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“Great British Bake Off” shocks viewers with a dramatic double-elimination round

There’s a cloud — both figurative and literal — hanging over the tents of “The Great British Bake Off” as we head into week five. Following Tasha’s illness last week, no contestants were eliminated, which left most of the bakers feeling pretty elated after some play-it-safe performances; however, that momentary relief came with a promise: A double elimination round, cutting the group from nine bakers to seven. 

On the other hand, the actual visible cloud cover outside the tents, combined with the fact that the contestants are all wearing long sleeves, indicates that the heat wave that plagued Chocolate Week has passed, which may bode well for Pastry Week (another notoriously fussy confection when it comes to temperature and handling). Regardless, college student and baker Rowan isn’t getting too cocky and summarizes what seems to be the prevailing sentiment on this season of “Bake Off.” 

“I never feel confident about anything in life and pastry’s no exception,” he said. “So I’m just gonna roll with it as I do every week.” 

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The "Bake Off" competition heats up during chocolate week — and now a double-elimination looms

In this week’s signature challenge, the bakers are challenged to make twelve individual savory picnic pies. The fillings and flavors are left up to their discretion, but the pies must be made from hot water crust pastry, and “be attractive and attempting to eat.” 

Oh, and they only have two hours to complete the task. 

In an aside to camera, co-judge Paul Hollywood went on to elucidate his personal preferences for these picnic pies: the fillings should be flavorful, but also really moist. The edges should be perfectly crimped and the top perfectly scored, both for aesthetic and technical reasons, as the steam generated from the filling needs somewhere to escape so that it doesn’t result in wet pastry and the now-infamous soggy bottom. 

The bakers are all going big on flavor this week, with a lot of classic sausage, fruit and cheese pies in the mix, including variations from Tasha, Nicky, Rowan and Josh. Matty decides to nod towards spanakopita with his spinach and feta pies, while Dan fills his crust with a play on lamb keema. There are a few pies that I’m particularly interested in: Saku’s spicy tuna picnic pies which each have a small quail egg in the center; Cristy’s pies with a decadent creamy leek filling; and Dana’s pies packed with dauphinoise potatoes, caramelized onions and a funky cheese sauce. 

“Almost like a dauphinoise pithivier,” Paul remarks, stealing a sly glance at Prue in what turns out to be a moment of not-so-subtle foreshadowing for the upcoming technical. 

The two-hour long round breezes by quickly, with a few saucy detours by Noel and Alison (lots of discussion of, uh… holes and pricks this round). As the judges begin to come around to sample everyone’s bakes, a few themes begin to reveal themselves in the feedback. Most everyone’s flavors are good, but the technical execution of the pastry largely wasn’t exactly what Paul and Prue were looking for, from Dan’s ripped crust to Saku’s soggy bottom. 

“Heartbreaking,” she said simply after Paul flipped her pie to reveal the moisture barrier of the crust had been broken.

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Rowan seems to be struggling most this week. In his pork and sweet potato picnic pies, he’d layered a piece of raw bacon between the filling and the pie lid, and it seems like the steam from the bacon prevented the crust from cooking properly. By the time Paul and Prue came by his station, the lids of his pies were literally falling off. Nicky also struggled this week, describing the round as an “absolute bag of pants,” a delightful phrase that I’m determined to begin weaving into my everyday conversations. 

Cristy, however, pulls it out with her creamy leek pies, earning her a Hollywood handshake. 

Soggy Bottom Watch continues in this week’s technical challenge which is (you guessed it) a decadent dauphinoise pithivier. Much like Dana’s picnic pies from the last round, this classic French pastry features a laminated crust stuffed with creamy potatoes, caramelized onions and Roquefort sauce. It is, as Prue describes, “carbs on carbs served with cream” and it is apparently heaven. 

Again, like all the technical challenges, the bakers are provided with very, very sparse directions to guide them through the baking process. Paul simply tells the bakers that “the textures on the inside and the outside must be perfect,” which, of course, starts with the pastry crust. What makes it work in this dish is that cold grated butter must be incorporated into the pastry a bit at a time, and then folded; essentially, you want layers of dough, butter, dough and butter to get that signature golden-brown pastry flake, much like what you see when you cut into a fresh croissant. 

The potatoes also present a slight challenge to the bakers. They need a little bite when put into the pie so that they don’t become mushy during baking, however they can’t be too raw because — well, no one wants to bite into a pie filled with raw potatoes drowned in Roquefort sauce. 

This is another quick-moving round peppered with more baking-themed innuendo, this time largely centered around the instruction that the bakers are meant to “knock up” their pastry edges. After assessing the field, Nicky, Josh and Matt are at the bottom of the group thanks to sloppy pastries and ill-cooked potatoes. 

Tasha is officially back in the game with a strong third place finish, while Dana, who had a bit of a leg up thanks to her signature bake, comes in second place. But it’s Dan — who nicked himself with a grater and had to actually restart his pastry — who manages to come out on top with a “recognizable pithivier” that both “tastes delicious and looks professional,” per the judges. 

Overall, Paul and Prue agree that pastry week is a step up from the middling performances during last week’s chocolate challenges, but that could all change during a deceptively simple showstopper challenge. The bakers are asked to make three ornate pies with a rich, sweet pastry crust. They should also have some kind of thematic thread linking them in their presentation. 

"I’ve never had a dry apple pie before."

The bakers have four hours, which seems like a long time, but I’m immediately concerned about Rowan. He plans to make three pies based on his favorite show, “Absolutely Fabulous,” which will include hand-painted portraits of Edina and Patsy. It’s a gutsy move for someone who hasn’t excelled in the last few showstoppers. 

And, indeed, after a tense round of rolling, shaping and filling delicate pastry dough, Rowan can’t even pull his overstuffed pies out of the tins without them bleeding and oozing fruit filling. Delicious? Probably. But definitely not what Paul and Prue are looking to reward in this round. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, my heart dropped for Nicky when Paul took a bite of her bake and said simply, “I’ve never had a dry apple pie before.” 

Those moisture issues were enough to convince the judges that Nicky and Rowan should both go home this week as part of the double-elimination round — but not before rewarding Cristy with the title of Star Baker.  

At this point, I still think Dan and Tasha are going to be our final two bakers, but who knows? Maybe Cristy will absolutely dominate “Botanical Week,” which is new to the series. Per the show description: “In a Bake Off first, it's Botanical Week and the bakers tackle bakes inspired by nature, starting with a spice-filled Signature, followed by a herby Technical and topped off with a floral dessert Showstopper.”

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Israel falls into the “Vietnam trap”: Increasingly brutal tactics will only lead to disaster

Orde Wingate, a legendary and eccentric British Army officer who was born in India (and died there) and was not Jewish, is widely regarded as the father of the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said that if Wingate had not died fighting the Japanese in 1944, he would surely have become the IDF’s first chief of staff. 

Wingate, a special operations officer and intelligence expert, became best known for his sabotage and guerrilla tactics against the Japanese in Burma, and is widely regarded by military historians as one of the best commando fighters ever. 

From 1936 to 1939, Wingate was stationed in Palestine, then governed by the British under a mandate established by the League of Nations in the wake of World War I and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. He was instrumental in training Jewish paramilitary groups to use guerrilla tactics against Palestinian insurgents who staged attacks both against the British authorities and Jewish communities. 

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Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most famous military commander, wrote with affection in his biography about Wingate’s idiosyncrasies: He seldom bathed and was known to eat raw onions tied to his shoulder, from time to time turning his head like a snake to seize them with his teeth. His behavior delighted the Jews, but annoyed or alienated both his British superiors and the Palestinian Arab community. 

An accomplished horseman raised in a British aristocratic family and trained at the Royal Military Academy, Wingate was also something of a rebel. He was a Christian Zionist and bibliophile, who by all accounts knew the land of Israel better than many of the Jews who lived there. He has also been described as “sadistic” by Israeli historian and author Tom Segev, and often expressed overt anti-Arab bigotry (although he spoke fluent Arabic).  

Orde Wingate's commando tactics dominated Israeli strategy through the dramatic victory of the Six-Day War in 1967. Then came a fateful change: The IDF was "Vietnamized."

Wingate had been dead for four years by the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, but his nimble approach to warfare was central to the newborn state’s defeat of the combined armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Most military analysts would agree that Wingate’s approach still dominated Israeli strategy and tactics in the Sinai campaign of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel once again conclusively defeated the combined armies of the hostile Arab nations on its borders. After that, however, came a fateful change: Wingate’s lessons were forgotten, and the IDF became “Vietnamized.”

That ambiguous term has a number of interpretations. It was initially used to describe the strategy of reducing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by devolving most military responsibilities to South Vietnam. That was also a failure, but I use “Vietnamization” in a different sense, to describe the use of overwhelming and often unnecessary brute force, leading to unintended and frequently disastrous consequences. 

Consider that during World War II, roughly 3 million tons of explosives were used against the Axis powers, which comprised three large and heavily militarized nations. During the Vietnam War, 4 million tons were used against a much smaller enemy force, much of it a guerrilla army spread out across densely forested and difficult terrain.  

Another aspect of Vietnamization was the repugnant use of terminology such as “body count” to describe enemy casualties, not to mention the U.S. military’s infamous use of euphemisms, outright lies and doublespeak: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” All of that fueled increasingly large protests against the war at home in America, and turned the entire world’s public opinion against the war, leading to the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.

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Why did America go to war in Vietnam in the first place? George Friedman, an author on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, says in one of his YouTube videos that European leaders, especially French President Charles de Gaulle, were skeptical of America’s Cold War promises to provide a “nuclear umbrella” in the event of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. To convince de Gaulle that America was serious, Friedman suggests, the U.S. wanted to show that it was willing to wage war halfway around the world in order to prevent the communist regime of North Vietnam from spreading into neighboring states, as postulated by the famous “domino theory.”

It’s clear enough in hindsight that America fell into a trap with Vietnamization, employing ever more aggressive tactics and ever-larger amounts of ordnance and military hardware. Israel has already fallen into the same trap in its military ventures since 1973. It is about to fall even deeper in the current war against Hamas, where a ground invasion of Gaza — with no clear or achievable objectives, and a high probability of disaster — now appears to be underway. 

When the initial stages of “Vietnamized” warfare failed in the 1960s, the U.S. military felt compelled to use even more lethal force, which again failed, driving a vicious cycle of atrocious, overwhelming force and vast civilian casualties: Best estimates hold that more than 1.3 million people died in North and South Vietnam between 1965 and 1974.

Israel has already fallen into a version of America's Vietnam trap: a cycle of ever more aggressive tactics and ever-larger amounts of military hardware. That's about to get much worse in a ground invasion of Gaza.

Charles de Gaulle died in 1969, five years before the end of the war in Vietnam. There was effectively no one left to convince of the supposed U.S. commitment to stop the spread of communism. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, even after he received the Nobel Peace Prize (a grotesque travesty in itself), was determined to continue the war, although the Pentagon Papers released by Daniel Ellsberg made clear that the U.S. defense establishment had known for years that the war was unwinnable.

We can also look to the example of Afghanistan, which has been called the “graveyard of empires.” Overwhelming use of force by the British failed there in the 19th century, and the Soviet Union was similarly defeated in the 1980s, surely a factor in its subsequent collapse. America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred just two years ago, as an early black mark in Joe Biden’s presidency. In Vietnam, as de Gaulle could have testified, the French had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a seemingly inconsequential enemy in the early 1950s, a historical lesson the Americans studiously avoided. 

So why did the IDF “Vietnamize” itself prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War — a near-catastrophe that in some ways prefigured the devastating Hamas attack of early October? There are several possible explanations. The first is that Israel’s leading enemies, Egypt and Syria, had themselves been “Vietnamized” by huge supplies of arms from the Soviets, and the Americans felt that they needed to respond in kind. Noam Chomsky provides a second plausible explanation, arguing that U.S. military aid to Israel essentially amounts to real-world testing of state-of-the-art weaponry as it is used live for the first time.

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But massive rearmament and “Vietnamization” were not adequate to meet the challenges of the Yom Kippur War, in which Egyptian and Syrian forces at first overran the IDF, rapidly depleting Israel’s stock of arms. Richard Nixon, despite the antisemitic views he expressed in private, felt the need to respond to the massive Soviet arms shipments to the Arab nations, and the U.S. bailed out Israel with 23,000 tons of arms delivered by aerial shipment in the middle of the conflict. 

In the subsequent decades, Israel has repeatedly used these kinds of heavy-handed overkill tactics against the Palestinians. That has done little or nothing to resolve the conflict or to suppress militant groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, as recent events have made clear. Worse yet, it has led to many civilian casualties that inevitably fuel ever-deeper hatred among every new generation of Palestinians, leading to recurring acts of terror and increasingly dangerous war. Revenge is a strong theme in Middle Eastern culture, certainly for Jews and perhaps even more so for Arabs. Virtually every Palestinian, no matter their class background, religion or political affiliation, has a father, a son, a brother, an uncle or a classmate who was killed, wounded or imprisoned by Israel.

The Palestinian people are much fewer than the Israelis, and their militant groups — despite the dramatic recent success of Hamas — are small in number and have nowhere near the training, capacity or hardware of the IDF. Palestinian casualties will inevitably exceed Israeli casualties by several orders of magnitude; at this writing, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is at least four times higher than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas. Israel was severely traumatized by the attacks of Oct. 7, but that doesn’t change the fact that the relative impact of war on the Palestinians is much greater than the impact on Israelis. 

What math can justify such a deepening cycle of violence? I do not advocate war and militarism, but if war against Hamas is inevitable, IDF top brass should go back and study Orde Wingate’s wars in Burma and Palestine. In his recent visit to Israel, Joe Biden cautioned against repeating America’s mistakes after 9/11, when the desire for vengeance led to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and then to two decades of pointless, wasteful bloodshed. If Israel is overcome by rage in response to the crimes of Hamas, the consequences for its future could be even worse. The lessons of the past should be clear enough; the stakes are far too high. 

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“Talk to the hand; the one with the nail in it”: Bill Maher drags GOP speaker on “Real Time”

In the opening monologue for Friday's episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher," new House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was the topic of focus, although the host was quick to mention it's likely that no one had ever heard the man's name before, prior to him winning his short campaign to succeed ousted former speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

Leaning in on Johnson's holy hell fire views on gay sex and abortion, Maher referred to him as "super-duper-uper" Christian, saying that Republicans finally found someone who "fits the glass slipper" . . . . "Never heard of him."

Scratching around underneath his belt like maybe he had a rash that night, or perhaps it's just that the thought of Johnson was making his skin crawl, Maher said that Republicans really found their sweet-spot in electing this new speaker — both Christ-y and the worst of the election deniers — in that he loves Jesus and hates Democracy.

"I gotta say, this guy owns it," Maher said. "We're just getting to know him and he said just today, or maybe yesterday, 'Pick up a Bible off the shelf and read it, that's my world view' . . . That's what he's saying, 'Talk to the hand, the one with the nail in it.'"

Known for being in a covenant marriage with his wife — a legally distinct kind of marriage in three states (Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana) in which the marrying spouses agree to obtain pre-marital counseling and accept more limited grounds for later seeking divorce — he is staunchly against gay couples having equal rights in their own marriages, or even just in the privacy of their bedrooms.

"He absolutely hates gay sex, especially when he's having it," Maher joked. "He wants to actually criminalize gay sex. He's written in favor of reinstituting sodomy laws; that's laws against anal and oral. I've never understood this about the Republicans. If you're so against abortion, why would you be so against the two places to do it where you can't get pregnant?"

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“A similar genesis”: The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst honors goth and its (spider)web of artistic connections

Lol Tolhurst’s “Goth: A History” succeeds at what’s often thought of as an impossible task: defining the roots, influences and impact of goth. Of course, the musician knows of which he speaks. As the co-founder and first drummer of the Cure, Tolhurst was an integral part of the musical genre’s rise in late-’70s and early-’80s England, though he might not have admitted it at the time.

“Despite our passionate insistence that the Cure was not a Goth group, the Cure was very much a Goth group,” Tolhurst writes in “Goth.”

Buoyed by research conducted by his son, Gray (who happens to play in a fantastically gloomy band of his own, Topographies) “Goth” examines the literary and musical influences on goth, including Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, David Bowie, Alice Cooper and the Doors. The book then goes on to explore the Cure and their contemporaries — Bauhaus, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees — before tracing goth’s impact through the modern day’s music, scenes and fashion. “Goth” is meticulous and detailed, with the kind of smart, informed perspectives that do justice to the often-maligned subculture.

“Goth” grew out of the book tour for Tolhurst’s 2016 memoir, “Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys,” which resembled a concert tour more than anything. “Most authors don't really do more than about 10 [events], according to my agent,” he said. “But I did about 300. I went all over America. I went all over quite a bit of Europe and I went to South America — I went to Peru and Argentina and Chile.”

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At these events, he met countless fans who expressed curiosity about “what the experience of growing up like that was, how it became that way, how goth came about,” Tolhurst says. He points out that photos of seminal places and scenes don’t necessarily exist — and things like notorious London goth club night the Batcave were different from what people might think.

“What I remembered in The Batcave was that yes, there were people that looked like what we would think are goths,” Tolhurst says, “but there were also a lot of different kinds of people. It didn't exclude anybody. If you had the money at the door, you could come in. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, you don't look goth enough, so you can't come in.’” 

Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife LeeLol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee (Pat Martin)Tolhurst, who checked in with Salon via Zoom on a recent afternoon, has already started on his third book and on Nov. 3, he’s releasing a new album, “Los Angeles,” in collaboration with Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer Budgie — a long-time friend with whom he co-hosts the "Curious Creatures" podcast — and the producer Jacknife Lee. Featuring guests such as LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, and U2 guitarist the Edge, the collection is a perfect complement to the book: heavy on pulsating rhythms and grooves that nod to goth’s dark textures and bruising roots, but with a modern spin.

Obviously with your background, this book concept is perfect. 

What I wanted to do with this book is explain how [goth] came about. The hardest part of writing it was the first six months trying to find what my model was going to be. I thought, “Well, I can't just write something that's another adjunct to the memoir,” which it kind of is as well. But I've got to write about other people. I've got to write about other situations that are not pertinent completely to me. How do I do that?

"Goth in general is malleable, but it stays true to certain tenets."

I'd been reading a lot of Joan Didion, and I really liked the way that she approached talking about events that are news stories. She made them come alive in a way that made them more than that, and so I tried to channel her spirits a bit in the writing of the stories. I remember reading a story she wrote about a dentist in San Bernardino; his wife killed him. And the way she described it, it was like a noir novel. It was very dark. Once I had decided, "OK, there's where I can get the inspiration for it," then everything else was much simpler. Everything else is just going out and getting the facts.

I didn't even have to do that because my son Gray was my researcher. At the beginning, I said to my agent, "I've got this idea for a book, but I really don't want to do the research because it's like homework, and I don't want to do that. I want to write the stories." My son has an MFA in creative writing, so I said, "OK, time to pay the old man back for all the stuff that I've had to fork out for.”

But I told Gray, "OK so I'll be telling you what I need and what I want you to research for me, but I'm not your boss, okay?" I didn't want me having to chase him. It worked out fine. Some fathers and sons bond over football or whatever, that we bonded over writing this book, so it was great.

Goth: A HistoryFrom "Goth: A History": The Cure fans in Brussels, 1981. (Richard Bellia)I've read that he contributed meticulous, detailed inquiries and thoughts to the book. Given that he is a musician and also of a younger generation, what things did he contribute that put you in a different direction or made you think about things in a different way? And how did his perspective help shape how the book evolved?

I had the idea of what it would be for the beginning, and I knew the middle part, which is what happened in that time in the '80s, but what I needed help with really was understanding where it's gone since. He was very instrumental in that part because a lot of people my age, they will say to me, conspiratorially, “There's no good music nowadays." And I say, "No, you're wrong. You're wrong. You just have forgotten where to find it. You don't know where to look because you've become older and you've lost the connections to it."

But I have a perfect connection because I have him. I just call him and say, "Gray, what should I be listening to? What's good? What's good out there?" He would introduce me to people. That was very helpful to me, because it wasn't always obvious to me where the [goth] thread had gone. I kind of knew, because like I always tell people, I've spent 40 years traveling around America and I can pretty much go into any small town and spot the people who are going to be goths. Like the five or six kids, I can spot them straight away. They have certain tendencies.

What I was looking for in the stuff that Gray showed me was like, where does this come from? Where's the genesis from it? It adapts, because I think like goth in general is malleable, but it stays true to certain tenets. That's really what I was looking for, so he was very useful for that.

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“Goth” came off as approaching things from more of an anthropological perspective, which I think makes total sense and fits—because you're right, there are the core tenets and over time, everything has evolved, but there's certain literary and musical touchstones that are really universal. The book really dug into that and underscored these facts.

Well, it's going to make you laugh then, because Gray's B.A. was in anthropology. That was his first love, and then he decided, “I think I love words more.” That's what he told me: "I love the stories. I don't love the research particularly." But unfortunately, he had to do the research for me, but that was good, because his mind was trained in how to do research. Me, I could research things, but it wouldn't be the same. 

And it's all about how the connections are made and how they evolve because things don't happen out of the blue. There's an evolution to go along with it all. My role in all of this was to connect the dots, really, and just show people this is where it comes from. You might think it comes from "Edward Scissorhands." And maybe there's some connections, because I know Tim [Burton] and I know where his ideas are fermented from, but there's other stuff that you might not be aware of. It’s like, “OK, so this is my journey. This is how I got to this point. These are the touchstones that I took with me.”

Siouxsie And The BansheesBritish New Wave band Siouxsie and the Banshees, from left, guitarist John McKay, singer Siouxsie Sioux, bassist Steven Severin, and drummer Kenny Morris, pose for a group studio portrait, in March 1979. (Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images)I love that you mentioned The Doors. For example I know Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran is also a huge Doors fan. There was such a touchstone in the late '70s, and people might not realize that now because people have a different relationship to the Doors now than they did then.

Yeah. I find it fascinating. I moved to California 30 years ago. I live quite close to the beach — not on the beach, but I live quite close. If you walk down onto Venice Beach, there's a police station right there on the beach, a police department, and it has a wall surrounding it. The wall is the poetry wall, and it has Morrison's poetry on the wall inscribed in it, which is amazing. It's ironic it's surrounding the police station, but it's still there. The whole feeling is still there. If you walk along the Venice Boardwalk on a Sunday, if you close your eyes and squint a bit, it could be the 1970s still. You open your eyes up and you see things that definitely weren't around then, but it's still got that same atmosphere, so I wanted to join the dots for people and show them where things germinated from.

As you were writing and then putting everything together, what sort of surprises did you discover? Or were there any things where you discovered connections you maybe didn't realize or expected until you were really digging into things?

[Pauses.] Yeah. I don't know. That's almost an impossible question for me because I think I spend most of my spare time looking for the connections. [Laughs.] It's like, if it hasn't come up, I'd probably think it's come up before and tried to connect stuff. I don't know.

What was interesting for me was talking to some of my contemporaries. I know most of them, but I don't know everybody, and seeing where their touchstones came from. We share lots of commonalities. I know Kevin [Haskins] quite well in Bauhaus, but I didn't know his brother [David J] very well. I sent him initially a big questionnaire, and it was interesting that although we hadn't really crossed paths that much there’s a similar genesis.

A few years ago, when people first started looking around the world on Google Earth or whatever, and they would go, "Oh, I can look at any streets in the world and go around." I did what I'm sure everybody does: I thought, “I'll go back and have a look about where I grew up and all those places, and I'll go to all the little secret places of my teenage years and childhood. And it blew my mind because after I finished doing that, I called Robert [Smith] up and I said, "You know what? It is absolutely no surprise to me that the music we wrote came out this way because it's there in the streets, in the dark, dank English countryside. It's there."

That's what we wrote. We wrote what we lived in and what we saw. It shouldn't be a surprise, but it was to me, and I realized, well, I could use that angle for a lot of other people, like for Joy Division. Definitely where they grew up, that huge monolithic projects that was outside of the Factory club with thousands of people living in this brutalist nightmare — I got it straight away. I only had to see that and go, “Yeah, OK, that makes sense." They always say that if you're a writer, you should write what you know, so I try generally to do that. But these things I didn't know — but when I saw them, I knew them. Does that make sense?

That totally makes sense.

I could connect with it. I think it's very true for musicians as well. If you know where they come from, if you know from where their images come from, there's something else that goes along with that. If you know those things that were there at the beginning, that's what informs it all the way along.

[A few years ago Gray] sent me the test pressing of the [first Topographies] album and said, "Dad, would you have a listen to it and tell me if it's OK?" I said, "Sure." But then I panicked, because like most middle-aged guys, my music is either on this [computer] or a CD. At the time, I didn't have a turntable, so I called a friend of mine up, he's a DJ [and] said, "What's the best turntable? Tell me the turntable I have to get."

I went out and I got one, and I listened and said, "Yeah, it's great. Everything's good." And then I had a box in the corner of my teenage records, the ones that Gray hadn't pilfered over the years [for] his collection. I started playing them when I was working on something else. That was mind-blowing as well, because in that box was everything that The Cure, became, you know?

Wow.

The connections weren't obvious, either. They weren't like, "Oh, OK, maybe there's some Buzzcocks and maybe you can see, well, there's a connection there with the early Cure." No, there were very, very striking examples of how to play different things [that] like osmosis, just come into us.

My friend James Murphy said to me, "You know, when you start first playing music, initially, you write songs like the people that you like." If you grew up liking The Smiths, you try and write a Smiths song and that becomes sort of your task initially. What happens is you get it wrong because you can't be them, or you can't be those people, because you have a different experience. You can't play in the same way.

"It's there in the streets, in the dark, dank English countryside."

And the way you get it wrong is what becomes your sound—and he's absolutely right. If I think about who we were trying to channel when we first started, we don't sound like them at all. The Cure doesn't sound like them at all. But I can see where the connections are now. It's the way we got it wrong. We couldn't play that way, or we didn't know what they were doing here, so we did our version of it, and that becomes your thing. The same must be true in writing as well.

I am not Joan Didion, and I don't think I ever would be, but I channeled the idea of how she would write and that was what was interesting to me. Obviously, the other literary things I put in the book, especially Sylvia Plath. I'd always loved her writing, but even more than the poetry, I love "The Bell Jar." It speaks to me of angst, and I understand where that comes from. Like I say in the book, although it's something rather different from my own [experience] — she wasn't a teenage boy growing up in England — I can transfer that to my own experiences and understand the feelings. And she writes so well about those things — that was a very good touchstone for me.

Goth: A HistoryFrom "Goth: A History": Lol Tolhurst at W.B. Yeats’s grave site (Cindy Tolhurst)It's that intensity of adolescence too — and there's nothing like it.

It's true. One of the quotes in my book [is] about Joe Strummer, and I said, "Joe Strummer saved my life” — not literally, but what Joe did helped me to become a man, and they wanted to know about that.

This is going to sound anthropological as well. But [in other societies] there are ceremonies [to mark] going from being a youth, a teenager, into adulthood. And we don't really have those in modern society. They've sort of gone away. I realized that becoming a punk was my ceremony. That was teaching me how to be out in the world, and so that's what I meant.

I was in my 50s when I started to write seriously. It was amazing because it is anthropology. I'm digging up the past to find out why things happened to explain it to myself more than anything else. That might sound a bit narcissistic, but I don't mean it in that way. I mean it more in a way to understand from where I've come to be able to utilize it now and maybe pass that on. I don't mean it to sound pompous, but to have that there so there's some kind of record of like, “Oh yes, well, this is how this happened, and this is what it produces.”

I think it's just something that happens as you get older, you start to see the little connections all over the world, which is actually a good part about getting old. Most of the parts about getting old are not good. My hearing's not as good as it was. There's more aches in the morning when I get up. But the good part is, you can actually start to see the whole picture much better.

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That's what I was going to say: You have that perspective. And especially something like goth, a genre that has been mocked or misunderstood over the years, but is finally starting to get respect and some serious scholarship. We need the people who were there to chronicle it from the beginning. The Batcave was much different than maybe people think it is, and so you need to have that fuller picture so the historical record is more accurate.

One thing that intrigued me was like, say Mary Shelley with "Frankenstein." It blew my mind when I found out there was never a proper scholarly biography about her until the '80s. It's like, really? There's one of the most famous novels in the English language. Why was there not?

It's not the first thing that comes to mind, but my aim is to bring some of those things to the forefront and say, "Look, this is something that has influenced a lot of artistry and thought in the Western world for quite some time. You need to know where it comes from and how it came about." That makes it interesting to me.

Cathi Unsworth has written a book about goth, and I did an event with her in London a couple of weeks ago. She said to me she liked the fact that I had given it a name and owned the name of goth. She's more of a journalist than anything else, she said, "A lot of people seek to defang goth by making fun of it.” I think that's very true. If you can turn it into bats and coffins, then it's not scary.

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Some experts warn against contacting aliens. Are the fears of an extraterrestrial invasion valid?

The concept of interstellar beings is pretty ancient, with even Greek philosophers pondering about the idea. But the concept of these beings acting maliciously is a relatively new one, which really took hold at the turn of the 19th Century thanks to H.G. Wells and his 1898 book "War of the Worlds." Today, aliens feature in many popular horror films such as the "Alien" series and "A Quiet Place" and action blockbusters like "Independence Day." First we invent extaterrestrial monsters, then we imagine them killing us.

But this fear has true scientific merit: Legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned his fellow scientists to stop trying to contact alien civilizations because he believed they would likely be hostile. Two years ago, a Washington Post editorial warned "Contacting aliens could end all life on earth. Let’s stop trying." And earlier this summer, four scholars were invited by the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the world's premiere organization for seeking intelligent life off-planet) to release an Indigenous studies working group statement on the issue. They cautioned "First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide."

To understand the root of this question, we need to start with physicist Enrico Fermi, who questioned why we don't see evidence of aliens amidst the stars — a puzzling prospect given the seeming likelihood that life should exist somewhere else in the universe. There are endless possible explanations for the so-called Fermi paradox, among them that aliens may be as exploitative and violent as we are.

"If they are belligerent, they may even try to destroy us and our society while pretending to be humans."

These fears may be rational. According to Dr. Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, we don't know a lot for sure, but certainly there is some reason for concern. "If they can travel to visit us, their technology is probably way ahead of ours, including maybe having a way to travel faster than light," Marchis wrote to Salon. "If they don't like us or don’t consider us to be intelligent, they could probably wipe us out quickly, so yes, this is a frightening prospect."

To best guess how these such aliens might act if they visited Earth and chose to be hostile, Marchis suggested comparing hypothetical aliens to real animals that humans encounter on a regular basis.

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"They could be like ants, with a queen in charge, like in the movie 'Aliens,'" Marchis speculated. "Or they could be like big cats that hunt alone and might come to our solar system to hunt, like in the movie 'Predator.' They could also be like the aliens in the TV show 'V,' who see our planet as a resource and want to use us and our water. Or, they might see us as a threat and want to destroy us before we get too advanced, like in the movie 'Independence Day.'"

Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science writer, takes a completely opposite position.

"This is a completely fear-driven approach from a human perspective, with no basis in reality," Siegel wrote to Salon. "Why would a technologically superior alien species, of all the planets with all the resources to choose from for whatever they required, choose to visit an inhabited, life-rich planet with a species in their technological infancy? And why, as these depictions tend to show, would their goal be to wipe out the infant species (us) rather than just acquire the resources they were seeking?"

Siegel compared this to humans intentionally annihilating a group of single-celled organisms in Europa's sub-surface oceans. "Of all the very real threats we face, from ourselves and from the Universe, this is just one case where our egocentrism has grabbed hold of our instinct to flee-and-hide as prey, and run amok in popular culture," Siegel said, ticking off movies like "Mars Attacks!" as examples of films that are as realistic as the Loch Ness monster, Sasquatch or Godzilla.

"Therefore, I put my trust in Godzilla to protect us from the invading aliens, just as she has successfully protected planet Earth from all similar alien invasions in the past," Siegel joked.

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"This is a completely fear-driven approach from a human perspective, with no basis in reality."

Dr. Steve Desch, an astrophysics professor at Arizona State University, was also skeptical of the prospect that aliens would be hostile to Earth. As he noted, "it's a completely silly premise once you realize the amount of technology and the magnitude of effort it would take to cross light years of space to fight a war like that."

Just as humans need for their investments to be worth the allocated resources, aliens would need it to be worth their while to travel all of this distance just to invade Earth. "Lifting just one of those city-sized destroyer spaceships from a hover position to Earth orbit would require more energy than the entire human civilization produces in a year (roughly 30,000 TWh). The aliens clearly have so much more resources. What do we have to offer?"

"It's a completely silly premise once you realize the amount of technology and the magnitude of effort it would take to cross light years of space to fight a war like that."

Desch added, "Sending in spaceships is so stupidly inefficient, too. Aliens intent on killing us and taking our planet would just crash an asteroid into every major city at once. If they could wait a millennium for the planet to recover, just send in a giant asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs. To really do the job right, just blow up the Sun, as in the book 'Dark Forest' by Cixin Liu."

While these possibilities may seem absurd, one must recall the basic premise of the Fermi paradox — if the universe is infinite, and therefore intelligent life is overwhelmingly likely to exist, any civilization capable of reaching Earth would have to be exponentially more advanced than our planet-bound species. 

"The Galaxy is over 12 billion years old," Desch wrote to Salon. "An alien civilization easily could have had a 100,000 year head start. At current rates of economic growth, human civilization could have powers literally 10 million times greater than it does today, in just 1,000 years. We just cannot imagine these discrepancies. The gap in resources and technology between the Spanish and the Aztecs was substantial, but absolutely trivial compared to the gap that would exist between us and an alien civilization."

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Are we too primitive for aliens to bother with us? Some scientists think so

When asked if any pop culture representations of aliens are accurate, Siegel pointed to movies that show benign representations of alien encounters: Robert Zemeckis' "Contact" (based on a novel by Carl Sagan of the same name), Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." and John Carpenter's "Starman."

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"It is more likely to be a case of 'Hey, who are you?' than 'Now that I found you, I'm coming to destroy you," Siegel said. For his part, Desch pointed to the Denis Villeneuve "Arrival" (based on a short story by Ted Chiang) because it succeeded in "depicting how advanced the aliens' technology is, but more so for how it depicted how difficult it would be to communicate with the aliens, understand their thought process and discern their purpose. I also love that the aliens are not here to destroy us, and even need our help." He also praised the Vernor Vinge book "A Deepness in the Sky" for likewise showing "that it's just as rational and likely that aliens would want to symbiotically help us when they arrived."

Marchis theorized that aliens who visited Earth would be closer to those "shown in the movie 'Men in Black' or the Lanthnites in 'Star Trek.'" His premise is that they would be "here, living with us, and learning about us without us even knowing it. If they are belligerent, they may even try to destroy us and our society while pretending to be humans."

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“This is an outrage”: Advocate calls out GOP for “silencing” pro-Palestinian student groups

Several prominent Republican presidential candidates in recent days have seized the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict as an opportunity to propose measures that would potentially infringe on the First Amendment – suggesting ideas like revoking student visas and deporting foreign nationals who express support for Palestinians or criticize Israel's military response.

Across American colleges and universities, students have organized large-scale protests and rallies calling for a ceasefire and supporting Palestinian freedom. But their efforts to promote liberation have largely been erroneously linked to endorsing Hamas.

Former President Donald Trump said earlier this month that if reelected, he would revoke student visas of “radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners” and would reinstate and expand his “Muslim ban,” a series of 2017 executive orders that banned travel from mostly Muslim countries and called for rigorous ideological screening of immigrants to the U.S., The New Republic reported.  

While pledging to significantly tighten U.S. immigration laws, Trump said: "If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you're disqualified, if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you're disqualified, and if you're a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified."

Several GOP presidential candidates have echoed similar sentiments – favoring the deportation of foreign students who are pro-Palestine or threatening to defund institutions that allow students to practice their freedom of speech. 

“Suppressing speech on an issue of such great public importance as the ongoing destruction of Gaza violates the very heart of what the First Amendment protects,” Justin Sadowsky, Council on American-Islamic Relations trial attorney, told Salon. “The First Amendment unequivocally extends to noncitizens here in this country, whether black, brown, or white. And part of the purpose of the student visa program is to showcase America’s freedom to the world. How can one aspire to be President of this country if one has contempt for the very Constitution the President swears to uphold?”

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently said if he were elected president, he would cancel the visas of students who expressed support for Palestine.

“You don’t have a right to be here on a visa,” DeSantis said on The Guy Benson Show last week. “You don’t have a right to be studying in the United States.”

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley suggested on Friday the potential of reducing or attaching conditions to state funding for higher education after accusing some colleges and universities of promoting violence.

“We have got to start connecting their government funding with how they manage hate,” Haley said. “Because when you do that, you are threatening someone’s life. That’s not freedom of speech.”

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said that he would withhold Pell Grant funding from universities that fail to adequately condemn terrorism, The New York Times reported. When discussing student student protests, he said: “If any of those students on college campuses are foreign nationals on a visa, they should be sent back to their country.”

On Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., added her support to the call for deportation by co-sponsoring a bill introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The bill seeks a vote on the expulsion of “individuals who stand with and back Hamas.”

Rubio has urged the Biden administration to cancel the visas of foreign nationals supporting Hamas and announced that he would pursue legislation to restrict federal funding to college campuses that host protests supporting Palestinian liberation.

“I will introduce legislation to force them to act,” Rubio said.

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Similar discussions are also brewing on Capitol Hill, where 19 Republican lawmakers are calling for foreign students who are in the U.S. on temporary visas to have their visas revoked and be deported from the country.  Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., both members of the House Anti-Woke Caucus, sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, requesting the deportation of student and foreign exchange visa-holders who have “endorsed terrorist activity."

In Florida, some of these calls to ban pro-Palestine groups have resulted in action. The head of Florida’s State University System has ordered the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to shut down on Wednesday over a “toolkit” published by the national organization.

State university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues has fixated on a section of the toolkit that "labeled the attack, now known as 'Operation Al-Aqsa Flood' as 'the resistance; and claimed that 'Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement,'” Politico reported.

By associating this document with SJP chapters in Florida, the state argues that these groups are violating a state law that criminalizes providing "knowing material support… to a designated foreign terrorist organization," and designates it as a felony, the outlet reported. 

The toolkit uses “offensive and anti-semitic” language, but none of it “amounts to what the statement has described as ‘material support’ for Hamas as a federally recognized terrorist organization,” Jeremy Young, the Freedom to Learn program director at PEN America, told Salon.  

“There's never ever a good reason to ban a student club on every campus in the state because of its viewpoints or statements made by its national organization, no matter how offensive those statements are,” Young said. “This is an outrage. It is a government stepping in and silencing students with whom it disagrees.”

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Students for Justice in Palestine describes itself as an organization that “seeks to empower, unify, and support student organizers as they push forward demands for Palestinian liberation & self-determination on their campuses. The organization has organized a number of demonstrations across college campuses.

Florida has been a "bad actor" when it comes to cracking down on student and faculty expressive rights, Alex Morey, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Salon. 

"This latest effort to derecognize student chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine is very clearly targeting disfavored speech," Morey said. "Florida seems to, either intentionally or unintentionally, misinterpret the law related to material provision of support to terrorism, which is unlawful, but only includes conduct supporting terrorism. Students speaking out about these issues, even if they express explicit support for groups like Hamas, without more, is 100% protected speech, and is lawful. The government should never be in the business of suppressing protected speech on a college campus. That idea is at the core of the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to decide which words or ideas We The People May express or hear."

When the government starts determining which student speech is permissible on campus, it sets us on a “slippery slope,” Young explained. 

“This is the turning of Florida College campuses into propaganda mills for the government, and it is telling students who have dissenting views… that their views are not welcome in Florida colleges,” Young said.

One of the reasons that censorship is “so damaging” in open intellectual environments is because it generates a widespread chilling effect, he explained. This means that even students and student groups who are not involved in extreme statements or supportive of them will fear that their own speech might be censored by the state government in the future.

“I can look at this toolkit and say, ‘I think this is really extreme,’” Young said. “I think it's more extreme than what other student groups are saying. But ultimately, that's a judgment call that I'm making. It's a judgment call the state governor is making and we do not, in a democratic society, place those judgments in the hands of politicians or in the hands of the government. The judgments about what is or is not an extreme thing to say, or an offensive thing to say, is a social judgment to be made by individuals and by democratic society, not by our government.”

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Female chimps discovered to display signs of menopause, a first for non-human primates

The last few months have seen major strides in chimpanzee-related research, from a study that figured out how chimpanzees form rudimentary languages to a study that examined how they reacted to being pranked with fake snakes. Now a study in the journal Science reveals there is evidence that chimpanzees can experience menopause — a phenomenon previously thought was only experienced by humans and certain species of toothed whales.

The researchers examined demographic and endocrine data for a population of chimpanzees in Uganda, one that had been studied by researchers for many years. They "found clear evidence for menopause in females living past the age of 50" and added that unlike the other species known to undergo menopause, "postreproductive chimps in this population are not involved in the raising of related offspring, suggesting that a different process is driving its development."

This is not to say that there are no other animals where females regularly live beyond their reproductive years. Usually when that happens, however, it is because of artificially imposed conditions rather than occurring in the wild.

“We know that in captivity there are quite a few species (including chimps) that can have a substantial postreproductive lifespans, with many individuals living quite long after their last reproduction,” corresponding author Kevin Langergraber told New Atlas. “This is because they get medical care, have abundant food, and no predators. Our novel finding is that we have demonstrated a substantial postreproductive lifespan in a chimp population that lives in the wild.”

The world is coming apart at the seams

Over 5,000 dead.  12,000 wounded.  Millions forcibly displaced.

Tragic figures from Gaza?  Think again:  Those are the casualty figures after six months of fighting in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), according to Amnesty International. In July, a mass grave was found containing the bodies of 87 civilians in Darfur in the west of Sudan.  The New York Times reported that the civilians were likely killed by RSF soldiers fighting for one of the two generals contesting control of Sudan.  Four and a half million people have been displaced.  More than a million other Sudanese citizens have sought shelter in the surrounding countries of Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.  The Wagner Group, the private Russian army that was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has established a base in Darfur and is advising one of the sides in the conflict.  Russia is seeking influence in Sudan so they can be permitted to station their warships at a port along Sudan’s Red Sea coastline.

How about Yemen, the country with coasts on both the Red and Arabian seas, including the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea?  What is happening in that incredibly strategic part of the world?  How about nearly 400,000 killed, with 11,000 of them children, nearly 60 percent of the deaths from hunger, lack of healthcare and safe water.   According to the U.N., 4.5 million Yemenis – one in seven of the country’s population – have been displaced in the eight years of fighting between Houthi rebels and Yemen’s floundering government.

In the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, there has been a civil war going on since a military coup d’etat in 2021.  According to Sky News, more than 6,000 civilians have been killed, with more than 3,000 of those deaths coming in the last 12 months.  The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian affairs reported that more than 1.6 million people have been internally displaced and 40,000 have fled Myanmar into neighboring countries.  As many as 55,000 civilian buildings have been destroyed in the fighting.

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Let’s not forget Ukraine.  Since Russia launched its illegal attack on Ukraine in February of 2022, nearly 10,000 civilians have been killed, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights.  Nearly 18,000 civilians have been wounded.  The Pentagon estimates that as many as 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, and somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 have been wounded.  The U.S. estimates that more than 120,000 Russian troops have been killed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and as many as 180,000 have been wounded.  Ukraine is the breadbasket of Eastern Europe.  Agricultural land in the country’s east has been decimated by bombs and artillery, and grain shipments from Ukraine’s port, Odessa, have been either stopped completely by Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s coastline in the Black Sea, or severely compromised. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threw the NATO alliance of western European nations into an uproar.  Two new nations, Finland and Sweden, petitioned for membership in NATO, with Finland becoming a member in April of this year.  (Sweden’s membership has been held up by Turkey, which must assent in the NATO vote to make Sweden a member.  President Erdogan recently announced he will put Sweden’s membership to a vote of the Turkish parliament.  The measure is expected to pass, and Sweden could become a member at the next meeting of NATO foreign ministers in late November.)

Even though NATO members quickly coalesced around support for Ukraine last year, with the U.S. Congress passing emergency appropriations to support Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance, the Republican coup-plotter just elected as Speaker of the House has voted against Ukraine aid in the past, and after the clusterfuck House Republicans went through to elect their Speaker, with clashes between the party’s moderate and far-right wings, it is uncertain what the fate of President Biden’s latest request for more than $100 billion in Ukraine aid will be.

The attempted coup in this country has riven the Congress with even deeper divisions than existed while Trump was president.  As a candidate for president, Trump has been all over the map about aid for Ukraine, supporting it one minute, critical of it the next.  Now Trump is calling for the Republicans in Congress to condition aid for Ukraine on the Biden Administration agreeing to somehow “support” Republican congressional investigations into Biden and his son, Hunter.

Let’s have a look at some other coups in the news besides ours. 

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More mass shootings like the one in Maine? Supreme Court will soon consider unleashing the violence

In July of this year, a coup in the African nation of Niger overthrew the government of President Mohammed Bazoum, with an officer in the Presidential Guard declaring himself the leader of a military junta.  Which would sound exotic, if Republicans in this country had not just elected as Speaker of the House a leader of the coup that nearly overthrew the U.S. government in 2021.  During that attempted coup, there was at least one meeting in the Oval Office in the White House during which what amounted to rule by military junta was suggested to President Trump and at least briefly considered, according to recent guilty plea from  one of the coup plotters and the indictment of another. 

Why should we worry about a coup in Niger?  Well, the U.S. has had troops stationed in that country for a number of years to counter Islamist insurgencies by A-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram.  Instability in Niger opened the door for Russia’s Wagner Group to begin exerting influence there.  In fact, that is exactly what happened in early August of this year, when the leader of the military junta asked for help from the Wagner Group to hold onto power as the junta came under threat of intervention from a coalition of Western African nations known as ECOWAS.  After the coup in the summer, supporters of the junta waved Russian flags in the streets of Niamey, the capital of Niger.  “Wagner is a recipe for disaster,” said a spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry after the contact between the Russian paramilitary group and the junta became known.

And now the world is watching as the tinderbox conflict between Israel and Palestinians gets closer and closer to ignition and explosion.  When Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza on October 7, firing thousands of rockets and rampaging through civilian villages and small military outposts, killing 1,400 Israelis and taking more than 200 civilian and military hostages, it set off a cascade of violence in the region.  Israel has hammered Hamas targets in Gaza with airstrikes and massed more than 300,000 of its troops on the Gaza border in contemplation of a ground assault on Hamas in its Gaza strongholds.  In northern Israel, Hezbollah fighters, with support from Iran, have launched rocket and artillery attacks on Israel.  Over the last few days, militants in Syria with strong connections to Iran have fired missiles and sent armed drones to attack U.S. military outposts in Syria and Iraq, including an airbase in western Iraq close to the Syrian border.  The U.S. has struck back with airstrikes on two militant outposts in Eastern Syria that are linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the strikes on Thursday night, saying that President Biden had ordered the retaliatory strikes “to make clear that the United States will not tolerate such attacks and will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests.”  Austin also said that the airstrikes on militant outposts in Syria were “separate and distinct” from the war between Israel and Hamas – as if the attacks on U.S. assets in Syria and Iraq were “separate and distinct” from what is going on between Israel and Hamas. 

I used the word tinderbox to describe the situation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, but the word applies to the whole damn world right now.  Vladimir Putin has not been shy about reminding anyone critical of his invasion of Ukraine that he has enough nuclear weapons to destroy most of the world.  It was Russia’s first nuclear saber rattling since the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is turning out that the end of the Cold War has morphed into the start of hot wars all over the globe, costing the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians, from bullets or bombs and starvation, disease, and inexcusable neglect from the rest of the world.  Let’s not forget that the pandemic which began in 2020 was declared over in this country earlier this year, after 1.14 million of us had died from the disease.  In the parts of the world that were unable to afford COVID vaccines, or because of wars and other conflicts have not been able to organize the emergency health care procedures necessary, COVID is still rampaging.  Worldwide, there have been seven million deaths so far, and those are just the reported deaths by the World Health Organization.  There are doubtlessly more unrecorded deaths in places like Darfur and Yemen and Myanmar, and Somalia and in war zones like Ukraine.

One of those spikey microscopic COVID proteins that attacks and infects human cells does not cost a penny, but we’re not satisfied with mere death from disease.  No, we human beings are spending hundreds of billions every year on military hardware with which to kill each other, including the tens of billions spent every year in this country on firearms like the AR-15, which was used by a murderer just this week to kill another 18 innocent Americans. 

You think the civilian death tolls in Israel and Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan are bad?  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 2021, the last year for which complete national figures are available, 48,830 Americans died from firearm violence (homicide) or suicide.  The authoritative Gun Violence Archive reports that last year, 20,138 Americans were killed by firearms in a homicide.  The firearms we are using to kill each other or ourselves are easily available at your local gun store.  All you need is money, a driver’s license, and the lack of a criminal record, although the last two requirements are regularly avoided in so-called “private” gun sales at gun shows.

So, add the death toll from America’s compulsion to buy and use firearms into the mix.  Even countries at war or suffering coups and revolutions can’t keep up with the number of people killed in this country with guns.  If the world is coming apart at the seams, the initial rip in the fabric of civilization starts right here.

Suspect in Maine mass shootings found dead

Hours after a press conference on Friday afternoon, where all 18 names of those who were killed during a mass shooting that took place at two locations in Lewiston, Maine on Wednesday night were announced, their suspected killer has been found dead. 

In an update from CNN, multiple sources confirm that the body of 40-year-old Robert Card was found in the woods near Lisbon, which is about eight miles from Lewiston. His cause of death is from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. According to a law enforcement source, the spot in which he was discovered is in an area near the recycling center from which he had been recently fired.

Earlier in the day, law enforcement discovered what appeared to be a suicide note in Card's home that was said to have been addressed to his son, although no known motive for his crimes was expressed therein. Per AP News, Card was a U.S. Army reservist who underwent a mental health evaluation in mid-July after he began acting erratically during training.

 

 

Officials release names of Maine mass shooting victims as hunt for suspect continues

As authorities continue their search for the person responsible for killing 18 people and injuring 13 others during a mass shooting that took place at two locations in Lewiston, Maine on Wednesday night, new information has been released about the victims after conclusive identification with the help of their families. 

According to a report from ABC News recounting details from a press conference held on Friday afternoon, the victims range in age from 14 to 76 and 4 of the 18 people killed were deaf, having been shot down while part of a gathering of people playing cornhole at Schemengees Bar & Grill.

During the press conference where all 18 names of those who were killed were read, followed by a moment of silence, Commissioner of Public Safety Mike Sauschuck said that the shelter in place order had been rescinded but hunting has been banned in the cities of Lewiston, Lisbon, Bowdoin and Monmouth beginning Saturday and lasting until further notice. He stressed that nearby residents should be aware of areas in which this ban is not taking place so that, should they hear gunshots, they don't assume those shots have anything to do with the ongoing investigation in this case. 

Local businesses are told that they may remain open, or close up shop as the search for Robert Card, the 40-year-old person of interest, remains underway. 

Watch the press conference below:

 

The coming crisis of 2025: What a second Trumpocracy would mean

If he becomes the official nominee of the Republican Party in next year’s presidential race, Donald Trump will receive tens of millions of votes in the general election. He may get less than the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He may get more. Regardless, tens of millions of GOP, conservative, and extremist voters will cast their ballots for him.

In 2016, despite his history of elitist, racist, and sexist behavior, failed businesses, lack of governing experience, and no demonstrated past of caring for anyone but himself, he won nearly 63 million votes. While still almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton got, it was not just enough for a victory in the Electoral College but a clear warning of things to come.

In 2020, after four years of non-stop chaos, the death of more than 200,000 Covid victims at least in part because of his mishandling of the pandemic, a legitimate and warranted impeachment, abuse of power, ceaseless corruption, and more than 30,000 documented public lies, he gained 74 million votes, even if, in the end, he lost the election.

Now, in addition to all that history, you can add on the incitement of a violent insurrection, a second impeachment for attempting to overthrow the government, four criminal indictments (91 separate charges), being found liable for sexual abuse, and a stated plan to exact retribution against his enemies in a second term. And yet he will undoubtedly again receive many tens of millions of votes.

In fact, you can count on one thing: the 2024 election will not resolve the authoritarian attraction that the Trump vote represents. So perhaps it’s time to prepare now, not later, for the political crisis that will undoubtedly emerge from that event, whatever the vote count may prove to be.

The Authoritarian Threat Continues

A year from the next election, multiple scenarios are imaginable including, of course, that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden will be contenders. While Biden’s health seems fine at present, he will be only weeks away from his 82nd birthday on Election Day 2024. A lot can happen, health-wise, in a year. When it comes to Trump, however, Biden is now likely to be significantly healthier (mentally and physically) than him. Among other things, no blatant lies or well-tailored suits can hide his unhealthy obesity.

And while he relishes castigating Biden’s cognitive state, it was Trump who only a few weeks ago, while giving a speech attacking the president’s capabilities, stated that he beat “Obama” in an election, that Americans needed IDs to buy bread, and that Biden would lead the country into “World War II,” which just happens to have ended 78 years ago. While some of Trump’s GOP opponents like Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley have indeed launched ageist attacks against him, it’s true that he’s roughly in the same age group as Biden.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that Donald Trump’s legal health is on life support. It’s a good bet that, in 2024, he will spend more time in courtrooms than on the campaign trail. He may very well face that moment of truth when he has to decide to cut a deal that keeps him out of prison and out of the White House.

In any case, the current trajectory remains Biden vs. Trump 2.0 while, whatever the outcome of the election, this nation seems to be headed for a crisis of historic proportions. No matter who wins, next November 7th will do nothing to end the divisions that exist in this country. In fact, it’s only likely to exacerbate and amplify them. 

Trump Remains a Danger

Trump has already made it clear that he won’t accept any losing outcome. Neither will millions of his followers. For modern Republican Party leaders and their base, election rejection (if they lose) has become an ironclad principle. On the stump, Trump has already begun to emphasize that the spiraling legal cases against him are “election interference,” that the Democrats are putting the pieces in place to steal the election from him, and that the Black judge and prosecutors holding him accountable are “racists.”

As he wrote on one of his social media posts (in caps) those individuals are to him “RIGGERS.” That stable genius’s use of a term that rhymes with a racist slur against Black people was undoubtedly no accident. After all, he spends a considerable amount of his private time branding people. White supremacists wasted hardly a moment in beginning to use the term online, in part, to get around censors on the lookout for explicitly racist terminology.

He is, in other words, already laying the foundation to claim election fraud and creating the basis for another MAGA revolt. While there’s plenty of reason to believe he won’t be able to draw tens of thousands of his supporters to attack the Capitol again, not the least being the Justice Department’s prosecution of hundreds of those who tried it the last time, he’ll certainly have GOP members in Congress ready to resist certifying a Democratic victory.

Trump’s desperation to win is driven not only by the prospect of multiple convictions in his various trials, drawn-out appeals (that are unlikely to be successful), and possible prison time of some sort, but also by the brutal public dismantling of what’s left of his financial empire. The civil suit New York Attorney General Letitia James brought against Trump and the Trump organization has already resulted in a devastating judgment by Judge Arthur Engoron. He ruled Trump and his adult sons liable and immediately stripped them of their control over their businesses. Trump may now not only lose all his New York business properties but have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution. For someone whose whole identity is linked to his purported wealth, there could hardly have been a more crushing blow.

In his mind, a second term as president clearly has little to do with benefiting the country, the Republican Party, or even the rest of his family. It’s his only path to shutting down the two federal cases against him in Florida and Washington, D.C. However, even such a win wouldn’t help him with the election interference case in Georgia or the hush-money criminal case in New York. Convictions in either of those would mean further accountability sooner or later. A second term would undoubtedly offer him another chance to monetize the presidency, just as he did the first time around, in a fashion never before seen.

His record is still being investigated but, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump raked in tens of millions of dollars that way. It reports that Trump’s businesses took in more than $160 million from international sources alone, and a grand total of more than $1.6 billion from all sources, during his presidency. As CREW put it: “Trump’s presidency was marred by unprecedented conflicts of interest arising from his decision not to divest from the Trump Organization, with his most egregious conflicts involving businesses in foreign countries with interests in U.S. foreign policy.”

Trump’s Violence Advocacy Grows

Trump’s legitimate fear of losing is pushing him toward ever more strident and violent language. He’s also signaling to his followers that the use of force to put him in power (or go after those who deny it to him) is all too acceptable. His visit to the Palmetto State Armory gun shop in Summerville, South Carolina, on September 25th was an unambiguous message to them: get ready for war.

There, he admired a Glock pistol and was visibly eager to purchase it. However, he ran into a legal snafu. His spokesperson, Steven Cheung, initially posted a video on social media celebrating Trump’s purchase of the Glock, a special “Trump edition” that had a likeness of him and the words “Trump 45th” etched on it. According to the New York Times, Trump gleefully said, “I want to buy one.”

However, after a staff member apparently realized that no one under federal indictment could legally do so, the post was deleted and a subsequent statement was put up that read, “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” The store would also have been liable under federal law 18 U.S.C. 922, given that it would have been hard for its proprietors to deny that they knew the former president was under multiple indictments.

That visit was more than just a message to his followers to arm themselves. There are 158 gun stores in South Carolina and yet Trump selected the very one linked to a mass killing of Black people in Florida. At least one of the guns used in those murders had been purchased at that very gun shop. On August 26, 2023, white supremacist Ryan Christopher Palmeter went to a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, and murdered three African Americans — Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Jerrald Gallion, 29; and Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., 19 — and then killed himself as the police closed in.

The shooter had two guns, a Glock and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, one of them from the South Carolina Palmetto State Armory gun store. Palmeter also left behind several racist manifestos.

That carnage occurred just a month before Trump’s visit and his implicit decision to associate himself with that explosion of bigoted violence — like an earlier trip to Waco, Texas, the site of a deadly gunfight between federal law enforcement agents and antigovernment extremists — helped reinforce the idea on the far right that violent force is acceptable for political ends. In his speech at Waco, his first “official” campaign rally for election 2024, Trump stated, “I am your warrior, I am your justice… For those who have been wronged and betrayed… I am your retribution.”

The chaos and disorder likely to follow any Trump loss in 2024 will only be further enhanced if the GOP keeps control of the House of Representatives or wins control of the Senate. A number of congressional Republicans have shown that they will not hesitate to do all they can to put Trump back in the White House, including igniting a constitutional crisis by refusing to certify Electoral College votes.

All that said, Trump losing and sending his supporters into the streets amid tantrums by congressional Republicans and Republican state governors and legislatures would hardly be the worst possible scenario.

After all, if Trump were to win, the extremists in and out of government would immediately be empowered to carry out the most right-wing agenda since the height of the segregationist era. A reelected Trump will find the most loyal (to him) and corruptible cabinet members possible. Their only necessary qualification will be a willingness to follow his orders without hesitation, whether or not they’re legal, ethical, or by any stretch of the imagination good for the country.

Count on one thing: it wouldn’t be an America First but a Trump First and Last administration.

He would undoubtedly engage in a series of personal vendettas with the sort of viciousness and resolve never before seen in Washington. He would take a victory, no matter how marginal or questionable, in the Electoral College as a mandate to attack all his perceived enemies with whatever power his new presidency could muster. He’s also well aware of a Department of Justice policy (of questionable legality) not to prosecute a sitting president, which he’ll interpret as a license of perpetual lawlessness. Trump’s persecution administration would harken back to the worst days of McCarthyism and beyond.

And lest you think that’s the end of the matter, it only gets worse. 

Trump Will Have Significantly More Help in a Second Term

Beyond Trump’s individual sociopathic behavior, a far-right agenda is being created that will provide a certain ideological clarity to his bumbling authoritarianism. The policy work, not just from the Trump campaign but from Project 25, should scare everyone. A $22 million initiative by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, Project 25 has already produced a 920-page book, "Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise," detailing plans to reshape the federal government. If implemented, its strategy would write “the end” to the classic separation of powers, checks and balances, and even a non-partisan civil service. Every single federal department and agency would instead be restructured to fall under the complete control of the president.

It also offers hundreds of new policies on issues ranging from the environment and labor rights to education and health care. Its underlying assumption: that, post-2024, a conservative president will be in power for some time to come. (If so, Trump will, of course, have the backing of Republicans in Congress, who again may control one or both chambers, and a 6-3 Supreme Court majority.)

Count on this: resistance will be swift, massive, and enduring. Trump and Republican minority rule would not go unchallenged and the repression sure to follow would only generate yet more resistance and, undoubtedly, a generation of political turbulence.

On the other hand, a significant electoral defeat for the Republicans and Trump (along with his conviction on any number of criminal charges) would certainly prove a major obstacle to future authoritarianism. However, tens of millions of his voters will not go quietly into the night, while far-right elected officials in Congress and state legislatures will continue to push extreme conservative policies. White nationalists and radical evangelicals will mobilize as best as they can. Financial and political resources will be available.

The effort to defeat MAGA at all levels and in all ways politically will go on, but progressives need to prepare for the challenge of 2024 and the perilous years to follow.

Trump’s Schedule F (for “Failed State”): Are Republicans fascists or nihilists — or both?

Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum.

Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position. 

Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.

You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his — and it is increasingly his alone — GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.

You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system. Perhaps it’s partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.

Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker. Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden administration of planning to replace white voters with immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Fearsome Power

Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money. My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape. These days, Miller is himself a president of something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”

Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons. “The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal, so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions.”

Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025. These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s  Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of personnel John McEntee. As the New York Times reported in July,

“Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.”

The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle — the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president. In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — provide checks and balances on each other. Under the unitary executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump will agree and act accordingly.

By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive, would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a nation’s laws and — just as the name suggests — the executive exists to “execute” them.

Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two. If that were the case, wouldn’t the executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact, Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as Locke argued) the legislative.

Heritage, however, points to Article II, which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on January 6, 2021.

While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power was met with widespread derision.

However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so. As the Times reported in July, their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly that direction.

A (Schedule) F in Government

Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government. Patronage jobs — positions granted, often to the friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors — were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified candidates for specific positions replaced the old system.

Today, the Office of Personnel Management oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.

The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives. It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on various branches of government through such appointments.

Those 4,000 positions exempted from competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules” (lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5 — I told you we were going to get into the weeds! — lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from civil service exams.

Or at least those were all the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

Such a broad, ill-defined category could, in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.

On taking office, however, President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least, Schedule F no longer exists.

In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected. That’s where the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).

Jokers to the Right of Me…

The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers. They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence. They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.

Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were. Did they want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social service programs? Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop funding Ukraine’s war effort?

When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:

“My goal is to get the most conservative Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and total control — this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our fellow Americans first.”

All Together Now

Much of this would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told the Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal

“an end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.”

I can’t say it any better than she has. They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes. That would put us on a true Schedule F — for Failed State — a condition this country now seems hellbent on achieving.

All the witchy things I do to stay connected to the occult this season and every season

As an ex-Evangelical kid who grew up in Amish country in the Northeast, I never really felt tied to anything — least of all religion. It's hard to trust or instill faith in anything when all your life you've been told what you should believe.

My agnostic views towards life and the larger meaning of life changed when I found a love of astrology in college with my best friend. We would spend hours reading each other's charts and diving into the deeper philosophical reasons we are the way that we are. We would run compatibility charts on the people we crushed on and each other. It became a pure and innocent way for two non-religious college girls to bond. She has always had an instinctive bond to the spiritual world — she grew up in a Cuban-Puerto Rican household that practiced and believed in Santería, a cross between West African spiritual and religious beliefs with Cuban Catholicism. For me, as someone who grew up Ethiopian and Evangelical, all of this spiritualism was new ground I was breaking into, and I was scared of what it held for me.

As I grew into the version of the person I am right now, I took a witch literature course at my kooky liberal arts college and I was hooked. It was there that I learned about all the types of witchcrafts and how most people follow their own personalized practices. We read "Carrie" by Stephen King, "I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem" by Maryse Condé, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson and plenty of poetry by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. It was a small class filled with women and nonbinary people and it was a safe place to intimately dive into the social and political impacts of witchcraft in the 20th and 21st centuries. My professor was a witch, and many of my classmates also identified as witches. As a former Christian whose parents despised anything to do with magic, it felt like I was traveling to discover a whole new realm.

Related

My affair with witchcraft

In the last few years, I have found solace in the connection to the occult or woo-woo witchy practices I do in my life. I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm a witch quite yet — give me a few more years — but I use a lot of witch practices in my daily life. And as we settle into fall, it feels like being a witch is in. So here are some of the things I do to feel connected to a larger community and idea of spirituality not just in the fall but year round.

First, I recommend starting with something as simple as crystals. Crystals are a great way to redirect negative energy or even alleviate stress, anxiety and just in general ward off bad vibes. Each crystal has its specific property which will help cleanse your space or give you a jolt of creativity. You can buy tumbled rocks in many different forms. I wear mine in my bracelets, rings and necklaces which means you always have it with you, protecting your energy. I tend to prefer rocks like aura quartz and rose quartz because they're stunning but also usually help me communicate and give me emotional support and relationship healing. I also love to burn sage and incense to cleanse my space of all negative energy and keep a room and house that sparks creativity and peacefulness.

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Another way I feel connected to spirituality is through tarot cards. It's a practice I use for myself when I feel like I need guidance and answers for the biggest, most complicated aspects of my life like work or my love life. I wouldn't say immediately start with tarot but work your way up to it because it can be intense, and you may not be ready to figure out some harsh realities about your life.

Alongside all these practices whenever the moon is in a crucial part of its phases, I do shadow work. Shadow work is essentially an exploration into your psyche using prompts and astrology to unlock parts of your self-development. So essentially a lot of journaling. We actually have an important partial lunar eclipse in the astrological sign Taurus which is said to be the last of the year. OK, I know I sound kooky but I also realize that while these ristualistic practices work for me for the most part — sometimes even I need a break from always pondering the abstract.

While being a witch isn't as stereotypically whimsical as it is portrayed to be in the '90s seasonal classic "Practical Magic," these practices have given me a sense of control and sometimes a sense that there is a high power looking out for my destiny or fate. Hopefully, during this season and well every season you can find solace in the richness of the occult.

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about witchcraft

 

George Santos pleads not guilty to new charges as House expulsion vote looms

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., pleaded not guilty to 10 new federal charges on Friday, putting him up against mounting legal issues and an uncertain future in Congress.

These most recent charges are part of a revised indictment filed earlier this month, tacking on conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, false statements to the Federal Election Commission and falsifying records to obstruct the commission, according to The New York Times. A tentative September 9 trial date has been set, which puts Santos in an awkward position as the date lands just under two months before the November general election, and his seat is anything but secure.

Earlier this month, Santos stamped down on the possibility of an ouster, telling reporters, “They can try to expel me, but I pity the fools that go ahead and do that and think that that’s the smartest idea.” But there are plenty of "fools" readying themselves to do just that. According to Politico, "Long Island political leaders are preparing for the possibility of a special election to succeed Santos amid his legal woes." And on Thursday, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito R-N.Y., gave an impassioned statement on the House floor on why Santos should be booted, introducing a resolution to expel that may result in a vote as soon as next week. 

Watch that statement here:

 

 

 

 

Trump’s court whisperer had a state judicial strategy. Its full extent only became clear years later

In July 2015, Wisconsin's Supreme Court shielded Gov. Scott Walker, then a rising Republican star with aspirations to the presidency, from a criminal investigation.

The court's conservative majority halted the probe into what prosecutors suspected were campaign finance violations. One of the deciding votes was cast by Justice David Prosser, a conservative who had won reelection a few years earlier in a heavily contested race. During the race, a state GOP operative said if their party lost Prosser, "The Walker agenda is toast," according to an email included in a trove of documents the Guardian surfaced. Another vote for Walker came from Michael Gableman, a justice who had also waged a contentious campaign for his Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

The high court, determining the prosecutors had overreached, ordered the investigation's documents destroyed. But not before the Guardian got its hands on a copy. And buried in the 1,500 pages was a reference to a key figure in propelling both Prosser and Gableman to victory: the co-chair of the right-leaning legal group the Federalist Society, organizer of dark money groups and conservative strategist Leonard Leo.

The Prosser and Gableman races were crucial skirmishes in Leo's decadeslong, ambitious effort to shape American law from the ground up. It's a project whose full dimensions are only now becoming clear. ProPublica detailed the arc of Leo's activism in a recent story and podcast with "On The Media."

If Leo's name sparks a note of recognition, it's usually because he was Donald Trump's judge whisperer and a leading figure in helping create the 6-3 conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo realized decades ago it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices; he would have to approach the legal system holistically if he wanted to bring lasting change. To undo landmark rulings like Roe v. Wade, Leo understood that he needed to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo built a machine to achieve that goal. He helped ensure the nominations of justices from Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett. He used his closeness to the justices to attract donors to support his larger effort. He then used those donations to build a network of dark money groups supporting his candidates and causes across the U.S. And he helped elect or appoint state Supreme Court justices who were predisposed to push American jurisprudence to the right.

Wisconsin was where Leo honed his strategy. In 2008, in a racially charged challenge to the state's first Black Supreme Court justice, Leo himself raised money for Gableman, according to a person familiar with the campaign. Leo passed along a list of wealthy donors with the instructions to "tell them Leonard told you to call," this person said. All those people gave the maximum. Gableman won, the first time an incumbent was unseated in Wisconsin in 40 years. (Leo declined to comment to us on his role in that race.)

Then in 2011, state GOP operatives turned to Leo to boost Prosser. They hoped he would help them raise $200,000 for "a coalition to maintain the Court," the emails show. Prosser won, by half a percentage point. (When the emails mentioning his race surfaced, Prosser defended his independence.)

In 2016, Leo got involved again. Walker had a vacancy to fill and had three people on his shortlist: two Court of Appeals justices and the former attorney for an anti-abortion group and Federalist Society chapter head, Dan Kelly. "Leo stepped in and said it's going to be Dan Kelly," a person familiar with the selection told us. Walker denied speaking to Leo, who said he didn't remember. From 2016 until the present, a group called the Judicial Crisis Network (which is now known as the Concord Fund), was a regular donor to state judicial races. Leo has no official role at the JCN, which as a dark money group does not have to disclose its donors. But he helped create and raise money for it, and JCN often works toward the same goals as the Federalist Society.

JCN was a crucial financial supporter of the public campaigns to win support for Supreme Court nominees backed by Leo, from Chief Justice John Roberts to Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. In Wisconsin, JCN sent increasing amounts of money to judicial races through circuitous routes. Sometimes the contribution flowed through a national political organization like the Republican State Leadership Committee. Other times, the money was sent to Wisconsin-based outfits.

Wisconsin is not the only state that Leo focused on. North Carolina shows the effects of more than a decade's worth of big-dollar funding from his network and a torrent of negative ads questioning the integrity of the judiciary.

In 2022, after years of sustained campaign spending by the Judicial Crisis Network and allied groups, North Carolina's high court flipped from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican majority. Months later, the court did something extraordinary: It reinstated a voter ID law that the same court, in its Democratic-led iteration, had found discriminated against Black voters. It also overturned a newly court-approved elections map that had produced an electoral outcome reflecting the state's partisan split.

In Wisconsin, the battles over the high court continue to be fierce. In April, Kelly, Leo's chosen candidate, ran to maintain a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. It was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with both sides spending at least $51 million. But Democrats were activated by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling to overturn Roe and by election maps that had maintained Republican dominance in the Legislature in a state evenly divided along partisan lines. Their candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won resoundingly.

But that hasn't stopped Republicans from trying to regain control. In September, there was talk of impeaching Protasiewicz because of comments she made during the campaign about "rigged" election maps. That effort has subsided — for now.

Leo's candidate lost in Wisconsin — but his efforts over the years have succeeded in something else: transforming seats on state Supreme Courts into political prizes. In many states, such judges are no longer viewed as independent arbiters from a branch of government that operates outside partisanship but as a kind of super-legislator. "That's bad for the system," Robert Orr, a former Republican North Carolina justice, told us. "It's bad for democracy. It's a very dangerous path to tread down."

In a written statement, Leo said state courts "are more independent and impartial today than they were when trial lawyers and unions dominated state judicial races without any counter."

The stakes for democracy are stark. Already, a University of Washington study ranking the health of democracies in states found North Carolina and Wisconsin have plummeted from two of the highest-scoring states to scraping the bottom.

One result of this project is clear. Today, the practice of deploying every weapon in the American political arsenal, from nasty campaign ads to spending by groups whose donors are hidden, is now a routine aspect of campaigns for the judges who rule on state laws and, in 2024, might well decide the outcome of elections in battleground states.

Centrist Maine Democrat takes “responsibility” after mass shooting and flips on assault weapon ban

In the wake of two Wednesday mass shootings in Lewiston, Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, announced Thursday that he had reversed his stance on gun control, calling on Congress to ban assault weapons, CBS News reports. "I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war, like the assault rifle used to carry out this crime," Golden told reporters at a news conference Thursday. "The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown of Lewiston, Maine." 

A gunman killed 18 people and wounded 13 others after opening fire at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Maine, Wednesday night. The suspect, believed to be 40-year-old Robert Card, is still at large. Golden, who previously departed from his party to vote against gun control bills, said he's now interested in working with his colleagues to further and pass such legislation. "For the good of my community, I will work with any colleague to get this done in the time that I have left in Congress," he said. 

The representative also asked for forgiveness because of his previous opposition to gun control measures, including his joining a handful of Democrats in voting against a bill last year that would have banned specific semi-automatic weapons in the aftermath of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York and Highland Park, Illinois. "To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the 2nd District, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I ask for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings," Golden said.

Taylor Swift dispels “Gaylor” rumors to the dismay of many fans who feel queerbaited

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift on Friday released "1989 (Taylor's Version)," reviving the 2014 album name for her birth year with the addition of previously vaulted tracks. Swift's life, at the time of the album's original release, also became distinguished by all-female friendships, a move that came after being consistently romantically linked to men in her life by the media and the public. Since then, a steady undercurrent of fans who believe Swift is not straight, otherwise known as "Gaylors," have proliferated, decoding the minutia of Swift's lyrics and music videos to prove a thesis of perceived queerness.

In a leaked document said to be the latest album’s written prologue, Swift supposedly shut down years of speculation about her sexuality. While addressing the slut-shaming she endured early in her career, Swift wrote, “Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior. I swore off dating and decided to focus only on myself, my music, my growth and my female friendships. If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”

The Gaylor rumors first cropped up in 2014, when photos of Swift seemingly kissing her former bestie, supermodel Karlie Kloss, went viral online. At the time, the famed duo were pretty much inseparable, attending Victoria’s Secret fashion shows together and even sharing the cover of Vogue magazine. Although Swift’s rep asserted that the possibility of a Swift-Kloss romance was complete “crap,” Gaylors were adamant that Swift was just in the closet.

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Gaylors have since taken over social media, building a community off of a baseless theory that Swift is secretly bisexual. There’s a Gaylor subreddit and several Gaylor accounts on X, like @gaylornews, @accidntlygaylor and @gaylorswiftbot. In the wake of the prologue leak, many diehard Gaylors were expectedly disappointed and even angry that their favorite pop star appears to be merely an ally and not queer herself. Some even went as far as to accuse her of leading them on through queerbaiting.

“Won't be staying up to listen. F**k that and f**k her for queerbaiting for a decade and then suddenly acting like it never happened,” wrote one angry fan on X. “Was it truly all narcissism to pull the biggest audience she could get?”

“I am not a dramatic person but I feel like I’ve been continuously gaslit for almost a decade,” another fan posted on Reddit. “I’ve stuck it out through a lot of things . . . this is basically the nail in my Gaylor coffin.”

Others said they were now “fully done” with Swift and moving “on to openly queer artists.” One self-described “Non-Gaylor” also made a Reddit post titled, “If you’re feeling lost/upset, here are some openly gay people to Stan.”

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Elsewhere in her prologue, Swift discussed her close-knit girl group, writing, "You see — in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming — the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop.

"Because it was starting to really hurt. It became clear to me that for me, there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him, and so I swore off hanging out with guys. Dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era."

Later in the prologue, Swift thanked her fans who “knew that maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood (not starting a tyrannical girl cult).”

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about Taylor Swift:

“Incorrect and misleading allegations”: Jack Smith accuses Trump of lying to delay Mar-a-Lago trial

Special counsel Jack Smith in a new filing accused Donald Trump and his legal team of lying about the discovery record in an effort to delay the trial schedule in the former president's classified documents case. In the filing, posted Thursday evening, the special counsel argues that an unclassified response and classified supplement Trump filed on Oct. 19 "made incorrect and misleading allegations about the discovery record in furtherance of his attempt to delay the pretrial litigation schedule and May 20, 2024 trial date."

Smith went on to offer a correction of the misleading statements from the defense's brief. "[A]s of October 6, the defense has had available to it nearly all unclassified and classified discovery collected by the Government to date, as set forth in prior filings cited below, and the Government understands that the defense SCIF has been approved to store all classified materials in this case, including the special measures documents," the filing reads. "The Government has met and exceeded its discovery obligations to date and the discovery record provides no cause to delay these proceedings."

Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who presides over the South Florida case, sided with Trump's argument that the Justice Department did not give him "timely" access to classified evidence in an accredited facility for his review. Cannon, a relatively inexperienced federal judge and Trump appointee, has made a number of other decisions at various points in the case that legal experts have argued are highly sympathetic to the former president and suspicious in the context of the case against him. 

17 million U.S. households faced food insecurity in 2022, according to new report from the USDA

A new report from the United States Department of Agriculture released Wednesday showed that food insecurity across households nationwide rose significantly in 2022 compared to the year prior. Food insecurity among families with children also rose astoundingly.

Specifically, the report found that 12.8% of households — or 17 million households — struggled to acquire enough food last year due to a lack of resources. That is up from 13.5 million households, or 10.2%, the year before. Nearly 7 million households had very low food security, meaning “the food intake of some household members was reduced, and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because of limited resources,” the USDA said.

Close to 9% of households with children were unable at times to provide adequate and nutritious food for their children last year, compared to 6.2% of households (2.3 million households) in 2021. Children, along with adults, suffered instances of very low food security in 381,000 households with children, which is statistically significantly higher than the 0.7 percent, or 274,000 households, in 2021. “These households with very low food security among children reported that children were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food,” the USDA added.

As noted by NBC News, the heightened rates of food insecurity “interrupted a yearslong trend of declining hunger in the U.S.” Older reports from food banks and the U.S. Census Bureau showed that hunger is on the rise, especially as low-income individuals “struggle to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and from the end of expanded food assistance.”

“Four Daughters” seeks to understand radicalization by ISIS: “People can go to the side of darkness”

Kaouther Ben Hania’s documentary, “Four Daughters” explores the trauma a Tunisian family experienced after Olfa Hamrouni’s eldest daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, joined ISIS. The film uses actresses Nour Karoui and Ichrak Matar, respectively, to portray Rahma and Ghofrane, and Tunisian actress Hind Sabri plays Olfa, “when scenes are too upsetting.” (Sabri is frequently on-screen.) Olfa’s youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play themselves. Significantly, Majd Mastoura plays all the male roles — Olfa’s husband, Wissem, a man she falls in love with, and an authority figure. 

"It was important to summon the past to understand it."

Eya and Tayssir are seen admiring the spot-on casting of their on-screen siblings, but this approach is not a gimmick. Ben Hania uses this layering to provide an opportunity for Olfa and her daughters to confront trauma through reenactment. Watching the family recount their lives and experiences in this meta production is fascinating. They work through their emotions in scenes that reflect on abuse and oppression. The actors rehearse line readings and work out motivations for accuracy. In one segment, an actor stops a scene and leaves.  

The episodes depicted include an unbelievable moment on Olfa’s wedding night where she resists her husband’s advances, and her own sister comes in and advises her husband to block Olfa in the corner for deflowering. Olfa, who learned self-defense, kicks her husband and wipes his blood on a sheet to fake losing her virginity.

It is one of many powerful examples of how women are treated, and Olfa is not always easy on her daughters. However, the pain she feels losing her eldest children to radicalization is powerful, and it is an effort for Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir to put the past behind them.

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Ben Hania spoke with Salon about her documentary, which is Tunisia’s submission for the 2024 international feature film Oscar.

How did you meet with Olfa and get her to trust you to tell her story, and potentially retraumatize her and her daughters? Why put them through that? 

I met Olfa in 2016. She was telling her story back then on TV and radio in Tunisia. I heard her story, and I knew I wanted to do a documentary. I found her fascinating with all her contradictions. I wanted the opportunity to understand how a tragedy like this can happen in a family. I contacted her, and at first, she thought I was a journalist. She said after talking to journalists, she and her daughters were attacked on social media.

I said I wanted to make a documentary. I got to know Olfa and the daughters and shot some fly-on-the-wall footage, but it wasn’t good enough. I thought this project is too complex; it’s like a minefield. I was about to quit. I went off and made “The Man Who Sold His Skin.” But I was still in contact with them, because I was someone they could talk to who was not judging them. I knew it was important to summon the past to understand it. I had this idea of bringing in actors and hijacking the cliché of reenactment. I shared this with Olfa and her daughters, and they found it really interesting. They are natural-born storytellers, so for them, it was very important that their voices could be heard after their previous bad experience with media.

What informed your decision to approach the film in the way you did by using actors? 

I don’t like reenactment. What was interesting for me was to question Olfa and her daughters; that the actors ask questions about their motivations and to have this kind of Brechtian discussion — we are inside the scene and the memory. This cinematic device gave me the opportunity to reflect the memory and explore the complexities of this multilayered story.

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What observations do you have about the relationship between the sisters? They are very close, with the older daughters being role models for the younger ones. But they also have their differences and distinct personalities.

They are individual and part of one family, like any family all over the world. I never met the real older sisters. What I quickly understood was that the older sister, Ghofrane, was like Eya. She is very feminine and beautiful and girly. The other sister, Rahma was like Tayssir, more masculine, more audacious. This is what the younger girls told me. So, there was mirroring between the absent sister and the present sister.  The younger sisters’ lives changed completely because of the fate of the older sisters.

The wedding night sequence is quite powerful with physical and verbal abuse, but there is an interesting sequence involving an exorcism. Can you talk about selecting the episodes that made up the film’s content?

My main question when I wanted to do this movie was to understand why and dig deep in the history of this family and this country to explain the visible part of the iceberg, this tragedy. All these elements gave me a clue to understanding. So in the wedding night, with its brutality, we see this extraordinary duality: love and hate, violence and caring. When we talk about wedding, we talk about love. When we talk about motherhood, we think of something warm. We don’t have those elements in this story.

Olfa’s sister’s behavior was shocking.

When we were shooting the [wedding] scene, I didn’t know about the sister’s story. Olfa remembered it, and the actor asked her how to play the sister. It works. We start shooting and we discover what really happened. It’s not scripted. Olfa said, it is her life. There are some women who are guardians of the patriarchy. Olfa is the victim of this oppression, but she reproduces it towards her daughters. She calls it “The curse.”

One of the most revealing scenes has Olfa and her daughters talk about Tayssir’s misleading photo of a (bent) leg that resembles a butt crack. A later sequence, where the daughters talk candidly about their breasts and periods and leg waxing is upsetting to Olfa, who thinks everything relating to the female body is shameful and obscene. To me, it shows how women self-suppress, which is telling. What are your thoughts on this topic and how it informed Olfa’s relationship with her daughters?

Yes, because of Olfa’s upbringing, she had this idea about obliging her daughters — they don’t have a father, he is absent, alcoholic. Olfa is playing a father figure. If she does this, she will save her daughters from what their father was telling them when they were young, that they will turn into prostitutes. Olfa was scared this might happen. The classic accusation for women is that they are either a mother or a whore. There is this pressure on a lot of young girls in every society. It goes beyond the cultural context of the film. The film is universal — it is about growing up and mother/daughter relationships and coming of age in a very difficult way. 

There are also several scenes that show the daughters talking about the hajib and niqab. The headscarf is a political symbol of resistance and rebellion. Can you talk about this debate?

It can seem counterintuitive because we always think about hajib and hiding as a submissive act for women, but in this context and in a Tunisian context, it is a way to oppress the oppressor — which is their mother. Talking about the mother/whore dichotomy, they understood quickly that they had to conform by wearing the hajib with all its symbolism, but also, with this tool, they could accuse their mother of being less Muslim than them. It was a tool of their rebellion but also a tool to oppress their mother, who was their oppressor.

Can you discuss why you portray the radicalization of Rahma and Ghofrane in the way you did? There are news clips that address their actions, but it is more the impact of what they have done that is the focus here, and not how they were indoctrinated. 

We see in the film that they put on the veil, and then there is a process. They oblige their younger sisters to wear the veil and they become zealots. We see a scene of their game about death. They learned this somewhere. It was important to cover yourself as proof of your devoutness and start thinking about death in this [teenage] stage of life. Given their background — they come from a complicated dysfunctional family with a lot of abuse — the real liberation was to quickly die, because life is unbearable, and go to heaven where everything is harmonious. It’s not about lecturing them, it is about being receptive to the first offer they get, even if it’s horrible. 

The film is a cautionary tale about the way women are victims and also vulnerable. What do you want audiences to understand having seen “Four Daughters.” Are we supposed to be sympathetic, or fear them?

Audiences can take away whatever they want. We forget how ordinary people can go to the side of darkness. In Europe, we see it with fascism where a lot of young people are fascinated with this ideology. Everyone is afraid of being “with or against.” They don’t try to understand the bigger scheme, to recognize that all of us have dark sides. I wanted to understand without judgment.

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Do you think this film has or will help Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir put their past behind them?

Yes. When I started, I underestimated the cathartic, therapeutic aspect. But I saw it while shooting. It enabled Eya and Tayssir to say things to their mother and she was obliged to hear because they were surrounded by [a film crew]. We created a safe space to talk. They felt better after the movie. When they saw the film, I was scared they would not like it, because it is very sensitive at times, but they were really proud of it and thanked me for giving them a voice. Their relationship as mother and daughters got better. Olfa is not the same violent mom. She had a lot of regret and understood things more clearly after doing further introspective work. She is an intelligent woman blinded by her wounds and her upbringing. But it was an amazing journey to do this movie with them and to see them growing up. They can’t put the past behind them because the story is still continuing.  

“Four Daughters” opens Oct. 27 in select cities, with additional cities to follow.

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film interviews by Gary Kramer

 

Girl, you know it’s not true: 8 major revelations from the “Milli Vanilli” documentary

Rob Pilatus and Fabrice “Fab” Morvan first met in a dance seminar at a club in Munich. Despite the language barrier (Pilatus grew up in Munich while Morvan grew up in Paris), the pair immediately became close friends and later, reunited in Munich to look for work as backup singers. Morvan and Pilatus went on to form their own act and even recorded an album for a minor German label. But their real shot at fame arrived in 1988, when they officially became the German-French R&B duo Milli Vanilli. 

Together, Morvan and Pilatus sold more than 30 million singles worldwide. They also won the Best New Artist award at the 32nd Grammy Awards and three awards at the 17th American Music Awards.

Milli Vanilli’s time in the spotlight, however, was short-lived. Only a few years after their big debut, the duo was caught in an infamous lip-syncing scandal. Turns out, none of their hit singles were actually sung by them. They were all recorded by studio performers, who were bribed by record producers and labels to stay quiet about their behind-the-scenes deeds. 

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The story of the once-beloved musical duo and their unfortunate downfall is explored in “Milli Vanilli,” an all-new documentary on Paramount+. The nearly two hour film spotlights the duo’s tale of stardom through interviews with Morvan, the only surviving member of Milli Vanilli, along with higher-ups in the music industry, culture critics and journalists. The documentary also features old footage of interviews, recordings and Milli Vanilli performances.

Here are eight revelations from the documentary:

01
Pilatus had a difficult upbringing
Rob Pilatus Of Milli VanilliRob Pilatus Of Milli Vanilli, London, 27th September 1988. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)

Pilatus’ father was an American soldier while his biological mother, who he never met, was a strip dancer. In an old recording, Pilatus is heard saying he was first placed in a children’s home before he was adopted at the age of four. Pilatus has an adoptive sister, Carmen Pilatus.

 

“In the beginning, I don’t think he saw himself as being any different,” Carmen said in the documentary. “I never understood why, but he was racially insulted by other people. They would say things like, ‘You are so dirty’ or ‘Go back where you came from.’”

 

Pilatus also said he was physically punished by his adoptive parents when he did something wrong.

 

“He sought the attention that he didn’t get as a child,” Carmen added.

 

In the documentary, Morvan said he understood Pilatus’ pain. Growing up, Morvan’s own family was incredibly dysfunctional and abusive, which led him to run away from home.

 

The duo, Morvan continued, were both looking for a family.

02
Milli Vanilli felt trapped in their contract with Frank Farian
Frank Farian and Ingrid SegiethFrank Farian and Ingrid Segieth (Katja Lenz/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Frank Farian, the German record producer, is best known for founding the 1970s disco-pop group Boney M. along with the Latin pop band No Mercy. In 1988, Farian officially founded Milli Vanilli, much to the excitement of Morvan and Pilatus.

 

Farian had invited the duo to his studio to listen to a demo of “Girl You Know It's True,” a song by the Maryland-based group Numarx. Although Morvan and Pilatus insisted that they’d be able to sing the demo, their singing did not impress Farian, who told them they’d be lip-syncing instead. The final mix of "Girl You Know It's True" was recorded with studio performers. Farian recruited Brad Howell as the lead singer of Milli Vanilli, Charles Shaw as the lead rapper and twins Linda and Jodie Rocco as backing vocalists.

 

Morvan and Pilatus had signed a contract with Farian, despite either of them understanding the terms and conditions. Under the agreement, Farian was allowed to record 10 of their songs a year. Backing out of the contract proved to be difficult, especially because Morvan and Pilatus were desperate for both the money and fame.

 

Morvan said Farian’s assistant (and girlfriend at the time), Ingrid “Milli” Segieth, told the duo they’d be indebted to Frank if they decided to no longer take part in Milli Vanilli. 

 

“What she conveyed to us clearly is that we signed the contract, we got money — if we didn’t want to take part, we had to pay them back,” Morvan explained. “But Ingrid said, ‘It’s not just the advance that we paid you, but also all the money that we gave you through the months.’”

 

Segieth, however, asserted in the documentary that she had never said that:

 

“If they would refuse, they can go back to Munich and can . . . go work for a garbage company or something like that.”

 

Morvan said he and Pilatus were “scared as hell.” They ultimately agreed to continue working with Farian, thinking that they’d be able to leave after lip-syncing just one song.

03
Farian had a history of exploiting Black artists
Boney MBoney M (kpa/United Archives via Getty Images)

Farian pulled the same scheme with Boney M. The group’s lead male vocalist, Bobby Farrell, was a dancer and not a singer. The vocals were done by Farian himself while Farrell lip-synced. Boney M. went on to sell more than 100 million records worldwide and put out several international hits, including “Daddy Cool,” “Sunny” and “Rasputin.” But only Farian reaped the benefits of all those major successes and accolades.

 

“The guy is stinking rich, he’s got a studio . . . I don’t have millions,” Farrell said of Farian in a clip from an old interview. “Frank Farian’s a stinking millionaire against a poor Negro like me?” 

 

Charles Shaw said Farian was merely “a producer that made most of his money on Black artists," and it worked.

 

“Then years later, he came back and did it again with Milli Vanilli. He took my voice, he took their faces, he put the project together, he put it on the market. And he got rich off it.”

04
Milli Vanilli’s debut album had overnight success
Milli VanilliMilli Vanilli (Peter Bischoff/Getty Images)

The 1989 album, titled “Girl You Know It's True” in the U.S., contained five singles that entered the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100, three of which reached the top position. The album was certified six-times platinum by the RIAA after it maintained its top spot in the Billboard Top 200 for seven weeks straight. The album also spent 41 weeks within the top 10 of the Billboard Top 200 and 78 weeks within the charts overall.

 

The album was also certified Diamond in Canada. Its success even helped Milli Vanilli earn a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on Feb. 22, 1990.

 

Unfortunately for the duo, their Grammy win also propelled their downfall.

05
Segieth claims Pilatus “trusted” and “loved” her
Ingrid SegiethIngrid Segieth attends the "Milli Vanilli" premiere during the 2023 Tribeca Festival at Village East Cinema on June 10, 2023 in New York City. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival)

"It’s so difficult to express. We loved each other, but that was the love without sex. Robert had an attention syndrome since childhood. In the orphanage, whenever parents came to adopt a child, he drank water from the toilet bowl to draw attention to himself," Segieth said. 

 

She continued, "He needed a loving mother. And hugs too. He always asked, ‘Take me in your arms.’ He slept with me in bed then he cuddled with me. I think I was the only person he trusted and he loved."

06
Milli Vanilli claimed they were more talented than The Beatles
Milli VanilliGerman pop band Milli Vanilli, composed of French singer, songwriter, dancer and model Fab Morvan and German-American model, dancer and singer Rob Pilatus, at a press conference announcing they will return their Grammy Awards after confessing to lip-synching their songs. (Bill Nation/Sygma via Getty Images)

Following their Grammy win, the duo grew increasingly arrogant and entitled. 

 

In an old interview with Time magazine, Pilatus said, “Musically, we are more talented than any Bob Dylan. Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger; his lines are not clear. He don’t know how he should produce a sound. I’m the new modern rock ‘n’ roll. I’m the new Elvis.”

 

Elsewhere, the duo proclaimed, “It’s more difficult to sing a song like Milli Vanilli than a Beatles song.” Pilatus even said he’s the “new modern rock ‘n’ roll” and “the new Elvis.”

07
Milli Vanilli's lip synching is exposed
Millii Vanilli and Frank FarianProducer Frank Farian (center) with Disco pop band "Milli Vanili", at Munich, Germany 1988. (Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Doubts about the pair's actual singing began to surface. Their English-language skills were at odds with the fluent performance on their hit songs. The first real sign that they were lip-synching came in July 1989. During a live performance of "Girl You Know It's True" for MTV at a Connecticut theme park, the vocal track had a mulfunction and kept repeating lines over and over. Unsure of what to do, Pilatus infamously ran off stage. Despite this, the audience didn't really seem to notice or care.

 

The truth came out in the wake of growing public speculation about Milli Vanilli's real singers along with Morvan and Pilatus’ demands to Farian that they be allowed to sing on their next album. On Nov. 14, 1990, Farian announced he had fired Morvan and Pilatus and revealed that the duo never sang any of their songs, thus casting them as frauds. Pilatus later confirmed that he and his partner did not sing on their own records when he was confronted by Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips.

 

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences subsequently revoked Milli Vanilli's 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist. The revelation also shocked the duo’s predominantly white fanbase, who demanded refunds for their albums and Milli Vanilli concert tickets.

 

During a press conference for more than 100 journalists in Los Angeles, Morvan and Pilatus said they would return their Grammy Award. Pilatus said they had been seduced by the money and the fame and “made a deal with the devil.” Morvan and Pilatus also sang and rapped for the room to prove that they could sing, even if they didn’t sing on any of their hit singles.

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Morvan blames Pilatus’ death on the rampant media backlash
Milli Vanilli, portraits, London, 27 September 1988, L-R Fab Morvan, Rob Pilatus. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)

Towards the end of the documentary, Morvan recalled one of the last times he saw Pilatus before his death from an accidental overdose in 1998. The heartbreaking incident took place outside The Viper Room in Hollywood, California, where Morvan happened upon an intoxicated Pilatus.

 

“I see a dude stumbling across the way,” Morvan said. “As he was falling, his body turned, and I looked into his eyes, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not true.’ I’m looking at Rob Pilatus.

 

“So I crossed the street, I picked him up and I said, ‘Hey Rob. It’s Fab. Rob, it’s Fab. Where do you live?’ And then he said, ‘There.’ So we ring the doorbell. We’re like, ‘Hey, we’re there with Rob. Like, this is where he lives, yes?’”

 

Morvan said Rob’s place looked “like a crack house to me," and the people inside were doing heavy drugs.

 

“I’m not surprised because I heard that’s what he’s been doing for a long time,” Morvan continued. “But to actually see my brother in the street looking like this and looking back at my dude in his prime . . . Man, it was like, ‘Phew.’ I didn’t know what to say.”

 

On April 3, 1998, on the eve of a promotional tour for a new Milli Vanilli album, “Back and in Attack,” Pilatus was found dead from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose in a hotel room near Frankfurt. His death was ruled accidental.

 

As for the album, it was never released.

"Milli Vanilli" is currently available for streaming on Paramount+. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube:

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Judge rejects Trump’s attempt to dodge Ivanka’s testimony at fraud trial

The New York judge presiding over Donald Trump's $250 million civil fraud trial has ordered the former president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, to testify in the case, NBC News reports. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said Friday that she could not be called as a witness prior to Nov. 1, which would give her time to appeal the decision if she so chooses.

Trump attorneys challenged New York Attorney General Letitia James' subpoena to Ivanka Trump, pointing out that an appeals court ruled earlier this year that she should be dropped as a defendant in the case over issues with the statute of limitations. They accused James' office of attempting to "continue to harass and burden President Trump’s daughter long after" the appeals court "mandated she be dismissed from the case." They also argued that the attorney general waited too long to issue the subpoena, claiming that the office does not have that authority over her because she is no longer a New York resident. 

The attorney general's office refuted those points and contended that Ivanka Trump, a former White House official, still has important information pertinent to their case as she is "financially and professionally intertwined with the Trump Organization" and the other defendants, which includes her brothers, Eric and Don Jr. She "does not seem to be averse to her involvement in the family business when it comes to owning and collecting proceeds from the OPO (hotel) sale, the Trump Organization purchasing insurance for her and her companies, managing her household staff and credit card bills, renting her apartment or even paying her legal fees in this action," James wrote in the filing. "It is only when she is tasked with answering for that involvement that she disclaims any connection."

“Worst idea since Sarah Palin”: Democrat Dean Phillips’ Biden challenge could “blow up in his face”

Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., is launching a bid for the Oval Office Friday, a longshot move that some of his colleagues deemed a vanity project and other top Democrats privately describe as a mid-life crisis, Politico reports. His new candidacy, though not likely to present much of a genuine challenge to incumbent President Joe Biden, also represents the undercurrent of discontent with the current president among Democratic voters.

In private conversations, the millionaire businessman has emphasized that voters need an alternative to the 80-year-old president. A half-dozen sources who have spoken directly to Phillips told Politico that while he has described feeling a sort of obligation to Biden, he has also voiced concern about the president's ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. The Minnesota Democrat is "seeing a problem that everyone sees, but no one is talking about," one of the sources told the outlet, describing Phillips as "frustrated" by it all.

"He was really earnest in his presentation of it. He framed it as this revelation he had when he was in Vietnam, visiting the site of his father’s death,” another source who spoke to Phillips said, referring to the trip the congressman took last spring to the site where his father was killed during the Vietnam War. “But I don’t think he understands the institutional forces that he is going to be up against and how — even if a lot of Democrats privately share some of his fears — no one is going to line up behind him.”

At first, Phillips told the sources that he wanted to publicly recruit another candidate, calling in August for a "moderate governor" to step up to the plate. "I thought there was a way for him to raise this concern, identify if there was space for another candidate, get someone else in, and then gracefully bow out and resume being a member of Congress,” a third source who spoke to Phillips directly told Politico.

“Now, I feel like he missed the window to land this plane,” that person added.

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Phillips instead made the decision to run himself and formally filed paperwork for "Dean 24, Inc." to the Federal Elections Commission Thursday night. Several people told the outlet that the centrist Democrat's campaign will likely resemble his 2018 run for Congress.

That bid saw Phillips disregarding much of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's guidance in favor of relying on his longstanding background in marketing. He drove a 1960 International Harvester milk truck to 32 cities and towns across his suburban House district, arguing for spending less on TV than on digital ads and refusing to take digs at his Republican opponent. While that approach enraged many a Democrat in D.C., Phillips won anyway, flipping a seat that hadn't elected a Democrat in decades. 

Signs of Phillips bringing back his strategy have appeared in the form of a "Dean Phillips for President" bus, seen recently driving about New Hampshire by two operatives, tagged with his 2018 slogan "Everyone's invited." The "government repair truck" he used in 2018 has also been repainted with "Dean Phillips for President." 

“He wants to scale his 2018 campaign to New Hampshire, if not to the national level,” one of the sources told the outlet.

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A presidential primary, however, is far from a congressional race, especially when facing off against an incumbent. Plus, Phillips will likely face a number of clear and serious hurdles as he embarks on his campaign. 

The Minnesota Democrat has already failed to get on the ballot in Nevada, the second presidential nominating state, and is counting on a former Republican operative to lead it. He's also almost completely unknown in New Hampshire, the place he plans to base his campaign, as evidenced by his needing to introduce himself to the state party chair two weeks ago. To top it all off, his primary opponent, Biden, boasts $91 million in campaign cash and has the entire party's campaign machine backing him.

Though the Biden campaign is not expected to engage much with Phillips, a source familiar with the campaign's thinking told Politico the extent to which they do would involve painting the Minnesota lawmaker as wealthy and out-of-touch, while highlighting his 100 percent voting record with the president.

“Everyone I know, to a person, is mystified, perplexed and frustrated by this move, and Dean has not really offered any public explanation,” Jeff Blodgett, a top Minnesota Democratic operative and donor adviser, told the outlet. “People here are all in on Biden and focused on the work to get him reelected.”

Phillips has recruited Steve Schmidt, a top campaign strategist for Sen. John McCain's 2008 bid for president, to assist him, a move several Democrats dubbed a "red flag." In 2020 Schmidt also advised former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who considered an Independent presidential run. Phillips has also added Ondine Fortune as a media buyer to the mix, while a firm headed by Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based ad-maker, has secured permits for the Democrat's Friday event.

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Phillips' New Hampshire-focused campaign comes in the midst of an especially contentious time for Democrats in the state, who lost their first-in-the-nation primary status for the 2024 election cycle earlier this month. With Biden's support, the Democratic National Committee reordered the presidential nominating calendar last year, pushing South Carolina into the top spot. 

But the millionaire lawmaker has yet to reach out to South Carolina Democrats, a sign "he's not serious," South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Christale Spain said, dubbing Phillips "a distraction" because "any serious Democratic candidate would understand that Black voters in South Carolina have been the backbone of the Democratic Party.” The state's presidential filing deadline closes on Nov. 10.

In the meantime, New Hampshire intends to run an unsanctioned contest, which is unlikely to produce any delegates for whoever wins the state in January. This week, the Biden campaign confirmed that the president's name will not appear on the ballot. Top Democrats in the state, however, are expected to lead a write-in effort on his behalf. Marianne Williamson, who ran for president in 2020, will also be on the state's ballot. 

The tumult over the calendar is a factor for former New Hampshire House Speaker Steve Shurtleff, who told Politico he "hopes" Phillips runs "because of the way things have been lined up by the DNC," who are “trying to take it out of the hands of the people.”

“I’ve got respect for Phillips that he may decide to get in the race, knowing what the price he might pay,” Shurtleff added. “By challenging the president, for someone like Dean, it could be the end of his political career.”

That uncertainty about Phillips' future is still occupying the minds of Minnesota Democrats, many of whom said they expected him to run for statewide office one day. Democrats instead are vying for his seat in the House, where he's already drawn a primary challenger in Ron Harris, a DNC executive committee member. 

“I believe every other Democratic member of Congress in Minnesota is supporting Biden, so it doesn’t help when your home team is on board with the incumbent president, while you’re trying to mount a challenge,” Mike Erlandson, a former chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, told the outlet. “I don’t know that the congressman is particularly concerned one way or the other about what other people in political places of power think, though this probably doesn’t help him with a statewide office run at home.”

Political pundits echoed the Minnesota Democrats' concerns about Phillips' bid.

"Dean Phillips is the worst idea in American campaigns since Sarah Palin," tweeted former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson. 

During a Friday appearance on CNN, contributor Errol Louis argued that Phillips' concern over polls showing Biden to be unpopular and, thus, the potential of Trump winning next year won't bode well for the Minnesotan.  

"That comment about [Biden's polling] numbers is going to blow up in his face when we start looking at numbers that show people don't know who he is, what he stands for or why they should vote for him. Numbers cut both ways," Louis said. "Fifty-plus years in politics and national leadership by Joe Biden counts for a lot. It does mean something, and it will play out in the numbers."

"The fact that he's polling — the fact that he's got this tough question about his age and whether or not people think that's disqualifying for the president? Absolutely valid questions," Louis continued. "Is [Phillips] the right person — the right messenger — to bring it forward? It's hard to see how."

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“Anatomy of a Fall” inverses the formulaic whodunit and shows the “limitations of a courtroom”

“Anatomy of a Fall” is a penetrating study of a successful writer, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller, from “Toni Erdmann”) on trial for her husband Samuel Maleski’s (Samuel Theis) murder — because an inconclusive autopsy suggests his death does not rule out third party involvement.

Did Samuel fall out a high window? Did he jump? Or was he pushed? Sandra claims she is innocent, despite evidence that she had motive, means and opportunity. The sole witness to the crime — if, indeed, it was a crime — is Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), the couple’s 11-year-old son, who is blind.

"The possibility of murder is the window into the film."

Director Justine Triet spends much of the film’s 150-minute running time in the courtroom, where Sandra is on trial. She is represented by Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who is facing an uphill battle to prove Sandra’s innocence. Her alibi, that she was sleeping when the fall happened, is perhaps flimsy. But the case against her means that Sandra has to prove she loved Samuel, and that she did not kill him. As discussions and depictions of the couple’s relationship are heard and shown, and Sandra’s writing is used against her, any outcome is possible. 

The courtroom scenes are especially fascinating, because as the trial unfolds, Daniel’s testimony is crucial, and he needs to be protected so as not to be influenced by his mother or outside forces. (He is given a minder, and not allowed to converse with his mother in English.) Daniel also insists on knowing the unpleasant truths about his parents and their relationship, despite the judge’s efforts to protect him, which further complicates things.

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“Anatomy of a Fall” pivots on the question of who (and what) you believe. With the assistance of interpreter Assia Turquier-Zauberman, Salon spoke with Triet about her film, which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes earlier this year.

The film pivots on the idea of who (and what) you believe. Is Sandra telling the truth? Is she lying to escape punishment? Is she protecting her son? The idea of Sandra killing her husband is said to be more interesting than his dying by suicide or slipping and falling. Can you talk about that? 

The possibility of murder is the window into the film. In some ways, it may be the most banal introduction — an inverse cliché with a slight reversal of gender roles. What I think is more interesting is that halfway through the film, with the argument scene, new possibilities emerge. We might speculate that if she didn’t kill him, she may have pushed him to do it or pushed him to exhaustion in a way that doesn’t make her directly guilty but does not make her blameless either. For his part, in dying, he finally manages to take up the space he felt she was not giving him in his life. These things open doors to show what is at stake here. In some ways, it’s the inverse of a formulaic whodunit where there is a logical sequence. Instead, it advances an idea that couples are not something that can be viewed from one angle only but rather create an impressionistic painting that represents the intimate life of two people. 

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You also show a flashback, late in the film, of a fight the couple had. Can you talk about including that scene? It shifts our understanding of the characters. To me, the film is about how do you prove, in a court of law, especially, that you love someone? Even though Sandra and Samuel fight, there is love, and she is on trial for that. The film is about perceptions and reality — the truth may be clouded by how others see you. Thoughts? 

The limitations of a courtroom and a trial are that these are spaces where truth does not emerge, but a struggle over narrative does. It is where morals intervene on behalf of a society that opposes and accuses certain failings and mores. We see how the [prosecuting] lawyers are scrutinizing Sandra for every aspect of her life — her sexuality, her creative practice, etc. These things are being neatly boxed up by the lawyers. Love is more complex and interesting, and it is excluded from the picture the lawyers paint. We are always going through a prism of an [impression] that is outside of the couple. Rather than see the intimacy of this relationship, instead, we are engaged in a corrective dialogue of what is already being said about her, or them, from outside. It is a situation that is very violent and anxiety-inducing.   

What can you say about how you filmed the courtroom scenes and kept this long, talky film, nimble? You zoom in on the judge, Sandra, even Daniel, which increases the intensity of things. Even if you don’t understand the French courts, the film is fascinating with the subplot about Daniel’s testimony being protected.

"She refuses to be a good victim. She’s not very tearful."

The trial room is a rectangle, so the geometric possibilities are limited. Courtroom scenes have been done so many times, and we are used to those images. The second you film language alone it can be boring or look like television. These were my worries. I drew on different police thriller genres. I needed more purity, so I went closer to documentary films about trials rather than fiction, which are too smooth for my liking. It was important that the camera espouses different points of view rather than in fiction when it is an omniscient camera with a God’s eye view that sees everything in an objective way. Instead, it was about how to deal with complexity of the subject with many camera angles that were foregrounded with the characters. 

Anatomy Of A FallAnatomy Of A Fall (Neon)

What can you say about Daniel. His accident, where he became blind certainly impacted Sandra and Samuel’s relationship. But he is put in a difficult position having to testify at his mother’s trial. What observations do you have about his character and the situation he faces? He is the film’s moral compass.

Daniel’s accident weighs heavily on the couple. It has something to do with them being creative artists and what one must sacrifice; there may be a cost to the creative process. It’s not for nothing that the accident that impaired Daniel’s sight is the moment his father got inspiration and he didn’t pick him up from school. The passion demands a sacrifice. There is also a relationship where two people share the same passions, and one is frustrated that he is not soaring like the other. The child is the crux for that balance. Making him the moral compass was one of the pillars of wanting to see a child in this infernal situation of having just lost his father and having to judge his mother. He is a witness to his parents’ relationship in this way. He is in the center of the couple and of the intrigue of the trial, but at the same time, he missed something, and so did we. It is difficult for me to say more.

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Is Sandra sympathetic? Does she need to be? I found it interesting that I was rooting for her, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure I liked her. Then there is a shot of her crying in the car that knocked me out. What observations do you have about her character?

Sandra is uncompromising and unapologetic. Sandra [Hüller] and I worked on this modesty, both in her clothes and the makeup. We could have played into visual tropes to make her attractive in the tribunal. We kept her exposed and tapped into the paradox of her being sincerely opaque, a mother who would go to an unexpected emotional place. Sandra would say, if my child is in the room, I would never show this kind of weakness and fragility. Who she is showing up for, and who she is addressing in every moment brought her to this kind of humility and modesty and feelings of reservation. On a political note, something we were interested in was the idea that she refuses to be a good victim. She’s not very tearful.

One last question, which Sandra asks, “What makes you so mad you want to explode?”

[Laughs] I can’t answer that in two minutes.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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