change. If that doesn't happen, we're in for some very, very hard times.

Hal Brown is a clinical social worker and was one of the first members of the Duty to Warn group. He has extensive expertise in working with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder).

After the debate, the media trampled over each other as if they were trying to get to the scene of a massive train wreck. Purported wisdom from George Clooney, for example, was covered as if he is an esteemed tenured professor of American presidential history. The media engaged in a feeding frenzy like lions having downed a hapless gazelle. The New York Times editorial board was downright salivating over what they saw as Biden's carcass. Fast forward to today and we have photos of a literally bleeding Trump with his fist raised in defiance being hawked on trading cards or emblazoned on t-shirts.

A Trump campaign official posted a photo of Trump with his fist raised which, by chance, had an America flag in the background. I anticipate that the most heroic seeming of these photos will be on the jumbo screens at the convention so the mythology of Trump the superman will again be on national TV.

Begrudgingly I give Trump credit for being a consummate showman. As soon as he realized he wasn't seriously injured he seized the moment. For a man who supposedly doesn't sincerely believe in God, Trump is shamelessly thanking God for saving him. If I was a cartoonist, I'd draw a picture of him with the raised right clenched fist and his left hand holding a donation can. This is sure to bring in a haul of money that would make his mugshot donations look like a pittance.

It is a bitter irony that sometimes it seems like Biden can't catch a break while Trump is able to turn bullets into gold. Now I am reading that the entire Biden campaign strategy has been knocked off its pins. The Washington Post reported that a massive negative ad buy planned to be aired during the Republican convention has been scrapped.

President Biden's team must be beside themselves as they try to determine how to attack a candidate who is so blatantly lying, saying that it was Biden who somehow instigated the assassination attempt.

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Trump’s revenge plan relies on a return to the tortured past of the George W. Bush administration

Who said there are no second acts on the American public stage? The good fortune of Donald Trump’s narrow escape from an assassin is a powerful recent exception to that rule, along with his GOP nomination this week after his 2020 election loss. Now Republicans are pressing their luck, bringing back Berkeley law professor John Yoo who is attempting to hitch his wagon to the second act of Donald Trump.

Yoo first came to prominence on the national stage two decades ago, in 2002, when he authored a series of infamous memos providing legal justifications for the Bush administration’s post-9/11 use of torture. Recently, Yoo has again broken out of the pack of the right-wing chattering class and returned to the limelight as a regular commentator on Fox News.

Because of his ardent defense of former President Trump and advocacy of revenge and reprisal as legitimate tools in a second Trump Administration, as Rolling Stone Magazine notes, “Trump and his allies are increasingly smitten with John Yoo’s work and his views on punishing their enemies and expanding presidential power.”

They may well be drawn to Yoo’s contention that prosecutors who investigated and charged the former president “have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs exactly the same way for exactly the same kind of things until they stop.” Yoo’s May 29 essay in the National Review laid out that case in detail.

According to Rolling Stone, one of Trump’s advisors labeled that essay “The Vengeance Memo,” a playful, if chilling reference, to Yoo’s Torture Memos.

Along with the authors of Project 2025, Yoo is laying the groundwork for an assault on constitutional governance and making the case for his appointment as Attorney General or to the United States Supreme Court should Trump win in November.

On July 8, Yoo used a startling point of reference to expand on his vision of what a second Trump Administration should do. “If we’re not going to become a banana republic,” Yoo said, “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to use banana republic means.”

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You could be excused for thinking that Yoo mistakenly inserted the word “not” into that sentence. But he made no such mistake. As the New Yorker’s Robin Wright explains, “Over the past century, ‘banana republic’ has evolved to mean any country (with or without bananas) that has a ruthless, corrupt, or just plain loopy leader who relies on the military and destroys state institutions in an egomaniacal quest for prolonged power.” Wright reminds us that one of their favored means is to use the justice system to try to crush and intimidate political rivals.

Trump’s advisors admire Yoo because, as one told Rolling Stone, “He knows how to get things done.”

Before looking more closely at Yoo’s thoughts about the use of “banana Republic means,” let’s look at the things he has “gotten done” in the past.

Thirty years ago, Yoo was a rising star in the conservative legal firmament. As the journalist and podcaster James LaRock argues, “He did everything a rising right-wing lawyer should: clerking for a Reagan nominee on the D.C. Circuit, and then for Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, and then working on the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Along the way, Yoo laid out an expansive vision of presidential power that turned the idea of separation of powers and checks and balances in a constitutional Republic on its head. He argued that any president had the authority to start wars unilaterally.

As LaRock reports, in 2000, Yoo “wrote glowingly about President Bill Clinton’s authority to order American troops into what was then Serbia, as well as Clinton’s other military actions in Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Macedonia, and Rwanda. Congress didn’t usually authorize these missions.”

Not surprisingly, Yoo took an “originalist position” and argued that “unilateral executive war power” could “find support in the Constitution’s text and original understanding.” He mocked scholars whom he said, “whined about Congress’s enumerated responsibility to declare war,” saying that they had ‘failed to describe reality.’”

In July 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him Deputy Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo would show what he could get done when he authored the Torture Memos. As the superb legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick says, those memos “redefined ‘severe pain or suffering’ by cherry-picking language from a health benefits statute to argue that ‘severe’ pain must be ‘equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.’”

Yoo provided specious legal cover for the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 use of waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold and heat. Those un-American techniques were used against any Muslim captured on foreign soil and suspected, often wrongfully, of being a terrorist.Per his memos, those methods might even include the “maiming, drugging or applying ‘scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance’ on detainees,” according to Time Magazine. Lithwick rightly called Yoo’s handiwork the “the lowest low point in post-9/11 legal thought.”

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility later recommended that Yoo be referred for bar discipline, but higher-ups gave him a pass. And what do you know? Like others, when lawyers escape consequences for misconduct, they show up later with more of the same.

Yoo’s record reminds us that the law can be misapplied and used as an enabler, rather than as a restraint on unlawful power. Now Yoo is back in the good graces of powerful people, trying again to use his well-cultivated skill in manipulating the law in service of what he takes to be Trump’s political agenda. Yoo won favor with the former president by criticizing the New York hush money trial, seeing it as a damaging precedent while echoing the usual, right-wing talking points.

As he wrote, "Make no mistake, Democrats have crossed a constitutional Rubicon. For the first time in American history, they have brought criminal charges against a former president. . . . To prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system,” Yoo urged Republicans “to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents. A Republican DA… will have to investigate Joe Biden for influence-peddling at the behest of a son who received payoffs from abroad.”

And on July 1, Yoo took to Fox News to crow about the radical Supreme Court majority’s presidential immunity decision. “Donald Trump today won the most important decision of any President before any Supreme Court at any time in our history” Yoo claimed.

If Yoo has been mounting a “charm offensive” aimed at Trump’s inner circle, it appears to be working.

“Since late May,” Rolling Stone reports, “some attorneys and Trump confidants have briefed Yoo’s legal theories and writings directly to the ex-president, who in turn has privately lauded Yoo’s recent defenses of Trump in conservative media, particularly on Fox News.”

There’s a recent model for someone auditioning to be Trump’s Attorney General. It happened in June 2018 when private citizen William Barr circulated a memo attacking the Mueller investigation. That memo was music to Trump’s ears; six months later, he nominated Barr to replace Jeff Sessions. Yoo certainly watched that happen.

Responding to the report of his influence in the former president’s orbit, Yoo issued a for-public-consumption coquettish non-denial denial of his ambition. As he told Rolling Stone:

I am bemused that Trump aides are saying that my writings have any influence in Trump’s inner circle. I haven’t discussed these issues with anyone on the campaign or legal teams or Trump himself.

He may be bemused. We should not be.

American voters need to pay careful attention to what Yoo is saying. In November, it will be up to us to decide if we want to follow the course he is charting.

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Supermassive black holes have masses of more than a million suns – but their growth has slowed

Black holes are remarkable astronomical objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. The most gigantic ones, known as “supermassive” black holes, can weigh millions to billions times the mass of the Sun.

These giants usually live in the centers of galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a supermassive black hole in its heart as well.

Juicing power from the abyss: How black hole batteries could be the energy of the (distant) future

So, how do these supermassive black holes become super massive? To answer this question, our team of astrophysicists looked back in time across the universe’s 13.8 billion-year history to track how supermassive black holes have grown from the early days to today.

We constructed a model of the overall growth history of supermassive black holes spanning the past 12 billion years.

How do supermassive black holes grow?

Supermassive black holes grow primarily in two ways. They can consume gas from their host galaxies in a process called accretion, and they can also merge with each other when two galaxies collide.

An artist’s illustration of an accreting supermassive black hole. The central black hole is black, while its surrounding gas heats up and shines to produce light. Nahks Tr'Ehnl (Penn State)

When supermassive black holes consume gas, they almost always emit strong X-rays, a type of high-energy light invisible to the naked eye. You’ve probably heard of X-rays at the dentist, where they are sometimes used to examine your teeth. The X-rays used by astronomers generally have lower energies than medical X-rays.

So how can any light, even invisible X-rays, escape from black holes? Strictly speaking, the light is not coming from the black holes themselves, but from the gas just outside them. When gas gets pulled toward a black hole, it heats up and shines to produce light, like X-rays. The more gas a supermassive black hole consumes, the more X-rays it will produce.

Thanks to the data accumulated over more than 20 years from three of the most powerful X-ray facilities ever launched into space – Chandra, XMM-Newton and eROSITA – astronomers can capture X-rays from a large number of accreting supermassive black holes in the universe.

This data allows our research team to estimate how fast supermassive black holes grow by consuming gas. On average, a supermassive black hole can consume enough gas to amount to about the mass of the Sun each year, with the exact value depending upon various factors.

For example, the data shows that a black hole’s growth rate, averaged over millions of years, is strongly connected to the mass of all the stars in its host galaxy.

How often do supermassive black holes merge?

Besides feeding on gas, supermassive black holes can also grow by merging with each other to form a single, more massive black hole when galaxies collide.

Supercomputer cosmological simulations can predict about how often these events happen. These simulations aim to model how the universe grows and evolves over time. The countless galaxies flying through space are kind of like bricks, building up the universe.

These simulations show that galaxies and the supermassive black holes they host can undergo multiple mergers across the span of cosmic history.

Our team has tracked these two growth channels – gas consumption and mergers – using X-rays and supercomputer simulations, and then combined them to construct this overall growth history, which maps the growth of black holes across the universe over billions of years.

Our growth history revealed that supermassive black holes grew much faster billions of years ago, when the universe was younger.

Back in the early days, the universe contained more gas for supermassive black holes to consume, and supermassive black holes kept emerging. As the universe aged, the gas was gradually depleted, and supermassive black hole growth slowed. About 8 billion years ago, the number of supermassive black holes stabilized. It hasn’t increased substantially since then.

An illustration of a merger of two supermassive black holes. Scott Noble (NASA GSFC)

When there isn’t enough gas available for supermassive black holes to grow by accretion, the only way for them to get larger is through mergers. We didn’t see very many cases of that in our growth history. On average, the most massive black holes can accumulate mass from mergers at a rate up to the mass of the Sun every several decades.

Looking forward

This research has helped us understand how over 90% of the mass in black holes has accumulated over the past 12 billion years.

However, we still need to investigate how they grew in the very early universe to explain the remaining few percentages of the mass in black holes. The astronomical community is starting to make progress exploring these early supermassive black holes, and we hope to find more answers soon.

Fan Zou, Graduate Student in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State and W. Niel Brandt, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State

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MAGA energy takes over the RNC: Republicans are riled up over Donald Trump’s shooting

MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump's biggest skill — perhaps his only real skill — is mugging for a camera. His first instinct, upon being nicked by a would-be assassin's bullet, was not to run for safety and certainly not to worry about those in the audience who were seriously injured or killed. No, it was to maximize the photo opp, raising his fist in a reality TV-style imitation of "defiance," as blood streaked through his make-up. The pictures sent a shockwave of fear and dread through the coalition of democracy defenders. Trump is already the cult leader of an increasingly fascist movement. The concern is that the attempt on his life will propel him to new levels of messianic power over his slavish followers.

Trump is leaning into this with all the subtlety of a pro wrestler. In a video that leaked Tuesday, Trump is heard on speakerphone talking to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about his injury, which he described as like being bitten by "the world’s largest mosquito." But when Trump showed up at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday night, he was sporting a comically oversized bandage on his ear. The crowd responded by chanting, "Fight, fight, fight!"

Here in Milwaukee, Republicans are riled up by the shooting. But they don't seem especially bothered about almost losing their leader. Democratic voters are the ones who are fretting, both from fear of backlash and an opposition to political violence that Republicans do not share. Republicans at the convention, on the other hand, aren't worried about violence at all. Trump nearly getting killed is making the crowd inside Fiserv Forum palpably giddy. Watching Eric Trump speak about the attack Monday night was startling, as he seemed more stoked to rev up the crowd than upset over the violence inflicted on his father.

The reaction from Republican politicians and pundits has been an unnerving competition of who can lavish Trump with the most praise for having the sheer luck that the bullet mostly missed him. (A man died during the attack, but following Trump's lead, most of the GOP leaders barely noticed until Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the final speakers on Tuesday, made a mention.) Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, won that silly contest by tweeting, "Courageous, United, and Defiant," earning the reward of being the next right-hand man Trump will soon pressure to commit felonies. This behavior is insincere, rooted not in any real affection for Trump, so much as in an understanding that hyperbolic flattery is the best way to pry favors from a narcissist. For everyday Republicans who will likely never meet Trump beyond shaking hands at a photo line, the focus was on how this shooting bolsters their hopes for a MAGA victory in November.

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The Salon team spoke with Michele Morrow, a home school advocate nominated by Republicans for North Carolina's state superintendent, on Monday at the convention. Her response captured the mood. "President Trump is going to win victoriously," she gushed. "He has actually put his life, his fortune and his sacred honor on the line for 'We the People.'" She predicted that, riding high on being shot, Trump would make America "that city on a hill for the rest of the world."

No doubt, the biggest prize is a chance to muddy the waters, when it comes to who is responsible for the rising tide of political violence in the U.S. today. As Alex Shephard wrote in the New Republic, the objective answer is not mysterious:

The man who was wounded on Saturday has spent his entire political career openly encouraging violence, including an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has mused about “Second Amendment people,” defended murderous neo-Nazis, encouraged police to shoot protesters, and spoken to a violent, right-wing group as if they were his private army. He has tried to overturn one lawful, wholly legitimate election and has suggested he will do it again, should he lose in November. He is campaigning on radically transforming the federal government, replacing thousands of employees with loyalists, and contorting it into his own authoritarian image. He has promised to “root out” his enemies who “live like vermin” and must be exterminated for the country to survive. In nearly every public statement there is contempt for democracy, decency, and pluralism.

Nor is there any real reason to believe that the shooter was motivated by politics. Much has been made of the killer giving $15 to a faux-progressive scam when he was still 17 years old, but his family's MAGA yard signs and recent Republican voter registration suggest his political sympathies leaned rightward. As Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money wrote, "It seems quite likely now that Thomas Crooks had no strong ideological motivation." His profile suggests a misfit looking for glory, in the mode of John Hinckley or Lee Harvey Oswald, not someone with coherent political goals.

Donald Trump hasn't called the family of a man killed at his rally

People on the ground at the RNC are eager to use this shooting to deflect the entirely correct accusation that Republicans, by nominating the man who incited the January 6 insurrection, are the ones endorsing political violence. Instead, they used the shooting to level false accusations at President Joe Biden's administration. One delegate from North Carolina claimed, "We don't really have a lot of trust in the agencies that are going to be doing an investigation." She hoped for a private investigation because "there's a lot of questions" about "the FBI and who they really work for."

When I pointed out that Biden had given an Oval Office address calling on people to resolve political differences "at the ballot box" and "not with bullets," she responded by saying, "I just don't feel like he means them. I feel like it's just all talk."

Tara Jenner, a candidate for state committeewoman in Florida, also took a conspiratorial tone. "It's not who shoots the bullet, who pays for it's the one that counts," she told Salon. "That's the key you need to look at to see where that's coming from."

When I jokingly asked if she was worried that someone at the convention would not vote for Trump, she replied, "Not if they want to live." Her companion swiftly jumped in to say, "That's not a threat," and she replied, "Well, they might get bruised…" Jenner later said her comment "was hyperbole and kind of tongue in cheek."

"We don't want to exacerbate things."

One delegate from North Dakota complained about "a media narrative that people on the right are evil, people on the right are misogynistic, evil, homophobes, whatever. And it's absurd, of course, because this is the party of Lincoln."

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"What else would you expect to happen when you have an administration who is calling people on the other side 'MAGA extremists' that want to harm you, that are wanting to end democracy?" he added.

Even though Salon never asked folks about gun control, many Republicans brought it up, worried that this incident might besmirch their support for even more gun deregulation. One delegate from Florida summed up the view as, "We don't have a gun problem in this country. You have a mental health problem." Tellingly, people tended to get more animated when defending the honor of guns than they did when expressing pro forma statements wishing Trump well. One gets the impression that, even if he'd been hurt more badly, they'd still be more worried about guns than about their leader's health.

Trump doesn't mean much on a human level to his supporters. He's a vehicle for what truly animates MAGA: their sense of grievance. As Paul Waldman wrote after the shooting in The Cross Section, Trump rallies have "a sustained bass note of menace and potential violence waiting to be unleashed." That feeling of barely suppressed rage comes to the surface often when speaking to Trump supporters, especially when they're talking about their sense of victimization at the hands of the liberals they imagine are sneering at their politically incorrect ways. As Waldman notes, the real heat flows when Trump waxes poetic about January 6 "hostages" or turns the crowd's ire towards the press, whom he calls "the worst people in the world." They don't love him so much as they hate other Americans who aren't like them.

That's why their response to Trump playing up his minor injury with a diaper-sized bandage was not to commiserate with his pain. Instead, the crowd chanted, "Fight, fight, fight!"

California passes law banning school mandates that out trans students

On Monday, California became the first U.S. state to legally bar school districts from notifying parents of a child's decision to change their pronouns.

The law was signed in response to local districts in California passing laws requiring school districts to notify their parents if they learn of a child changing their pronoun. Advocates of the law point out that preventing transgender children from confiding in sympathetic teachers puts them in danger and violates their right to privacy, especially if their parents do not understand the history and science behind transgender identities.

The author of the bill, Assemblyman Chris Ward, explained its importance in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

Cancer risks are far higher for LGBTQ folks. Here's how health justice groups are fighting back

“Politically motivated attacks on the rights, safety and dignity of transgender, nonbinary and other LGBTQ+ youth are on the rise nationwide, including in California,” Ward said. “As a parent, I urge all parents to talk to their children, listen to them, and love them unconditionally for who they are.”

Eric Vilain, a clinician and the director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Scientific American that "since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter."

“Having a trusted adult is paramount to ensuring a queer kid makes it to their next birthday,” Kai, a transgender man who recently graduated from high school, said at a news conference last month, as reported by AP News. “If you care about kids, you’ll enact this legislation that will protect their well-being and protect their lives.”

about LGBTQ rights

Experts warn JD Vance and Trump are “most dangerous” threat to reproductive rights in US history

This week, former President Donald Trump announced his running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who does not hide his strong stance against abortion. Vance, 39, is most notorious for his 2016 memoir-turned-movie “Hillbilly Elegy,” as well as a former venture capitalist who has publicly aligned himself as a nationalist. In a November 2023 X post, he wrote: “I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible.”

Vance has also compared abortion to slavery and described Ohio’s vote to enshrine abortion rights as “a gut punch” for anti-abortion officials. Reproductive rights organizations are sounding the alarm that Vance is an extreme pick who has said that pregnancies conceived from rape or incest shouldn’t be viewed as "inconvenient.”

"Reckless" and "unsafe": The misinformation around "late-term abortion" is harmful, experts say

“If the Republican Party’s plan to come after our reproductive rights wasn’t clear enough, look no further than Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance,” Jenny Lawson, executive director for Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a media statement. “From supporting a national abortion ban, to voting to block nationwide access to IVF, Vance has consistently attacked and undermined reproductive freedom throughout his career — and he will take that dangerous record to the White House, cosigning every policy that comes his way, no matter the harm.”

As vice president, Vance could play a key role in major reproductive bills that pass through Congress in the event of a second Trump administration. In addition to serving as presiding officer, he would have the power to break a tie vote in the Senate. As Salon has previously reported, unless Democrats hold a majority of the Senate, it will be nearly impossible to pass legislation to restore Roe v. Wade or pass a bill to expand the U.S. Supreme Court — for either future president.

"Make no mistake, Vance will gladly do the bidding of Trump and the anti-abortion movement."

“He could be that break vote,” Leila Abolfazli, director of National Abortion Strategy at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, told Salon. “And could he be that tiebreaker for national bans? We know the anti-abortion movement wants that national ban, and we know Trump gave them what they wanted before.”

Seema Mohapatra, a health law and bioethics expert at Southern Methodist University, told Salon "with the margins the way they are" Vance "could yield an enormous amount of power."

Abolfazli added it seems pretty clear that Vance is supportive of any effort at the federal level to take away abortion rights adding that in the last 50 years, the U.S. hasn’t had an “anti-abortion administration” where there’s no Constitutional right to abortion.

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“Make no mistake, Vance will gladly do the bidding of Trump and the anti-abortion movement, including allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies and prosecute if they miscarry, working to ban medication abortion, and eliminating access to essential health care nationwide,” Lawson said. “In contrast, we have a reproductive rights champion in Kamala Harris who has been unapologetic in the fight to restore, protect, and expand access to abortion.”

In a statement, Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All said that Trump selecting Vance is “even more evidence that a Trump administration will stop at nothing to ban all abortion.”

“Make no mistake, Trump picked him because of — not in spite of — his anti-abortion bona fides,” Timmaraju said. Despite some media outlets reporting last week that the GOP had “softened” its stance on abortion or that it “backed away” from an abortion ban, legal experts told Salon the party is still advocating for a national abortion ban — they are trying to conceal it using different language. Specifically, the Republican Party released its 16-page “Make America Great Again” policy platform ahead of the national convention stating that it supports states establishing fetal personhood through the constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Timmaraju said a Trump-Vance administration will be “the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history.”

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Anti-abortion organizations are applauding Vance as Trump’s pick. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Vance “an exceptional selection” who has an “A+” on their “scorecard.” Carol Tobias, the president of National Right to Life described Vance as “committed to promoting the right to life and protecting both women and their preborn children,” and said he shares “President Trump’s commitment to nominating qualified judges who will interpret the Constitution as written and not legislate from the bench.”

Vance has notably centered his career around supporting a “traditional nuclear family” and incentivizing people to have more children. At the same time, he once said that universal daycare is a “class war against normal people” and has called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

“The selection of Vance as vice president reinforces that reproductive freedom, affordable child care and our very democracy are on the line,” Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) Action Fund, said in a media statement. “Donald Trump was always going to pick an anti-abortion, anti-gender justice extremist as his running mate – at least now we know which one.”

about abortion

Junk food is promoted online to appeal to kids and target young men, our study shows

The Australian government has been investigating whether we should ban unhealthy food advertising online, and how it could work. In the United Kingdom, a ban on unhealthy food and drink advertising online will start in October 2025.

We recently used the Australian Ad Observatory to investigate targeted junk-food ads on Facebook in Australia. Our study finds that unhealthy food and drinks are promoted in ways designed to appeal to parents and carers of children, and children themselves. Additionally, young men in our study were being targeted by fast-food ads.

Kids, young people and parents should be aware of the strategies online advertisers use to normalise unhealthy eating patterns. We should all demand a more healthy digital environment.

Our work supports ongoing calls for a ban on junk food advertising online.

What did we see in the ads?

The Australian Ad Observatory has created the world's largest known collection of the targeted ads people encounter on Facebook. Our 1,909 volunteers have donated 328,107 unique ads from their social media feeds. This gives researchers an unprecedented opportunity to examine what ads Australians see on social media and how they are being targeted.

We searched the database for ads promoting the top-selling unhealthy food and drink brands. These are "discretionary" or "sometimes" foods that tend to be high in fats and sugars. They include fast-food meals, confectionery, sugary drinks and snacks. (To identify unhealthy food and drink categories, we used government guidance on healthy food and drinks.)

We also looked at online food delivery companies because of their popularity on digital platforms. They play a likely role in promoting unhealthy foods.

We found nearly 2,000 unique ads by 141 separate advertisers observed about 6,000 times by individuals. Ads for fast-food brands made up half of the unhealthy food ad observations in our study.

Fast-food giants KFC and McDonald's combined accounted for roughly 25% of all unhealthy food ad observations. Snack and confectionery brands, like Cadbury, featured in a third of the ad observations. Soft drink brands such as Coca-Cola were promoted in 11% of observations.

About 9% of ads promoted online food delivery companies, and typically promoted fast-food options. Other advertisers we might not think of as junk food brands, such as Coles supermarkets and 7-Eleven convenience stores, also regularly promoted junk foods.

The power of junk food

The vulnerability of children to junk food ads is well established. Children's exposure to food marketing has been associated with what types of food they prefer and ask their parents to purchase. When they develop preferences for unhealthy foods, this contributes to unhealthy habits and related health concerns.

But it's not only children who are susceptible to unhealthy food marketing. Junk food advertising also shapes the food norms and attitudes of young people aged 18 to 24.

Our experiences online and digital technologies more generally can impact our health. These are known as "digital determinants of health".

Food advertisers use the vast amounts of data collected about individuals to target specific audiences. They can seamlessly integrate advertising into everyday life.

Our study shows junk food advertising is disproportionately served to young people, especially young men. Young men are seeing a much higher proportion of fast food ads (71%) compared to the sample overall (50%), suggesting fast food is marketed to them more aggressively. Many ads promoted special "app-only" deals, including free delivery, especially for fast food.

The 'halo effect'

We also found examples of ads aimed at busy parents, painting fast food as something that saves parents time, quietens children and feeds families.

Even though Facebook accounts are available only to people 13 and over, junk-food ads still use child-oriented themes, such as characters and games. Many appear to be designed to appeal directly to children. This included ads promoting "healthy" foods, such as vegetables, in kids' meals.

The most insidious marketing tactics we found connect junk foods, and the brands synonymous with junk foods, to wholesome or popular activities. This creates a "halo effect".

For example, many ads use "sports-washing" to associate unhealthy foods with healthy sports activities or pleasurable spectator sports. Sports in junk-food marketing can appeal to a broad audience, including young people.

While not all of these sport-related ads promoted or displayed unhealthy food products directly, the sport provided the focal point of ads with strong brand-specific elements, therefore forging the connection.

Other ads used "mental health-washing", including ads for chocolate bars, packaged snacks or fast food co-promoting community mental health organisations.

Examples of online ads found during our research. Author provided

Unhealthy food advertising should be banned

Last week a Parliamentary Inquiry into Diabetes in Australia repeated calls for the government to restrict the marketing and advertising of unhealthy food to children on television, radio, in gaming and online.

The federal government should soon issue its report on how best to limit unhealthy food marketing to children. Our study supports the government's proposal to ban all unhealthy food and drink advertising online.

The proposed ban should cover not just unhealthy food itself, but also any mention of the brands synonymous with those foods. This is because mentioning these brands brings such foods instantly to mind.

We also recommend the government should include all types of promotions. This includes ads from online food delivery companies, supermarkets and sports clubs that cross-promote unhealthy foods.

Many are concerned about the impact of social media and its algorithmic content feeds on children and young people. Our study highlights the food and drink ads targeting children, young people and harried parents can also create an unhealthy digital environment.

Tanita Northcott, Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne and Christine Parker, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne

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

East Coast-based grocery chain Stop & Shop to close 32 underperforming stores by the end of 2024

Regional supermarket chain Stop & Shop announced that it will close 32 underperforming stores by the end of 2024.

In a Friday press release, the grocer said the closures are part of “the next steps in its plans to position the company for growth.” Stop & Shop continued, saying it “will continue to have a strong presence across its five-state footprint with more than 350 stores.” Associates and employees at all closed locations will be offered other opportunities within the company, the grocer specified.

“Stop & Shop is proud of the deep roots and community ties we have developed as a neighborhood grocer of more than 100 years, and we remain committed to nourishing our associates, customers and communities,” said Stop & Shop president Gordon Reid. “As we announced in May, Stop & Shop has evaluated its overall store portfolio and made the difficult decision to close underperforming stores to create a healthy base for the future growth of our brand.”

The 32 store locations are slated to close on or before Nov. 2, 2024. They include five locations across Connecticut, eight locations across Massachusetts, ten locations across New Jersey, seven locations across New York and two locations in Rhode Island. Following the store closures, Stop & Shop will operate more than 350 stores spanning five states: 81 stores in Connecticut, 115 in Massachusetts, 47 in New Jersey, 91 in New York and 25 in Rhode Island.

The upcoming store closures come after parent company Ahold Delhaize, which also owns Food Lion and Giant Food, announced in May that it would close an undisclosed number of underperforming grocery stores after evaluating Stop & Shop’s overall portfolio.

James Beard award-winning chef Naomi Pomeroy has died at age 49

Acclaimed Portland chef, restaurateur and cookbook author Naomi Pomeroy has died by drowning after being involved in an inner tubing accident over the weekend. She was 49 years old.

According to The Oregonian, Pomeroy was inner tubing with her husband Kyle Linden Webster and an unnamed third individual on the evening of July 13. Pomeroy’s family told Portland Monthly that the accident occurred when their inner tubes, which were tied together, flipped over in fast-moving currents after hitting a snag on the Willamette River. Both Webster and the unnamed third individual survived, the outlet reported.

Efforts by the Benton County Oregon Sheriff’s Office to recover Pomeroy’s body are ongoing. Sheriff Jef Van Arsdall told Eater in an email statement that “debris in river, currents, and ragged rocks” currently make it unsafe for “divers to conduct any exploratory search underwater.” Despite those dangers, the sheriff’s office said they’ll “continue our efforts to recover the victim, to bring [closure] to the family and the community.”

Pomeroy is credited with redefining Portland’s restaurant landscape with her trailblazing style of cooking. The self-taught chef, who put together her first recipe at age 4, later went on to open her renowned fine-dining restaurant Beast in Portland, Oregon. When Beast shut down in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the space was used for Pomeroy’s new project Ripe Cooperative — an all-in-one restaurant, wine shop and grab-and-go market — until its closure in 2022.

In 2009, Pomeroy was recognized by Food & Wine magazine as one of America's Top 10 Best New Chefs. She was also named one of the 18 Most Powerful Women in Business in Marie Claire’s October 2010 issue and one of the Top 10 Women on the Rise that same year by O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2011, she also competed on Top Chef Masters, finishing in the top four. In 2014, Pomeroy won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific.

According to Portland Monthly, Pomeroy’s family asks for privacy and has not announced any plans for a memorial at this time.

“You better arm yourself”: Republican uses Trump shooting to defend AR-15s at GOP convention

A Trump campaign adviser, speaking at a concealed carry event at the Republican National Convention, lauded the Supreme Court’s rulings boosting Second Amendment rights and promised the next Trump administration would continue its “remaking of the judiciary.”

The event, sponsored by the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, took place on the second morning of the RNC – whose platform has little mention of Second Amendment rights, save for a sentence that promises Republicans will “defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including… the right to keep and bear arms.”

But despite the platform’s scant mention of gun rights, Trump co-campaign manager and senior advisor Chris LaCivita said the former president, if elected, would continue to support and defend the Second Amendment.

“One of the largest impacts that President Trump had, clearly, in his first term, was a remaking of the judiciary,” he told attendees. “From three Supreme Court justices to all the way down the line. And I think you will see that continue.”

This year, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulation – passed in the wake of the deadly 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting – banning “bump stocks,” a piece of equipment that allows a semi-automatic weapon to fire automatically like a machine gun.

And in 2023, the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen ruling struck down New York’s concealed carry restrictions and ruled that firearms restrictions must fall within the United States' so-called "historical tradition."

LaCivita said that “gun owners don’t vote at the level everyone thinks they do” – which he said makes it all the more important for gun rights activists to show up at the polls in November.

“I mean, this is why this scares the hell out of the Democrats on the left,” he said. "I mean, that's why they're talking about packing the court, increasing the number of justices, these kinds of things. But I think that's where we can have the biggest impact.”

"Very clever effort": Right-wingers find new group to blame over Trump assassination attempt — women

Congresswoman Kat Cammack, a Republican from Florida who also spoke at Tuesday’s event, said her focus is registering 10 million hunters and gun owners in the U.S. who she says aren’t registered to vote.

Congressman Wesley Hunt, a Republican from Texas, said supporters of gun rights should get ready for a renewed attack from the left on AR-15 style guns in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

“The insinuation that we're going to just eradicate this country of guns is a ridiculous one,” Hunt said. “So you better arm yourself accordingly and make sure that you can get the ability to respond when an incident like that happens, because there's bad people out there that want to see all Americans dead.“

Hunt said the assassination attempt shows the power of an old NRA adage: “good guys with guns” saving the day.

“There are 400 million guns currently in circulation,” Hunt said. “Guns aren’t going anywhere. The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And that son-of-a-b**** is now dead because a good guy with a gun shot him.”

The U.S. Concealed Carry Association held the Tuesday mid-day event at Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, and handed a flier to attendees with tips on how to increase situational awareness, warning: “Your life depends on it.”

LaCivita said the campaign is undergoing a security assessment and will hold a training class to “basically teach people and give them a better understanding of their surroundings.”

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This week, the diminished National Rifle Association is facing an ongoing corruption trial in New York, with no events or speakers on the RNC schedule.

That’s in sharp contrast to 2016, when the GOP dedicated about half-a-page to its plans to confirm “additional anti-gun justices” and fight “frivolous” lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

The 2016 platform also said the party would push legislation to allow firearm reciprocity and constitutional carry and oppose limits on the “most popular and common modern rifle” as well as restrictions on magazine capacity.

The NRA Institute for Legislation Action’s then-executive director Chris Cox spoke at the RNC in 2016, while the 2020 RNC featured remarks by the white St. Louis couple charged – and eventually pardoned – for waving guns outside their home during a Black Lives Matter protest.

Still – LaCivita said both he and Trump are “very, very big, supporter[s] of the Second Amendment.”

“That's something that's very important to us, from a campaign standpoint and an issue standpoint,” LaCivita said. “Allowing law abiding citizens to carry their firearms and to protect themselves and to protect their families. And that's an issue that will always be an important one for the Republican Party. It's also important in this election because Biden has made it clear – they're saying the quiet part out loud now, they're just more and more emboldened by what we believe is and what is an extreme anti-firearms policy.”

Dennis Barthemheier, who owns a gun range in Wisconsin and attended the Tuesday event, said he “absolutely” expects a renewed push by liberals to infringe on gun rights.

“They’ve been doing it for years – a constant chipping away,” Barthemheier said. “They try to chip around the edges, and then they’ll go for the kill.”

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Investigators are trying to figure out how the 20-year-old suspect who fired an AR-style rifle toward Trump on Saturday got ahold of the weapon, which his father purchased – and how the security team failed to prevent the shooting.

Last month, Biden called for a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.

Advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety says those steps are crucial to preventing mass fatality shootings, saying on their website: “They are generally capable of firing far more bullets, far faster than manual-action hunting rifles.”

Hunt said the left is using the AR-15 as a “Trojan horse” to try to reign in gun rights.

“The left is using the AR-15 as a scapegoat for infringement on your rights,” he said. “So what they're going to try to do is demonize the AR-15 to make it seem like everybody is a crazed mass shooter even though that's completely false. So my message to you all is to be vigilant here. They cannot go after a pistol braces, they cannot go after bump stocks, they cannot go after AR-15s. Because the second we allow them to infringe on that we are letting the fox in the henhouse.”

Barthemheier and another attendee at Tuesday’s event, Bob Johnson of Hawaii, said they aren’t looking for Trump and Congress to pass new gun rights laws.

“We have plenty of laws on the books that protect the average person,” Barthemheier said.

Following the event, States Newsroom reported that Cammack told reporters that she finds it “really shocking” and “not appropriate” when lawmakers and pundits push for gun reform following “tragic events."

She also called out Democrats for failing to yet unveil any new gun control proposals following the assassination attempt Saturday.

“In this case, I have gone through and seen the messaging of some of my colleagues, and I don’t see those same calls for gun control in the aftermath of this incident,” Cammack added. “So it makes me think that there’s a bit of a disingenuous attitude on some of the remarks that they’ve been making.”

Katie Pointer Baney, the managing director of government affairs for USCCA and its service provider Delta Defense, said the group represents over 830,000 supporters nationwide. Baney is also senior advisor for the USCCA-FSL Super PAC and as executive director of its USCCA-FSL Action Fund.

According to OpenSecrets, the USCCA’s Super PAC spent about $423,000 to support five federal candidates elected to office in 2022 – including Hunt.

That’s a far cry from the nearly $16 million in outside spending that the NRA reported in 2022 – or $29 million in 2020.

Still, Baney said public safety is top of mind for voters.

“The temperature is clearly rising in the United States,” Baney said. “I mean, we just saw one of the most protected men in the world almost killed by a deranged, evil individual. Average Americans, I think, are on edge about their personal safety.”

about the Republican National Convention

“We were very disappointed”: Joe Scarborough blasts decision to take “Morning Joe” off the air

Joe Scarborough and his “Morning Joe” co-Mika Brzezinski and Willie chided NBC News leadership for pulling the flagship show at the last minute on Monday following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, CNN reported.

Scarborough was not pleased that his show was taken off the air and delivered a blistering on-air response Tuesday, threatening to quit should it happen again.

To their surprise, the "Morning Joe" hosts were told Sunday evening that all of MSNBC’s lineup would be swapped out for a single NBC News broadcast focused on the events at Trump’s weekend rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “Morning Joe” made the announcement of the changed schedule on X, late Sunday night, however, “that did not happen,” Scarborough noted.

The hosts addressed the issue before they started the show’s second hour, on Tuesday morning, the Daily Beast reported.

“We were told in no uncertain terms on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday,” Scarborough said, noting he thought there would be “one news feed across all NBC news channels, that we were going to stay — as a network — in breaking news mode throughout all day yesterday.”

This didn't happen, he said.

“We don’t know why that didn’t happen. Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen — but it didn’t happen. We were also told it was going to happen throughout the day, and I guess, after there was such a strong blowback about yesterday morning, I guess they changed their plans," he said.

"We were very surprised. We were very disappointed," Scarborough added.

Following comments from Brzezinski and Geist, the hosts were about to resume the show when Scarborough slipped in one last point.

“Let me just say: Next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” he said. “Yeah. And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”

An MSNBC spokesperson defended the move in a statement to The Daily Beast.

“Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening," the statement said.

“Very clever effort”: Right-wingers find new group to blame over Trump assassination attempt — women

Amid the conspiracy-theory flurry following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump Saturday, right-wing pundits, media personalities and influencers have sought to add another narrative to the gauntlet: Women, by way of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), are at fault.

The claims stemmed from edited footage and images of the female agents in the GOP nominee's security detail that went viral over the weekend alongside clips of a 2023 CBS report that stated the Secret Service's aim to bump up the number of women in its ranks to 30 percent by 2030, according to Time. Most common among them are sexist jabs deriding the agents as too small, overweight and not capable of doing the job, Wired reports.

“This female agent couldn’t even holster her gun today during the attempted assassination of Trump. DEI hire?” Chaya Raichik, the rightwing influencer behind Libs of TikTok, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, of a Secret Service agent missing when attempting to holster her gun without looking. “DEI got someone killed," she added in a follow-up post.

A review conducted by Wired and researchers at nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy found that hundreds of posts on the Musk-owned platform make similar claims, with dozens garnering upwards of 1 million views.

"It was staged": Conspiracy theories are flying after Trump's Pennsylvania shooting

The propagation of this narrative represents "a very clear effort to divert attention" from media reports that the shooter was a white man and registered with the Republican Party, according to Jennifer Saul, a University of Waterloo professor of philosophy whose research focuses on political language, including racist, sexist and deceptive speech.

"It's not useful to the Republicans to blame somebody like that. That's not politically helpful for them," Saul told Salon. "In fact, it's politically damaging for them. So there's, I think, a very clever effort to divert attention onto something that is a more useful object of blame."

In recent months, conservatives have brought into the mainstream what was once a refrain of the far-right fringe: blaming a companies' failures and missteps on its prioritization of DEI or calling professionals and leaders of color — particularly Black people — "DEI hires," alleging they only obtained their position through supposed privileging workplace initiatives.

Prominent right-wing influencers wielded the narrative against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay during the furor over her widely panned response to concerns of on-campus antisemitism at a Congressional hearing in December 2023. Earlier this year, the right lobbed the attack at Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott following the March bridge collapse and, just this month, described Vice President Kamala Harris as a "DEI hire" during the Democratic scramble over whether to give President Joe Biden's presidential candidacy the boot.

"DEI is the latest in a long line of dog whistles," coded words and phrases with a set political message intended for members of certain group to understand, "meant to trigger resentments rooted in racism and sexism, but presented instead as defenses of high principle," according to Ian Haney López, a UC Berkeley Law professor of public law and author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class."

The argument the far-right has leveled against DEI is that it "represents a violation of meritocracy that discriminates against white people and men, and white men especially," he told Salon.

Right-wing leaders and influencers have "spent quite some time already building up DEI as an immense force for evil and incompetence in the world, so there's a lot of negative associations and emotions that come with the use of the term DEI, which is very helpful for them," Saul added, explaining that the animus around "DEI" casts it as "an object of hostility" and its usage gets others' "emotions and anger going."

"It's been built up as a way of targeting that hostility at particular groups, the groups who are meant to be helped by DEI," she continued, arguing that the demonization of DEI makes it harder to speak out against the "huge amount of discrimination" left in the world and urge companies and organization to care about remedying it.

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Many of the posts circulating on X in the aftermath of the assassination attempt featured a clip of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle's interview with CBS News discussing a need to increase diversity in the agency. Other posts, according to Wired, included a viral image comparing a male Secret Service agent with a sniper rile and one of the female agents protecting Trump, captioned: “Secret Service agents before DEI and after DEI." (The male agent in the picture is a counter sniper, while the female agent assigned to Trump's detail is performing close protection, duties the Secret Service indicates are typically armed differently.)

Another widely shared photograph showed another female agent crouching behind the former president on stage — supposed evidence of why women shouldn't be allowed in the role, according to ultraconservative critics — despite video footage taken moments later showing that agent as part of the group surrounding Trump and escorting him off the stage.

Far-right political commentator and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza fanned the flames around the agents in a number of posts to X.

"Watch these female agents who have no clue what to do, or what they are doing," he wrote in one Sunday post over a clip of three female Secret Service agents frantically surrounding Trump's vehicle after he's secured inside. "The Secret Service has been trying to raise the number of its female recruits to meet a 30% goal. This is DEI!"

In an appearance on Fox News, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., put the blame for the shooting squarely on Cheatle, dubbing her a "DEI initiative person" and arguing, "this is what happens when you don’t put the best players in."

“This DEI agenda and the destruction of meritocracy is affecting the competence levels of these agencies,” former Trump-era attorney general Bill Barr also told Fox host Jesse Watters.

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Other media personalities decidedly upped the ante and said the not-so-quiet part out loud, espousing misogynistic rhetoric outlining so-called reasons why women are not equipped to be Secret Service agents.

"Women are not empowered by attaining jobs for which they are not qualified or well-suited, and neither a president nor any of us should be endangered to make someone feel better about their obvious limitations," tweeted Megyn Kelly, a far-right media personality and ex-Fox News host.

"We support women — of course, we do," Fox News host Laura Ingraham told "The Five" co-host Jeanine Pirro during a Sunday night segment discussing the Secret Service's protection of Trump after the shooting. "But when it comes to shielding the body of someone who is six-foot-three — shielding him, you can’t do it if you’re five-five."

Meghan McCain, former co-host of "The View" and the daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, shared a post from far-right commentator Matt Walsh of the female agents that argued: “There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”

"This is why the notion that men and women are the same is just absurd," she said on X. "You need to be taller than the candidate to protect them with your body. Why do they have these short women (one who can’t holster a gun apparently) guarding Trump? This is embarrassing and dangerous."

While assessing potential failures in the Secret Service response to the attempted assassination and deadly shooting is a worthy cause, focusing on the female Secret Service agents and the agency's director — and DEI — operates as a distraction from "another important place that we should look: who carried out the shooting," Saul said.

"Rather than look at the laws that allowed this man to get a gun or look at why this man carried out the attack," ultraconservatives have said, 'let's instead look at women as people to blame," she argued.

The narrative the right has crafted "distorts the fundamentally meritocratic aim of DEI," which aims to actually bolster meritocracy by "overcoming structural and cultural barriers to entry," Haney López said.

"But no matter, for the goal on the right is less to engage with actual policies and how they might or might not work, but instead to tell scare stories aimed at stoking the strong emotions of hatred and fear connected to supposed victimization," he added.

about this topic

“This is where I belong”: Amber Rose at the RNC, denouncing “left-wing propaganda” about Trump

Amber Rose solidified her MAGA status at the Republican National Convention with a speech that denounced her former beliefs, saying, "I believed the left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist.”

On the first evening of the RNC, Rose clarified her newfound support for former president Donald Trump,

Rose said on stage, “I’m here tonight to tell you, no matter your political background, that the best chance we have to give our babies a better life is to elect Donald Trump president of the United States."

The musician and model, known for her high-profile relationship with Kanye West and later marriage to rapper Wiz Khalifa, formerly denounced Trump in 2016 in his first bid for president. In an interview with The Cut, Rose said, "He’s a f***ing idiot. He’s just such an idiot. He’s so weird. I really hope he’s not president." She even threatened to move to Canada in an interview with the Daily Mail.

However, Rose's political stance has changed since then, and she noted that during her RNC speech.

She said, “I’m no politician and I don’t wanna be, but I do care about the truth, and the truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time, I believed those lies.”

But things shifted for Rose when she started listening to his rallies and meeting fellow Trump supporters.

Rose continued, “I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me: These are my people. This is where I belong.”

“No longer the party of Lincoln”: Liz Cheney says Trump and JD Vance threaten the Constitution

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., warned Tuesday that Trump running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, will help the former president “illegally seize power.”

"JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power," Cheney, who lost her 2022 bid for reelection, posted on X. "He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine."

Cheney also shared a post from earlier noting that Vance had told an interviewer that, unlike former Vice President Pence, he would have blocked the certification of President Joe Biden's 2020 victory, as The Hill reported.

In a post in February, Cheney noted that Vance had also asserted that Donald Trump could simply ignore Supreme Court rulings. “Neither Trump nor Vance is fit to serve,” she wrote at the time, adding that following Vance's proposal would lead to “tyranny.”

Condemning the GOP pick for vice president, the former Wyoming representative wrote Tuesday: "The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution."

“Back to being angry”: Pelosi “working the phones” to oust Biden as Democratic mutiny continues

Though the calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race quieted after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, prominent Democrats are still working behind the scenes to urge their presumptive nominee to step aside, with Politico reporting that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is leading the effort.

According to Politico, Pelosi is “convinced Biden will lose” and has been “working the phones” since the presidential debate last month to try and oust Biden as the Democratic candidate.

Sources close to Pelosi told Martin she’s made calls to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and told a former elected official that “Biden’s legacy can’t be destroying the party.” Pelosi also reportedly spoke with former President Barack Obama; both Democrats share concerns over Biden’s ability to beat Trump, CNN reported.

Biden team resorts to Trump's "Access Hollywood" playbook as Democrats signal looming revolt

Other Democratic members of Congress too are privately lobbying for Biden’s withdrawal, urging his team to consider how a Democratic House and Senate loss would impact the president’s legacy, CNN reported.

One Democratic lawmaker told CNN it was “counterproductive” to publicly call on Biden to step aside right now, as the image of a unified Democratic Party is important as ever. But, behind the scenes, those efforts continue.

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who advised Bill Clinton’s two winning presidential campaigns, has been sending memos sharing his opinion that Biden is going to lose the election, sources told CNN. A Democrat close to the White House described Greenber’s memos as “devastating," indicating that Democrats would lose control over each house of Congress too.

Biden, however, remains committed to running.

“Look, 14 million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic Party, OK? I listen to them,” he said in an interview with NBC News' Lester Holt on Monday.

Some Democrats in Biden’s campaign are concerned that the president is receiving an incomplete picture of the race from those closest to him, who reportedly limit the data he receives, The Washington Post reported. Two Democratic strategists involved in Biden’s re-election efforts told the Post that Biden should be hearing from a wider range of voices, including the top officials on his own campaign.

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The Post obtained a portion of a 45-minute Zoom call on Saturday with the New Democratic Coalition in which Biden falsely claimed that he was leading in several national polls post-debate.

“The polling data we’re seeing nationally and on the swing states has been essentially where it was before,” Biden said in the recording. “You noticed the last three polls, nationally, they had me up four points. And I mean, I don’t have much faith in the polls at all, either way, because they’re so hard to read anymore.”

In a YouGov poll conducted from July 4-12, Biden trailed behind Trump in all seven swing states. In Arizona and Nevada, Trump has gained 7 and 4 points, respectively, on the President since March. In Michigan, Trump leads Biden 42-40.

In fact, not a single head-to-head poll since June shows Biden ahead of Trump by four percentage points, according to the national polls website 538. One poll, from Marist College, did find Biden with a 2 point lead, within the margin of error, but an average of the current 2024 presidential polls show he trails Trump by 2.4 points.

“He is not getting the honest truth,” one House Democrat told The Post.

Despite the growing level of concern within the party — or, perhaps, because of it — leaders of the Democratic National Committee are moving to confirm Biden as the Democratic nominee by the end of July, sources told The New York Times. Though the Democratic National Convention isn’t until August, this year’s roll call, which usually takes place on the convention floor, is set to take place virtually, with ballots cast as soon as next Monday.

Some Democrats have pushed for the DNC to delay the process.

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., is circulating a letter among House Democrats calling on the DNC to delay Biden’s nomination until the convention in August. A copy of the letter was obtained by Axios.

"We respectfully but emphatically request that you cancel any plans for an accelerated 'virtual roll call' and further refrain from any extraordinary procedures that could be perceived as curtailing legitimate debate," the letter reads.

"People are back to being angry at Biden and a push to sign on to this letter is going around … the 'replace Biden' movement is back," a House Democrat told Axios.

about the 2024 race

In private speech, JD Vance said the “Devil is real” and praised Alex Jones as a truth-teller

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Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed “something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives that counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives and media figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago. ProPublica and Documented obtained a video recording of his 30-minute speech and question-and-answer session, which has not been previously reported.

Vance’s remarks at the conference — which you can read a transcript of or watch in full below — give a rare unvarnished look at his thinking and illustrate how aligned he is with various factions within the conservative and MAGA movements. “I’ll throw out the standard campaign speech,” he began his Teneo talk. “[I’ll] actually just try to level with you guys about what I do see is the big — a few big problems that are in our country right now.”

According to tax records, the Teneo Network’s chairman is Leonard Leo, the legal activist who built a pipeline of lawyers who interpret the Constitution based on the “original intent” of the framers or the meaning of the words in the text when they were written. One of the most influential conservatives of the past three decades, Leo helped confirm all six conservative justices currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo-aligned judges have pushed to restrict abortion rights and rein in the government’s power to regulate corporations.

Leo has said he views the Teneo Network as a way to extend his influence beyond the judiciary to industries including finance, media, government and Silicon Valley. The network identifies and cultivates conservative leaders in “other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now,” as Leo put it in a Teneo video.

According to internal Teneo documents, Vance joined Teneo in 2018, several years before he ran for Senate in his home state of Ohio. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had already become a bestseller, and Vance was a commentator for CNN while running his own nonprofit and investment fund backing startup companies outside of Silicon Valley.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign, Leo and Teneo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.

Vance’s connection to Teneo could form a bridge between different factions of the Republican Party that seem to be at odds. Previous news stories have reported that Trump and Leo, who advised the former president on judicial nominees during his administration, are no longer as close as they once were. Russ Vought, a Trump ally, publicly denigrated the Federalist Society, the legal networking group Leo and others built into a juggernaut.

Adding Vance to the ticket bolsters the connections between Leo’s network and the Trump 2024 campaign. It also strengthens ties between Trump’s reelection bid and the Project 2025 blueprint, which outlines plans for a second Trump administration, including firing thousands of career civil servants, shuttering the Department of Education and replacing ambitious goals to combat climate change with ramped-up fossil fuel production. In a recent TV interview, Vance said the document contained “some good ideas” but claimed that “most Americans couldn’t care less about Project 2025” and that the Trump campaign wasn’t affiliated with it.

In his Teneo remarks, he bemoaned that decades ago major corporate CEOs reliably donated money to Republicans but now they give heavily to Democrats. He lamented that conservatives had “very few oligarchs on our side,” had “lost every institution in American society” and needed to make corporations “taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”

“So we’ve not just lost the academy,” meaning universities, “which we’ve lost for a long time; we haven’t just lost the media, which has been on the side of the left for a long time; we now find ourselves in a situation where our biggest multinational corporations are active participants in the culture war on the other side,” he said. “It’s really been a few of us over the past few years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.”

He argued that conservatives needed to take action against corporations that, say, defended abortion rights or punished employees who spoke out against abortion access. “If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war,” he said.

He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”

Shortly before he spoke at the Teneo conference, Vance drew criticism when he tweeted that “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Jones, founder of the online show Infowars, gained a following with his promotion of conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. More recently, judges in several states ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had called a hoax.

Vance told Teneo members that he was “just trolling” with his defense of Jones, but added “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”

“Look, I think there’s a not-terrible chance that one of you is going to be sharing cellblock 12A in Premier Harris’ prison detention camp in a few years,” he explained, seemingly referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. “If we’re going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there. It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But, look, I do think what I said was correct.”

If the conservative movement was going to survive, he continued, its members needed to “speak for truth.” He mentioned donors in Ohio who had asked him if he would condemn inflammatory remarks made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“And I say, ‘Why? Why do you want me to denounce this person?’” Vance said. “‘Well, she believes these crazy things.’ Who cares?”

He went on, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be OK with nonconventional people.”

Nutrition Facts labels have a complicated legacy

The Nutrition Facts label, that black and white information box found on nearly every packaged food product in the U.S. since 1994, has recently become an icon for consumer transparency.

From Apple's "Privacy Nutrition Labels" that disclose how smartphone apps handle user data, to a "Garment Facts" label that standardizes ethical disclosures on clothing, policy advocates across industries invoke "Nutrition Facts" as a model for empowering consumers and enabling socially responsible markets. They argue that intuitive information fixes could solve a wide range of market-driven social ills.

Yet this familiar, everyday product label actually has a complicated legacy.

I study food regulation and diet culture and became interested in the Nutrition Facts label while researching the history of Food and Drug Administration policies on food standards and labeling. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, mandating nutrition labels on all packaged foods to help address growing concerns about rising rates of chronic illnesses linked to unhealthy diets. The FDA introduced its "Nutrition Facts" panel in 1993 as a public health tool that empowered consumers to make healthier choices.

The most obvious purpose of the Nutrition Facts label is for consumers to learn the nutritional properties of a food. In practice, however, this label has done much more than simply inform shoppers. It also encodes a wide range of political and technical compromises about how to translate food into nutrients that meet the diverse needs of the American public.

Where do "% Daily Values" come from?

The daily value, or DV, percentages on the label don't all come from the same source. This is a reflection of differing public health targets for the label.

Recommended values for micronutrients like vitamins are based on Recommended Dietary Allowances, or RDAs, from the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine. Vitamin RDAs were developed out of historical concerns with undernourishment and meeting minimum needs.

Daily value percentages for macronutrients – carbs, fats and proteins – are based on U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines. DVs for macronutrients registered a new concern about overeating and a focus on "negative nutrition" encouraging maximum intake levels.

DVs reflect two fundamentally different causes for concern. The numbers for micronutrients represent a floor: the basic minimum vitamin needs a child should meet to avoid malnutrition. The numbers for macronutrients, on the other hand, are a ceiling: a target maximum limit that adults should avoid surpassing if they want to prevent future health problems caused by eating too much high sodium or fatty food.

Each component of the Nutrition Facts label is based on data and decisions from various sources. Food and Drug Administration

Why 2,000 calories?

The FDA almost used 2,350 calories as the baseline for calculating daily values, because it was the recommended population-adjusted average caloric need for Americans ages four and older. But after pushback from health groups concerned the higher baseline would encourage overconsumption, the FDA settled on 2,000 calories.

FDA officials felt this figure was less likely to be "misconstrued as an individualized goal since a round number has less implied specificity." This means 2,000 calories is not actually a target for most American consumers reading the label. Instead, it is an example of the public health preoccupation with collective risk – what one scientist called "treating sick populations not sick individuals."

By choosing a round number that was easy to do math with, and a calorie count below the average American's, FDA officials were favoring practicality and utility over accuracy and objectivity. Advocating for the lower 2,000 calorie baseline, they reasoned, would offset Americans' tendency to overeat and do more good than harm for the population overall.

Who determines serving sizes?

According to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, serving sizes should reflect "an amount customarily used."

In practice, this involves routine negotiations between the FDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture – which also sets serving sizes for dietary guidance tools like the MyPlate – and food manufacturers. Each conducts research on consumer expectations and food consumption data, taking into consideration how a food is prepared and "typically eaten."

Serving sizes are also determined by product packaging. For example, a soda can is generally considered a single-serving container and therefore just one serving, regardless of how many fluid ounces it contains.

Changing public health goals have shaped the Nutrition Facts label over time. In the 1970s, the FDA framed itself as a neutral information broker. The 'war against heart disease' in the 1980s placed an emphasis on saturated fat and cholesterol. And the 2010s saw increased focus on added sugars, 'good fats' and total calories. Xaq Frohlich

What's in a name?

The label was almost called "Nutrition Values" or "Nutrition Guide" to highlight that Daily Values were recommendations. Then FDA Deputy Commissioner Mike Taylor proposed "Nutrition Facts" to sound more legally neutral and scientifically objective.

The new design – a staid, black Helvetica text against a white background, using indented subgroups and hairlines for readability – and the authoritative boldface title helped establish "Nutrition Facts" as an easily recognized government brand.

This led to imitators in other policy arenas: first "Drug Facts" for over-the-counter medicines, then consumer protection initiatives in various tech industries, such as Federal Communications Commission "Broadband Facts" and "AI Nutrition Facts."

The Nutrition Facts panel has remained largely consistent since the 1990s, despite some updates like adding lines for trans fats in 2002 and for added sugars in 2016 to reflect evolving public health priorities.

New ways to calculate the facts

Establishing the Nutrition Facts label required building an entirely new technical infrastructure for nutrition information. Translating the diverse American diet into a consistent set of standardized nutrients necessitated new measures, testing procedures and standard references.

The AOAC organized food based on fat, protein and carbohydrate content. National Institute of Standards and Technology

A key player in developing that technical infrastructure was the Association of Official Analytical Chemists. In the early 1990s, an AOAC Task Force developed a food triangle matrix dividing foods into categories based on their proportions of carbs, fats and protein. The intention was to determine appropriate ways to measure nutritional properties like the amount of calories or sugars, as the food's physical properties would affect how well each test worked.

Legacy of the Nutrition Facts label

Today, public-private collaborations have taken this translation of foods into simplified nutrient profiles further by making nutrition facts plug-and-play. The USDA FoodData Central provides a comprehensive database of nutrient profiles for individual ingredients that manufacturers use to calculate Nutrition Facts for new packaged foods. This database also powers many diet and nutrition apps.

The analytic tools developed for the Nutrition Facts label helped create the basic information infrastructure for today's digital diet platforms. But critics argue these databases reinforce an overly reductionist view of food as simply the sum of its nutrients, ignoring how the different forms a food takes – such as its moisture, fibrous materials or porous structures – affect the way the body metabolizes nutrients.

Indeed, many nutrition researchers concerned about the negative health effects of ultra-processed foods now talk of a food matrix to emphasize precisely the opposite of what the AOAC sought with its food triangle: a need for a holistic understanding of how food shapes health.

Surprisingly, the Nutrition Facts label's greatest impact may have been driving the food industry to reformulate products to achieve appealing nutrient profiles – even if consumers weren't closely reading the labels. While envisioned as an education tool, I believe the Nutrition Facts label in practice has worked more like a market infrastructure, reshaping the food supply to meet shifting dietary trends and public health goals long before consumers find those foods at the supermarket.

Xaq Frohlich, Associate Professor of History of Technology, Auburn University

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