America’s mainstream media still wants to save the GOP — but that’s impossible

Why is the centrist and center-left press more preoccupied with saving the Republican Party than are the GOP itself and its politically traumatizing right-wing media?

Who do I mean by the centrist and center-left press? For instance, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Atlantic, all organizations employ adult journalists and columnists. Hell, let’s throw in CNN.

Here are some recent examples, which should be considered in-kind contributions to the national Republican Party:

Washington Post: “Republican 2024 contenders are doing it all wrong“

Post again: “Vivek Ramaswamy knows the trick to winning Republican votes“

Here are two articles on former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, latest entrant in the 2024 race. They have undoubtedly endowed him with more national visibility than have his own media appearances and tough-guy, anti-Trump talk:

New York Times: “The Chris Christie Scenario“

Post: “Chris Christie is not in it to win it. His task is more important“

With no disrespect to Kaitlan Collins, I’ve yet to hear any cogent journalistic justification for CNN’s disastrous Trump town hall last month. But, hey, ratings: Maybe the method by which to save America from a second Trump term is to give him prime-time slots to lie, prevaricate and vent self-pity. I wonder whether CNN thought its mini-Waco might turn off enough Republican primary voters to reject Trump, in the interests of salvaging the party of Lincoln.

I voted for Trump — twice. I was a right-wing pundit. I was dead wrong about all of it

Here’s another, a “save the GOP” love-fest in the Times, featuring a former spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee during John McCain’s 2008 campaign:

“‘A Tim Scott Nomination Would Be a Nightmare for Joe Biden’: Our Columnists Weigh In on the G.O.P. Candidate“

And here’s a Times op-ed by Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, which is currently anti-Trump and pro-Ron DeSantis — but will, predictably, “begrudgingly” support Trump if he’s the 2024 nominee, in order to (what else?) save America from a second Biden term:

“He’s (DeSantis) Not Dead Yet“

Recent Times hire David French (who says he is a conservative but struggles to define what conservatism is) tweeted a 232-character jeremiad to the effect that there must be a Republican out there somewhere who can defeat Trump without resorting to anti-COVID vaccine hysteria.

And here’s David Frum, from the Atlantic:

“Never Again Trump“

Never again, David? You sure about that?

GOP can’t be saved; it must be killed

Nowhere in all this adult punditry is an audacious, candid, intrepid recommendation: Put the Republican Party out of its misery. Kill it electorally. Finish it off. I mean not to bully these media companies; I subscribe to all of them (including Salon).

Why will no one come out and say that? There are a few reasons.

First, the press intellectualizes salvaging the GOP. Sure, there is a place for intellectual takes on the Republican Party, the conservative movement and our two-party system (which we’ve always had and always will). But a healthier two-party system will only arise after the GOP is mercy-killed. There are myriad opinions among progressives, liberals, moderates, independents, center-left and even center-right Americans as to what should be done with the GOP. It’s nearly impossible to get 10 to concur, much less 100-plus million. This endless “what to do?” cycle probably partly explains why centrist and left-of-center media is so concerned with the “who will save the GOP?” question.

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But whether the GOP can actually be saved is a question the center-left press mostly avoids, likely because prominent media outlets largely consumed by Democrat-leaning readers are internally obsessed, in their boardrooms and editorial rooms, with proving that they’re objective and free of “liberal bias.”

Second, the centrist and left-center press analyzes the GOP voter base through an outside-looking-in lens. Its perspective is abstract and faux-scientific. Those reporters and editors have not lived a right-wing, politically traumatizing, mythological, fantastical, hysterical and paranoid existence. Members of the adult press have never consumed the nectar of the Republican Party’s false prophets, from Ronald Reagan to Trump; they have merely observed others imbibing it. Viewing Republican primary voters from the outside is like looking through a filthy, smeared window; no matter how smart you are, you can’t clearly see what’s on the other side.

I immersed myself in the MAGA/Trump cult from 2015 to 2022, and congregated with Republican primary voters on a near-daily basis. I was a right-wing pundit. And I now wish I could have all 221 million seconds back. I sincerely adhered to many of the mythologies most GOP base voters adhere to, centered on gays, sex and marriage; male Caucasian paranoia; Christian theocracy; the evil of Barack Obama; racial and ethnic animus; the sacredness of guns and the demonic nature of COVID vaccines.

I immersed myself in the MAGA/Trump cult from 2015 to 2022, and congregated with Republican primary voters on a near-daily basis. I was a right-wing pundit. I wish I could have all 221 million of those seconds back.

I am not convinced that most GOP politicians actually believe the trauma-based conspiracies and mythologies they peddle, but they know that the party’s base voters are addicted to them. This dependency on fighting imaginary phantasms — which are responsible for eroding our “values” and “culture” by making America browner, less Christian, more constitutionally equal and ever less heterosexual — is what unites GOP base voters. The trauma shapes the right’s identity politics, brought to them, oftentimes, by affluent Ivy League-educated Republican leaders.

If David French, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg and the editors, reporters and columnists at the Times and the Post spent a single evening with those I associated with for 7 years, methinks their “save the GOP” yearning would die a death that Lady Macbeth could hardly stand to look at. Furthermore, if the press spent more time speaking to those who are truly remorseful for supporting Trump, DeSantis and the GOP (such as myself — wink wink), other Americans would, unequivocally, better comprehend the irreversible malignancy that has enveloped the GOP.

This malignancy cannot be cured

I do my best to avoid traumatizing language and rhetoric, but my empirical and experiential assessment of the GOP is that the malignancy now pervades throughout the entire body of the party. Consider this in medical terms: When that happens in the human body, there is no saving it — there is only preparing it for its departure from this world.

I promise you that virtually no Republican primary voters anywhere in the country are reading or writing editorials that wonder about who will save their party. For the most part, the people I formerly broke bread with want the GOP to die, because in their view it has become a nest of RINOs, Democrats Lite and globalists.

So who, exactly, is the center-left press speaking to and attempting to persuade? Is it apolitical, general-election Republicans, who pay attention a month before the election every four years? Respectfully, most of them have never heard of the Atlantic, and wouldn’t read it on a dare.

The media’s naïveté has gotten the better of them: GOP voters don’t just see the Times or Post as “librul,” biased media. They see them as longtime active conspirators with the Democratic Party, whose goal is to render white heterosexual Christians as Untouchables.

Sure, I know what the press will say: We need to be better than those who disdain us. As a former journalist myself, it’s what I’d expect intellectuals to say. But the inherent problem with “both sides” narratives is that they imply that both sides do something with approximately equal frequency. With politically-motivated violence, for example, there is no such equivalence; right-wing violent incidents vastly outnumber left-wing incidents.

But the well-meaning adult media’s naïveté has gotten the better of them: Most GOP primary voters don’t just see the Times or Post as “librul,” biased media. They see them as longtime active conspirators with the Democratic Party, whose goal is to eradicate the GOP and render white heterosexual Christians as Untouchables in a newly “woke” political caste system.

In fairness, there are some centrist or center-right organizations, such as The Bulwark, whose writers include former Weekly Standard writers and editors, who understand that the GOP is beyond salvation. But I suspect the site’s founder, Sarah Longwell, for all the compelling stories she has published, clings to an inner belief — even if planck-length—that just maybe the Republican Party can yet be saved.

Trying to save the GOP is trying to pick up glass that has shattered into a billion pieces; the shards have embedded themselves into everything, making a clean-up a Sisyphean task. (In a future article, I hope to address America’s imminent political realignment, including the question of where the GOP’s fragments will go.)

It’s true that miracles can happen when treating the terminally ill; but the hope of a miracle cure for the GOP ended when Donald Trump mocked John McCain in 2015 for having been captured in Vietnam. My mistake was that I remained a Trump supporter after that godawful statement, which maligned and disrespected not only McCain but every service member, past, present and future.

Perhaps man’s most quixotic delusion is that we can save someone, or something; I am not speaking here of faith but of our earthly endeavors. Our centrist and left-center press, important and necessary as it is, is being led far astray by its hopeless fantasy of saving the GOP.

Until last year, I remained hopeful that the press might wean itself from its high doses of incessant Trump coverage. The futile “save the GOP” narrative is inextricably linked to the media’s addiction to the quotidian drama and trauma Trump produces day after day.

The only pathway to saving our republic goes through the electoral mercy killing of the Republican Party, and the only savior is the one you see in the mirror. I do not seek to kill the GOP because I want a one-party nation; I seek to kill it because no other choice is acceptable. To our friends in the press: I hope you’ll join us, sooner rather than later. “Later” may be too late.

about the GOP’s current dilemma

Clinging bitterly to guns and religion: The end stage of American empire

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case.

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the historical evidence shows that trans people were, indeed, persecuted by the Nazi regime.

This is an important case. It was the first time a court recognized the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.

Up until the past few years, there had been little research on trans people under the Nazi regime. Historians like myself are now uncovering more cases, like that of Toni Simon.

Being trans during the Weimar Republic

In 1933, the year that Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked Toni Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” a term that is offensive today but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” The police permits were called “transvestite certificates,” and they exempted a person from the laws against cross-dressing. Under the Republic, trans people could also change their names legally, though they had to pick from a short, preapproved list.

In Berlin, transgender people published several magazines and had a political club. Some glamorous trans women worked at the internationally famous Eldorado cabaret. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, advocated for the rights of transgender people.

The rise of Nazi Germany destroyed this relatively open environment. The Nazis shut down the magazines, the Eldorado and Hirschfeld’s institute. Most people who held “transvestite certificates,” as Toni Simon did, had them revoked or watched helplessly as police refused to honor them.

That was just the beginning of the trouble.

Nazi banners hang in the windows of the former Eldorado nightclub. Landesarchiv Berlin/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

‘Draconian measures’ against trans people

In Nazi Germany, transgender people were not used as a political wedge issue in the way they are today. There was little public discussion of trans people.

What the Nazis did say about them, however, was chilling.

The author of a 1938 book on “the problem of transvestitism” wrote that before Hitler was in power, there was not much that could be done about transgender people, but that now, in Nazi Germany, they could be put in concentration camps or subjected to forced castration. That was good, he believed, because the “asocial mindset” of trans people and their supposedly frequent “criminal activity … justifies draconian measures by the state.”

Toni Simon was a brave person. I first came across her police file when I was researching trans people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Essen police knew Simon as the sassy proprietor of an underground club where LGBTQ people gathered. In the mid 1930s, she was hauled into court for criticizing the Nazi regime. By then, the Gestapo had had enough of her. Simon was a danger to youth, a Gestapo officer wrote. A concentration camp was “absolutely necessary.”

I am not certain what happened to Simon. Her file ends abruptly, with the Gestapo planning her arrest. But there are no actual arrest papers. Hopefully, she evaded the police.

Other trans women did not escape. At the Hamburg State Archive, I read about H. Bode, who often went out in public dressed as a woman and dated men. Under the Weimar Republic, she held a transvestite certificate. Nazi police went after her for “cross-dressing” and for having sex with men. They considered her male, so her relationships were homosexual and illegal. They sent her to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where she was murdered.

Liddy Bacroff of Hamburg also had a transvestite pass under the Republic. She made her living selling sex to male clients. After 1933, the police went after her. They wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” She too was sent to a camp, Mauthausen, and murdered.

Trans Germans previously misgendered

For a long time, the public didn’t know the stories of trans people in Nazi Germany.

Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, which was odd: When you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so.

Bacroff, for example, told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.”

There was also confusion caused by a few cases that, by chance, came to light first. In these cases, police acted less violently. For example, there is a well-known case from Berlin where police renewed a trans man’s “transvestite certificate” after he spent some months in a concentration camp. Historians initially took this case to be representative. Now that we have a lot more cases, we can see that it is an outlier. Police normally revoked the certificates.

A through line to today

Today, right-wing attacks against trans people in the U.S. are intensifying.

Though the American Academy of Pediatrics and every major medical association approves gender-affirming health care for trans kids, Republican politicians have banned it in 19 states, with even more moving to prohibit it.

Gender-affirming medicine is now over 100 years old – and it has roots in Weimar Germany. It had never before been legally restricted in the U.S. Yet Missouri has essentially banned it for adults, and other states are trying to restrict adult care. A host of other anti-trans bills are moving through state legislatures.

I find it fitting, then, that “A Transparent Musical” recently premiered in Los Angeles. In it, fabulously dressed trans Berliners sing and dance in defiance of Nazi thugs.

It’s a reminder that attacks on trans people are nothing new – and that many of them are straight out of the Nazi playbook.

Laurie Marhoefer, Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History, University of Washington

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

Climate crisis is on track to push one-third of humanity out of its most livable environment

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Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated.

The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.

“There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,” Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international action on this issue.”

The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could by 2070.

The new study reconsiders population growth and policy options and explores scenarios that dramatically increase earlier estimates, demonstrating that the world’s environment has already changed significantly. It focuses more heavily on temperature than precipitation, finding that most people have thrived in mean annual temperatures of 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Should the world continue on its present pathway — making gestures toward moderate reductions in emissions but not meaningfully reducing global carbon levels (a scenario close to what the United Nations refers to as SSP2-4.5) — the planet will likely surpass the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and instead warm approximately 2.7 degrees. That pathway, which accounts for population growth in hot places, could lead to 2 billion people falling outside of the climate niche within just the next eight years, and 3.7 billion doing so by 2090. But the study’s authors, who have argued in other papers that the most extreme warming scenarios are well within the realm of possibility, warn that the worst cases should also be considered. With 3.6 degrees of warming and a pessimistic climate scenario that includes ongoing fossil fuel use, resistance to international migration and much more rapid population growth (a scenario referred to by the U.N. as SSP3-7), the shifting climate niche could pose what the authors call “an existential risk,” directly affecting half the projected total population, or, in this case, as many as 6.5 billion people.

The data suggests the world is fast approaching a tipping point, after which even small increases in average global temperature will begin to have dramatic effects. The world has already warmed by about 1.2 degree Celsius, pushing 9% of the earth’s population out of the climate niche. At 1.3 degrees, the study estimates that the pace would pick up considerably, and for every tenth of a degree of additional warming, according to Lenton, 140 million more people will be pushed outside of the niche. “There’s a real nonlinearity lurking in there that we hadn’t seen before,” he said.

Slowing global emissions would dramatically reduce the number of people displaced or grappling with conditions outside the niche. If warming were limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius targeted by the Paris accords, according to a calculation that isolates the effect of warming, half as many people would be left outside of the optimal zone. The population suffering from extreme heat would be reduced fivefold, from 22% to just 5% of the people on the planet.

Climate research often frames the implications of warming in terms of its economic impacts, couching damages in monetary terms that are sometimes used to suggest that small increases in average temperature can be managed. The study disavows this traditional economic framework, which Lenton says is “unethical” because it prioritizes rich people who are alive today, and instead puts the climate crisis in moral terms. The findings show that climate change will pummel poorer parts of the world disproportionately, effectively sentencing the people who live in developing nations and small island states to extreme temperatures, failing crops, conflict, water and food scarcity, and rising mortality. The final option for many people will be migration. The estimated size of the affected populations, whether they’re 2 billion or 6 billion, suggests an era of global upheaval.

According to the study, India will have, by far, the greatest population outside of the climate niche. At current rates of warming, the researchers estimate that more than 600 million Indians will be affected, six times more than if the Paris targets were achieved. In Nigeria, more than 300 million citizens will be exposed, seven times more than if emissions were steeply cut. Indonesia could see 100 million people fall out of a secure and predictable environment, the Philippines and Pakistan 80 million people each, and so on. Brazil, Australia and India would see the greatest area of land become less habitable. But in many smaller countries, all or nearly all the land would become nearly unlivable by traditional measures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Niger. Although facing far more modest impacts, even the United States will see its South and Southwest fall toward the hottest end of the niche, leading to higher mortality and driving internal migration northward.

Throughout the world, the researchers estimate, the average person who is going to be exposed to unprecedented heat comes from a place that emitted roughly half the per capita emissions as those in wealthy countries. American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans, who still live a prosperous and modern existence, the authors point out, so there is ample room for comfortable change short of substantial sacrifice. “The idea that you need the level of wasteful consumption … that happens on average in the U.S. to be part of a happy, flourishing, rich, democratic society is obviously nonsense,” Lenton said.

Each American today emits nearly enough emissions over their lifetime to push one Indian or Nigerian of the future outside of their climate niche, the study found, showing exactly how much harm Americans’ individual actions can cause (1.2 Americans to 1 future person, to be exact). The lifestyle and policy implications are obvious: Reducing consumption today reduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result. “I can’t — as a citizen of a planet with this level of risk opening up — not also have some kind of human and moral response to the figures,” Lenton said. We’ve all got to deal with that, he added, “in our own way.”

How understanding plant body clocks could help transform how food is grown

Have you ever had a bad case of jet lag? That horrible feeling when you get off a long haul flight and your body is telling you it’s time to go to sleep, but the outside world is telling you it’s time for breakfast? That’s the biological effects of your inner body clock, also known as your circadian clock.

You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here.

Plants, fungi and even some bacteria have a circadian rhythm too. Although plants don’t tend to hop onto international flights, any living organism with a circadian clock has the potential to get jet lagged. This is more than a fun fact: We could use this information to make crops more productive and tackle food security.

The first reports of an inner body clock in plants stretch back to ancient Greece, when a ship’s captain studied the daily opening and closing of leaves on a tamarind tree. The first systematic observations of plant circadian rhythms were conducted in the 1700s by the French scientist Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan who studied the rhythmic opening and closing of the leaves of Mimosa pudica (a plant in the pea family).

De Mairan noticed these cycles persisted even when the plant was in constant darkness. This demonstrated the leaf movements were not a response to changes in the lighting conditions, but were controlled by the plant itself. This is the definition of a circadian rhythm.

How plants tell the time

We now know these rhythms are controlled by a genetic network found inside each plant cell. About 20 genes control the circadian rhythm in plants. These genes switch each other on and off in a complicated circuit, generating a 24-hour rhythm.

This control circuit also activates other genes in the plant genome. Some genes are activated at dawn, followed by genes required later in the morning, but switched off by the afternoon. For example, genes associated with photosynthesis are typically activated in the morning to make the most of the daylight, while genes associated with growth and development are normally active at night.

Lab experiments demonstrate that if any of these circadian control genes are mutated (which means their genetic sequence is altered so that they no longer function properly) then the plant’s clock may speed up to give a shorter rhythm, slow down to give a long cycle or stop functioning altogether.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: They are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.
This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenges the way you view plantlife.

Plants with mutated circadian genes not only have faster or slower clocks, but their ability to photosynthesise, grow and reproduce is damaged. A plant with an out of kilter circadian clock will only grow to half the size of a normal plant under laboratory conditions.

Almost every process that scientists have looked at in plants is regulated by the internal clock to some extent. It controls opening and closing of the stomata pores on the underside of a leaf, gas exchange in photosynthesis, shoot and root growth, seasonal flowering and “chemical warfare” between plants and the animals that eat them. This is when some plants produce chemicals that are toxic to animals when ingested.

While most of the research into plant circadian rhythms has been done in the laboratory, there is increasing interest in how this might be applied to agriculture to address the challenges of global food security.

Fit for the future

Global warming is weakening soil health and killing pollinators, while extreme weather and war are among factors pushing up food prices. So this research could become essential to our survival.

Learning more about plants’ circadian clocks could significantly increase crop yield and control the timing of plant flowering to adapt to climate change. For example, several studies have found plants are more sensitive to herbicides depending of the time of day they are applied. Since many plants have similar clocks, we can apply lab findings to crop species.

Several studies have demonstrated that natural alterations in clock genes have been associated with farming breakthroughs. For example, tomatoes were originally farmed in central America where day lengths don’t change much through the year. As people started growing the domesticated tomato in more northerly latitudes, they inadvertently selected a variety with a natural mutation which resulted in a slower clock. That meant the tomato plants were able to make better use of the longer summer days and photosynthesize for longer.

Also, spring (spring sown) and winter (autumn sown) barley flower at different times of year due to a genetic difference in a circadian clock associated gene. Farmers therefore sow different genetic varieties of the same crop in particular seasons to maximize productivity.

With the development of indoor vertical farming, there is huge interest in understanding plant circadian responses to light so that lighting systems can be designed to maximize growth while reducing energy consumption. This is because indoor vertical farming allows for complete control of lighting, unlike when we grow plants outdoors or in our houses. Understanding the plant’s internal rhythm may help optimize plant growth, control the best time for watering and indicate when to use fertilizers or other chemicals used in farming.

Plants are so much more complex (and perhaps a bit more like us) than a lot of people realize. The last 25 years has seen a huge amount of research into the genetic control mechanisms of the circadian clock. The challenge now is to apply that knowledge to agriculture.

It’s in our interest to make sure we understand plants in this way, because we can use that knowledge to better farm our food and make our crops more resilient.

Katharine Hubbard, Reader in Biological Sciences Education, University of Hull

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

Texas sheriff files charges over DeSantis’ migrant stunt — Calif. AG threatens “kidnapping” charges

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The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office says it has completed its investigation into the transport of 49 migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard last September by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and filed criminal charges with the local district attorney.

A statement from the sheriff’s office says it has filed several counts of unlawful restraint, both misdemeanors and felonies. The sheriff’s office didn’t name any individual suspects and didn’t specify when the investigation was turned over to the Bexar County district attorney.

“At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public,” the statement said.

In a separate statement from the sheriff’s office, spokesperson Johnny Garcia said the case was turned over to the DA’s office “recently,” adding, “At this time we are not naming the suspects involved in the case.”

The Bexar County district attorney didn’t respond to an email from The Texas Tribune seeking comment.

According to a lawsuit filed by a law firm representing some of the migrants, Perla Huerta, a former combat medic and counterintelligence agent in the U.S. Army, gave $10 McDonald’s gift cards to about 50 migrants in San Antonio last year in exchange for a signed consent form to board a flight to Massachusetts. Inside the charter plane, the migrants, many of whom were Venezuelans, were given a brochure with a list of organizations that provide social services the migrants were not eligible for, according to the lawsuit.

The next day at a news conference, DeSantis claimed credit for sending the planes from Texas to Massachusetts. He has said that it was part of the state’s program to relocate migrants to a “sanctuary destination.” The Florida Legislature set aside $12 million for the effort, and DeSantis has spent more than $1.5 million so far on the flights, according to state records.

DeSantis’ office didn’t respond to an email from the Tribune seeking comment.

Meanwhile, California’s attorney general on Monday accused the DeSantis administration of recruiting South American migrants in El Paso to fly them to Sacramento.

According to the Sacramento Bee, 16 migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were flown on Friday from El Paso to Sacramento and then dropped in front of the offices of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento. On Monday, the same plane carried 20 migrants from El Paso to Deming, N.M., then to Sacramento, according to the newspaper and the flight tracking website FlightAware.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement on Saturday that his office has opened an investigation into who flew the migrants to California and why. No one has taken credit for the migrant flights out of El Paso.

“We are also evaluating potential criminal or civil action against those who transported or arranged for the transport of these vulnerable immigrants,” he said. “While this is still under investigation, we can confirm these individuals were in possession of documentation purporting to be from the government of the State of Florida. While we continue to collect evidence, I want to say this very clearly: State-sanctioned kidnapping is not a public policy choice, it is immoral and disgusting.”

On Monday, Bonta’s office said the same contractor flew both groups of migrants to Sacramento, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Special agents from the California Department of Justice are on the ground and have made contact with these individuals,” the office said in a statement on Monday. “As was the case with the migrants who arrived on Friday, the migrants who arrived today carried documents indicating that their transportation to California involved the state of Florida.”

In a tweet Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man. This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard.” He included a link to his state’s criminal code on kidnapping.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/05/texas-san-antonio-migrant-flight-marthas-vineyard-criminal-charges/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

It’s time to bust the ‘calories in, calories out’ weight-loss myth

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, there’s a good chance you’ve been told it all comes down to a simple “calories in, calories out” formula: Burn more calories than you consume and the kilos will disappear.

And it’s easy to see the appeal of breaking weight loss down into simple maths — just follow the formula and you’ll achieve success. It’s also believable because many people do lose weight when they first adopt this approach.

Indeed, the diet industry’s reliance on the “calories in, calories out” concept is why society blames people for being overweight. Anyone who can’t follow this simple energy formula is only overweight because they lack the willpower to eat less and exercise more.

But the only simple truth here is that it’s time to bust the “calories in, calories out” myth as the only way to lose weight. Here’s why.

It’s nearly impossible to calculate accurately

The many calorie-counting apps and online calculators available make it seem effortless. Simply enter your sex, age, height, weight, body composition and activity levels and they’ll tell you exactly how many calories you should eat daily to lose weight.

Unfortunately, no matter how accurate these calculators claim to be, they rely on averages and can’t determine the calorie intake appropriate for you with 100% accuracy. They can only estimate.

Similarly, our metabolic rate — how much energy we burn at rest — also varies from person to person based on many factors, including body composition or how much muscle and fat we have. Complicating things further, our metabolic rate also alters when we change our diet and lose weight.

Calculating the calories in food — the other part of managing “calories in” — is also far from accurate.

While Australian food standards require foodstuffs to display Nutrition Information Panels showing energy in kilojoules, there are no requirements for information accuracy other than it must not be misleading. A worrying +/-20% discrepancy is generally accepted for the values shown on labels.

In practice, the variation can be much more than this. One Australian study found food contained anywhere between 13% less and 61% more energy or nutrient components than its packaging stated.

Not all calories are created, or consumed, equally

Another reason the simple “calories in, calories out” formula is not so simple is our bodies don’t consume every calorie the same way. What’s shown in your calorie counter is not what’s actually absorbed in your body.

Different calorie sources also have different effects on our hormones, brain response and energy expenditure, changing how we respond to and manage our food intake.

For example, while eating 180 calories worth of nuts is the same as eating 180 calories of pizza in terms of energy intake, the way these foods are absorbed and how they affect the body is very different.

While we absorb most of the calories in a slice of pizza, we don’t absorb about 20% of the calories in nuts because their fat is stored in the nut’s fibrous cell walls, which don’t break down during digestion. Nuts are also packed with fibre filling us up for longer, while a slice of pizza has us immediately reaching for another due to its low fibre content.

Our bodies disrupt the formula

The biggest failing of the “calories in, calories out” formula is it ignores that the body adjusts its control systems when calorie intake is reduced. So while the formula can support people achieving weight loss initially, the reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that ensure lost weight is regained.

Namely, when your body registers a sustained decrease in the calories you consume, it believes its survival is threatened. So it automatically triggers a series of physiological responses to protect against the threat, reducing our metabolic rate and burning less energy.

This stems from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, whose bodies developed this response to adapt to periods of deprivation when food was scarce to protect against starvation.

Research also suggests our bodies have a “set point weight“: a genetically predetermined weight our bodies try to maintain regardless of what we eat or how much we exercise.

Our bodies protect our set point as we lose weight, managing biological signals from the brain and hormones to hold onto fat stores in preparation for future reductions in our calorie intake.

The body achieves this in several ways, all of which directly influence the “calories in, calories out” equation, including:

slowing our metabolism. When we reduce our calorie intake to lose weight, we lose muscle and fat. This decrease in body mass results in an expected decrease in metabolic rate, but there is a further 15% decrease in metabolism beyond what can be accounted for, further disrupting the “calories in, calories out” equation. Even after we regain lost weight our metabolism doesn’t recover. Our thyroid gland also misfires when we restrict our food intake and fewer hormones are secreted, also changing the equation by reducing the energy we burn at rest
adapting how our energy sources are used. When we reduce our energy intake and start losing weight, our body switches from using fat as its energy source to carbohydrates and holds onto its fat, resulting in less energy being burned at rest
managing how our adrenal gland functions. Our adrenal gland manages the hormone cortisol, which it releases when something that stresses the body — like calorie restriction — is imposed. Excess cortisol production and its presence in our blood changes how our bodies process, store and burn fat.

Our bodies also cleverly trigger responses aimed at increasing our calorie intake to regain lost weight, including:

adjusting our appetite hormones. When we reduce our calorie intake and deprive our bodies of food, our hormones work differently, suppressing feelings of fullness and telling us to eat more
changing how our brain functions. When our calorie intake reduces, activity in our hypothalamus — the part of the brain that regulates emotions and food intake — also reduces, decreasing our control and judgement over our food choices.

Bottom line

The “calories in, calories out” formula for weight loss success is a myth because it oversimplifies the complex process of calculating energy intake and expenditure. More importantly, it fails to consider the mechanisms our bodies trigger to counteract a reduction in energy intake.

So while you may achieve short-term weight loss following the formula, you’ll likely regain it.

What’s more, calorie counting can do more harm than good, taking the pleasure out of eating and contributing to developing an unhealthy relationship with food. That can make it even harder to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

For long term weight loss, it’s important to follow evidence-based programs from health-care professionals and make gradual changes to your lifestyle to ensure you form habits that last a lifetime.

At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register for free here to express your interest.

Nick Fuller, Charles Perkins Centre Research Program Leader, University of Sydney

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

Experts: Trump lawyers trying to “work the referees” ahead of likely indictment

Lawyers for Donald Trump met with top Justice Department officials on Monday to make the case that the former president should not be charged in connection with his possession of classified documents after leaving office, The Washington Post reported.

The meeting included Trump attorneys Jim Trusty, John Rowley and Lindsay Halligan, who spoke with the special counsel Jack Smith other DOJ officials, CBS News reported.

“Special counsel Jack Smith’s decision to meet with former President Trump’s lawyers suggests that Smith is near a final decision about whether to charge the former president for his handling of classified documents and possible obstruction of the DOJ’s investigation into his conduct,” Temidayo Aganga-Williams, partner at Selendy Gay Elsberg and former senior investigative counsel for the House Jan. 6 committee, told Salon.

He added that it isn’t “atypical” for senior DOJ officials to meet with counsel representing individuals in high-profile, public investigations prior to a final charging decision. Such meetings are also unlikely to change the course of the special counsel’s investigation, Aganga-Williams said.

The meeting came two weeks after the former president’s legal team requested to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland to raise concerns about what they alleged was unfair treatment of Trump over his handling of classified documents compared to other former presidents.

After Monday’s meeting concluded, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform in capital letters: “How can DOJ possibly charge me, who did nothing wrong, when no other president’s were charged…”

“How can DOJ possibly charge me?”: Trump explodes on Truth Social as lawyers try to stop indictment

He referenced the probe into Hillary Clinton, who was investigated by the FBI for having classified information on her private email server, which ended without criminal charges, and another ongoing investigation into classified documents found in the office and home of President Joe Biden.

“… only trump – the greatest witch hunt of all time!” he wrote in all caps.

Unlike the investigations into Biden and Clinton, the Trump inquiry has focused on potential obstruction of the investigation and efforts to retrieve classified documents.

For months, prosecutors have been examining whether Trump or his associates intentionally impeded their inquiry and attempts to recover classified materials.

In August, the FBI obtained a search warrant after suspicions arose that not all classified documents had been handed over despite the former president being issued a subpoena.

The FBI eventually carried out a search of Mar-a-Lago last August and found over 100 documents with classified markings at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

“Trump’s attorneys are just working the referees, hoping to avoid a thorny legal mess for the former president,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told Salon.

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A federal grand jury in D.C. has heard testimony from several witnesses in relation to the ongoing investigation.

Most recently, the special counsel’s team obtained a recording in which Trump admitted to holding onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.

The recording as well as surveillance video showing boxes of documents being moved at Mar-a-Lago by Trump’s aides can serve as crucial pieces of evidence that could potentially be used in a case against Trump, according to legal experts.

While several former White House aides and Mar-a-Lago employees have been called to testify in secret proceedings, grand jury testimony has slowed in recent weeks, sources told CBS.

Now, recent reports suggest that Smith’s probe into the former president appears to be nearing its end. The special counsel is also leading a separate investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“The best offense is a good defense in this case,” Rottinghaus said. “If his attorneys can forestall prosecution in this case, they can make the former president’s legal and political life a little easier.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

To fully appreciate the potential of canned clams, pair them with briny, bright red sauce

The image I conjure of pasta with clams has an aspirational sort of purity to it. A tangle of bronze-extruded pasta and just-opened clams in their shells are slicked with a glossy sauce of wine, olive oil, garlic and the clams’ briny liquor. Green parsley and red chile flake lend occasional shocks of color to this otherwise muted, luscious composition. Its unspoken caption reads, “Nowhere to hide here!”

I am a believer in paying a little extra for excellent pasta, which provides a flavor backbone of its own, much like I’d rather cook with wine that I like drinking. But because I live in a landlocked place, I can’t get the freshest wild-harvested clams, which are the inarguable star of this dish. So, long ago, I resolved to find ways to make this dish delicious with canned clams, which are tasty in their own right and quite affordable.

The perfect pasta for hot summer nights stars fresh tomatoes and buttery brie

This is how I also began appreciating the red sauce version of pasta with clams, whose jammy tang benefits from the briny shot of clam juice and saline funk of an oil-packed anchovy or two. Yes, you should absolutely add anchovies to red pasta with clams.

I’d probably condone splurging on fancy canned clams for the white version (Island Creek in Duxbury, Mass., recently released a beautiful collection of tinned fish in partnership with Mariscadora that includes clean, saline clams in brine). But you’d be mistaken to use those beauties in the red version, as the reduced tomatoes will overpower their oceanic nuance.

Besides the tomatoes and anchovy, I’ve changed little else about this simple recipe, with its aromatic foundation of garlic and shallots cooked in olive oil (and butter, if you please). I don’t particularly think this sauce requires wine, but if you have Pinot Grigio open, by all means add a splash or two (just before you add the clam juice in the method below).

A lot of people will fiercely debate whether or not one should sprinkle a little parm or pecorino over shellfish pasta dishes. I, for one, say if you love cheese with fish, add it. I prefer finishing this dish with a shower of fresh breadcrumbs fried with garlic in olive oil then tossed with parsley and lemon zest. It adds a little crunch and is a great way to use up those pesky bread butts. Then again, people could probably find plenty about this recipe to fiercely debate. Meanwhile, I’ll be here, slurping red pasta with canned clams and nothing at all to hide.

Red pasta with clams

Yields

3 servings

Prep Time

5 minutes

Cook Time

25 minutes

Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more as needed
5 fat garlic cloves, smashed and divided
2 to 3 slices bread, pulsed for 45 seconds in the food processor
Pinch salt, plus more as needed
Zest of ½ lemon
1 pound linguine, spaghetti or fusilli
1 tablespoon butter
1 to 2 anchovies
¼ teaspoons red pepper flakes
1 shallot, minced
2 6-ounce cans of clams, drained and liquid reserved (Snow’s, Bar Harbor — whatever your grocery store has)
2 cups strained or chopped tomatoes (I like Pomi)
½ cup fresh parsley, minced and divided
Fresh squeezed lemon juice, as needed, for seasoning and finishing

Directions

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, add the 2 Tbsp olive oil and one smashed garlic clove. Tip in the breadcrumbs, add a tiny pinch of salt, and cook, tossing frequently, until the breadcrumbs are golden brown. Take care to turn the garlic clove frequently, so it doesn’t burn. Remove from the heat and scrape the breadcrumbs into a bowl, reserving the cooked garlic. Add the lemon zest to the breadcrumbs, tossing to combine. Wipe out the skillet with a paper towel.
Chop the reserved, cooked garlic clove and remaining four raw cloves, and set aside. Heat the skillet over medium with another 2 Tbsp olive oil and the butter. Add the anchovy, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it melts. Add the red pepper flakes, shallot and chopped garlic. Cook for about 3 minutes, until the aromatics start to soften. Add the liquid from the clams, and turn the heat up to medium high. Add the tomatoes, half the parsley and a good pinch of salt. Bring the sauce to a boil, then turn down to medium and simmer for 12 to 15 minutes, until the sauce has thickened and reduced a little. Add the clams, cook for another minute and taste. Adjust the seasoning as needed with salt, red pepper flake and lemon juice.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta in generously salted water according to the directions on the box. When the pasta is al dente, add it to the sauce, reserving about ⅓ cup of the starchy cooking water. Toss the pasta until evenly coated in sauce, adding a few tablespoons of pasta water to the mixture to loosen, and a glug of olive oil for sheen. Taste a sauced noodle, and adjust the seasoning again if needed.
To serve, dish up the pasta into bowls, and top each with a good handful of the oil-fried breadcrumbs. Garnish with a generous sprinkling of parsley and another spritz of lemon.

from this writer

“Gender identity is real”: Judge torches Florida trans youth care ban with “no rational basis”

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Florida legislation barring gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction after four Florida families sued, arguing that the law violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by singling out trans minors.

Hinkle wrote that the ban was likely to be found unconstitutional and represents “purposeful discrimination” against transgender youth.

“The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real,” the judge wrote in a 44-page ruling. “The record makes this clear. The medical defendants, speaking through their attorneys, have admitted it. At least one defense expert also has admitted it.”

The legislation bans treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth. Hinkle, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, said the law bars treatments that are widely accepted by the medical community.

“Florida has adopted a statute and rules that prohibit these treatments even when medically appropriate,” he wrote. “The plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”

DeSantis’ “Florida blueprint” wipes the LGBTQ community off the map

The judge also called out the defendants in the lawsuit — including Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and other state officials — for contradicting themselves by both acknowledging that trans people exist and that trans identity is “made up.”

“Any proponent of the challenged statute and rules should put up or shut up: do you acknowledge that there are individuals with actual gender identities opposite their natal sex, or do you not? Dog whistles ought not be tolerated,” Hinkle wrote.

“The overwhelming weight of medical authority supports” gender-affirming care and “not a single reputable medical association has taken a contrary position,” he continued, adding that there is “no rational basis for a state to categorically ban these treatments.”

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The injunction does not apply to other parts of the legislation, which also bars gender-transition surgery for minors, labels transition care as equivalent to child abuse and bars the use of state funds to pay for transition care.

“The court addressed the specific question in front of it, but also issued a very strong ruling that says the bans are unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny,” Jennifer Levi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and the senior director of transgender rights at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, told The New York Times.

“My husband and I have been heartbroken and worried sick about not being able to care for our daughter in the way we know she needs,” one of the plaintiffs told Axios. “Today my entire family is breathing a huge sigh of relief knowing we can now access the treatment that we know will keep Susan healthy and allow her to continue being the happy, confident child she has been.”

Read the full ruling below:

Florida youth trans care ruling by Igor Derysh on Scribd

about anti-trans bills

George Santos says he would rather go to jail than name people who guaranteed $500K bond: court docs

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., would rather go to jail than name the individuals who secured his $500,000 bond, his attorney said in a court filing.

The Republican pleaded not guilty in May to charges of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements and was released on $500,000 bond.

His suretors did not appear in court but several media outlets filed motions to release their names under First Amendment grounds.

Santos lawyer Joseph Murray in a filing on Monday objected to the release of the names and asked the judge to notify two suretors if they have to be identified so they can back out and avoid being outed.

George Santos arrested on charges including fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds

“If this Court is so inclined to unseal the sureties, we truly fear for their health, safety and well being,” he wrote. “My client would rather surrender to pretrial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come.”

Per Santos's latest batch of court filings, the House Ethics Committee has asked Santos about the identities of people who helped him make bond

===> pic.twitter.com/RYQvUaZP1Q

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) June 5, 2023

Santos is charged with fraudulently collecting pandemic unemployment funds while running an investment firm, campaign finance fraud, and false statements to Congress about his assets and income.

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“The public interest in openness is particularly strong in this case. The surety records relate to three individuals who have committed large sums of money to ensure that Rep. Santos can remain at liberty, pending further proceedings,” Dana Green, the senior counsel for the New York Times, said in a filing. “This presents an obvious opportunity for political influence, given Rep. Santos’s elected position and his dependence on these suretors.”

Santos was caught lying about his biography after he won his 2022 race. Murray argued in the filing that his guarantors could face threats and blowback if they are outed and revealed that one of the suretors already had a change of heart after the indictment was unsealed.

“They all also expressed concern and fear of losing their jobs if they were forced to be identified,” Murray wrote. “The others did not appear at the arraignment on May 10, 2023. Instead, we made other confidential arrangements with the cooperation of (Assistant U.S. Attorney) Anthony Bagnuola and the court.”

Final page of Santos's legal team court filing says: "We'd respectfully request that the Court allow the suretors notice before the court releases their information so that they can withdraw as cosignors on the bond and Rep. Santos and I will appear before Your Honor forthwith"

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) June 5, 2023

about George Santos

As a mega-merger with Albertsons looms, Kroger makes another big payroll error

For almost a year, Kroger employees across the country have been plagued by payroll problems.

It started around last Labor Day when, as Salon Food reported, the supermarket chain migrated to a new payroll platform called MyTime and a glitch in that program caused thousands of late, partial and missing paychecks

Kroger abandons demand that employees return extra COVID-19 pay – here’s what happened

According to a November email sent to an area manager in the Midwest that was reviewed by Salon Food, management at Kroger were “”aware of the issue with relief [pay] being entered, but not paid out.” However, they didn’t indicate to employees when the issue would be resolved. Employees and their union representatives pushed the company for answers for months before eventually four class-action lawsuits against Kroger were filed in five states.

And now — as the chain is already facing increased scrutiny for its proposed mega-merger with its competitor, Albertsons — Kroger has made yet another payroll error and workers are speaking out about the experience.

As WCPO Cincinnati’s Dan Monk reported, 50 bakery managers in the Greater Cincinnati Kroger stores received incorrect bonus amounts in March when they were included for the first time in a new incentive program run by the company.

Kroger issued a statement about the error, which read, in part:

Kroger’s values include honesty and integrity, which means when we make a mistake, we acknowledge it and act quickly to resolve the issue. Several months ago, a small percentage of local associates were paid more than their earned incentive. This was due to a clerical mistake. We immediately identified the error, notified and provided the affected associates with options to return the mistaken overpayments in a way that respects both their personal financial situation and integrity.

But in the case of Tabitha Gilven, one of the impacted bakery managers, she was promised a $3,134 bonus. Instead, she received $6,653.93 from the company in three bank deposits on March 24. Initially, the company requested that the overpaid employees return the extra funds via an overnighted cashier’s check, however that was ultimately vetoed after some workers pushed back on having to absorb the cost of both a certified check and the overnighting costs.

Then, as Monk reported, Kroger’s payroll department sent Gilven a letter on April 14, claiming she was “overpaid a gross amount $6,794.48” and warning of “further collection efforts” if she failed to choose one of four options for repayment. The letter did not address why the company was seeking to collect over $140 more than they had deposited into her account, nor when she would get her $3,134 bonus after sending the money.

As of now, Gilven hasn’t sent the money back while she waits for her union representative to land on a repayment structure that won’t impact next year’s taxes for the overpaid employees.

“It feels like a slap in the face,” Gilven said. “I worked hard to get that bonus. I just want what’s supposed to be mine.”

Kroger’s pattern of payroll errors has caused some critics to question whether its proposed $24.6 billion merger with Albertsons, which is currently under review by the Federal Trade Commissions, should be approved. Kevin Garvey, Local 75 president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, told WCPO Cincinnati that there are various reasons people are concerned about the merger.

“Potential loss of (union) membership, liability to the trust funds, pension and health care, but I’m sure the payroll’s a big part of it as well,” he said. “You definitely don’t want to mess with peoples’ pay, right?”

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In May, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and its 1.3 million members voted unanimously to reject the merger. UFCW International President Marc Perrone said at the time: “Given the lack of transparency, and the impact a merger between two of the largest supermarket companies could have on essential workers – and the communities and customers they serve – the UFCW stands united in its opposition to the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger.”

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“Sounds like two sets of indictments”: NYT reveals existence of second Florida Mar-a-Lago grand jury

A New York Times report on Monday revealed the existence of a second federal grand jury in Florida hearing evidence in the Justice Department’s probe of former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents.

Prosecutors are expected to question a new witness before the Florida grand jury and at least one other witness has already appeared before the panel, according to the report.

It is not clear why a second grand jury is taking testimony in Florida, the report added, but prosecutors in recent weeks have focused on potential efforts by Trump employees to obstruct the probe. Prosecutors are interested in an indicted from October in which a worker drained a pool at Mar-a-Lago that flooded a room containing computer servers with digital surveillance logs.

“Very suspicious”: Experts skeptical after Trump employee drains pool into Mar-a-Lago server room

Prosecutors have also obtained Trump attorney Evan Corcoran’s notes in which he described his search for documents last June in response to a subpoena. Corcoran was forced to turn over the notes after prosecutors convinced a judge that there was evidence that Trump used his services in furtherance of a crime.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the second grand jury appeared to be an “effort to tie up loose ends.”

“Sounds like two sets of indictments: one for Trump (in DC) and one for the staffers DOJ suspects of assisting in obstruction (in FL),” tweeted national security attorney Bradley Moss.

Sounds like two sets of indictments: one for Trump (in DC) and one for the staffers DOJ suspects of assisting in obstruction (in FL).

We will know more soon. https://t.co/H3fOlFsOmB

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) June 5, 2023

“The existence of a separate grand jury in Florida considering evidence in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case strongly suggests that there may be *two* indictments due to venue issues, as there was in the Manafort case,” wrote former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, referring to Trump’s former campaign chief who was charged in both D.C. and Virginia in the Mueller probe. “Certain potential crimes occurred *only* in Florida.”

The existence of a separate grand jury in Florida considering evidence in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case strongly suggests that there may be *two* indictments due to venue issues, as there was in the Manafort case.

Certain potential crimes occurred *only* in Florida. https://t.co/iWTvjuWNmz

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 5, 2023

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Trump’s attorneys met with special counsel Jack Smith on Monday in an attempt to avert a possible indictment.

“I have been hearing before this meeting took place, that Trump expected he is going to be charged,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN on Monday. “It’s not that they have said this to him. It’s just that he believes it… DOJ officials, typically prosecutors at any level keep their cards close to the vest. I don’t think this was different in this meeting. But I also don’t think they came away thinking, ‘oh, we’ve solved this.’ For somebody like Donald Trump who treats everything like a deal and exchange and transaction, I don’t think this is the meeting he wanted.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

“How can DOJ possibly charge me?”: Trump explodes on Truth Social as lawyers try to stop indictment

Former President Donald Trump lashed out on Truth Social Monday as his lawyers met with special counsel Jack Smith in an attempt to avert a possible indictment.

Trump attorneys James Trusty, Lindsey Halligan and John Rowley met with Smith and DOJ officials for about two hours on Monday as they made their case that the government should not criminally charge the former president, according to The Washington Post. The lawyers raised allegations of prosecutorial misconduct at the meeting, according to CNN. Two Trump advisers told the Post they are preparing for a potential indictment in the coming weeks and that the meeting did not change their expectations.

“It’s possible that their lout of a client insisted that the lawyers waste their meeting with general grievances about prosecutorial misconduct that already have been rejected by the courts,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “But if so, it was tantamount to throwing away the meeting.”

Trump, meanwhile, has been busy posting in all caps on his social media platform over the past 24 hours.

“Very suspicious”: Experts skeptical after Trump employee drains pool into Mar-a-Lago server room

“HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP – THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” Trump wrote.

Trump continued to compare his case to President Joe Biden’s, whose attorneys discovered classified documents at several locations and turned them over. Biden’s handling of the documents is being investigated by the DOJ. But Trump refused to turn over documents in response to requests from the National Archives and later failed to comply with a grand jury subpoena to return the documents before the FBI seized hundreds of classified materials from his Mar-a-Lago residence. Investigators have reportedly focused on potential obstruction and Espionage Act charges in the probe.

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“The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong,” Trump posted on Tuesday morning. “Joe Biden kept (keeps) thousand of documents, in many locations, some illegally taken from skiffs while he was a Senator, a big portion of which were classified. He didn’t want to give them back, and still doesn’t. Nothing happens to him, with same reasonable prosecutor who correctly exonerated Mike Pence. I have a much different prosecutor, a Trump hater!”

Trump in a subsequent post described the probe as “election interference” and urged his supporters to “FIGHT.”

“They don’t want to run against me. I ran twice, I did much better the second time, getting millions and millions more votes than the first, a record for a sitting President, and am leading Biden in the polls, by a lot. They are the Party of Disinformation! They are using the DOJ & FBI against me to Rigg the 2024 Election. They’ll hit Hunter with something small to make their strike on me look ‘fair.’ Nothing about these Fascists is fair or honest. FIGHT!”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

The father of genetics couldn’t get anyone to listen to him — but he got the last laugh

The history of science is full of tales of unappreciated genius. Indeed, the founder of modern genetics was not fully appreciated for his ideas until decades after his death.

His name was Gregor Mendel — and he loved breeding pea plants.

“People that are in power, they can help you or block you.”

Born Johann Mendel on July 20, 1822, the burgeoning scientific genius struggled financially for most of his childhood because he was the son of a poor farmer in the Austrian empire. Joining the Order of Saint Augustine, a mendicant order of the Catholic Church, Mendel was able to spend his life as a monk and therefore not have to worry about his livelihood. While this was a clever decision for someone who wished to spend much of his life studying science — monasteries, as de facto universities in the 19th century, often hosted important scientific innovators — it did not mean that Mendel was spared all future hardships. In 1850, for example, he failed one of the three examinations necessary to become a certified high school teacher. Mendel ultimately overcame this and other career setbacks, but at the end of the day, he was never appreciated for his contributions to science during his lifetime. When he died on January 6, 1884 of chronic nephritis and possible cardiovascular problems, he was regarded as a kindly and intelligent Augustinian friar and abbot of his monastery — but not much else.

Today’s anti-mask activists have much in common with anti-handwashing doctors of the 1840s

Sixteen years passed before Mendel’s true contributions to humanity were rediscovered. To understand the significance of that rediscovery, though, one must start by describing Mendel’s historic experiments with peas. As he explained when he presented his historic paper “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” in 1865, Mendel had spent nine years testing 28,000 plants, most of them pea plants. He wanted to learn how to reliably breed specific types of peas, explaining that he hoped to come up with “a generally applicable law governing the formation and development of hybrids.” It was never his intention to revolutionize science; in fact, both when he discussed his paper in lectures and when he published it in 1866, he presented his findings in humble terms. Perhaps for this reason, Mendel’s fellow scientists generally dismissed his work as being merely about hybridization, failing to see its implications for understanding the laws of inheritance. Even scientist Charles Darwin, who discovered evolution, appears to have been unaware of Mendel’s work during his lifetime, even though Mendel sent him a copy of his paper, which Darwin never opened. When Mendel died, he was well-respected and highly regarded by his family and friends, but was hardly considered to be a pioneering scientist.

Yet Mendel had pioneered new scientific theories. Specifically, he came up with three vital concepts that are known today as Mendel’s laws of inheritance. First there is the law of dominance and uniformity, which holds that alleles (alternative forms of genes found at the same place on a chromosome and produced by mutation) can be either dominant or recessive, with organisms that have at least one dominant allele displaying that allele’s traits. Next there is the law of segregation, which determined that gametes (the reproductive cells of animals and plants) contain segregated version of the alleles for each gene and, as a result, each gamete carries only one allele for every gene. Finally there is the law of independent assortment, which found that genes with different traits can segregate from each other independently while gametes are being formed.

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Mendel managed to be hailed as a scientific pioneer more than one-third of a century after he presented those concepts, and more than a decade-and-a-half after his death.

Fortunately for Mendel’s legacy, three separate botanists working independently of each other wound up rediscovering his ideas and — in the year 1900 — they all published their concepts while crediting Mendel’s paper for originating the theories. To this day it is unclear whether the botanists in question — Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich con Tshermak — acted as they did out of altruism or because crediting Mendel with the idea neatly side-stepped any possible competition for credit among the three scientists. Thus Mendel managed to be hailed as a scientific pioneer more than one-third of a century after he presented those concepts, and more than a decade-and-a-half after his death.

Mendel is hardly alone in history when it comes to scientists who were unappreciated in their time. The field of biology alone is replete with examples of this happening. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis, a young doctor at an obstetrical clinic in Vienna General Hospital, figured out that mortality rates were unusually high at the maternity ward run by doctors (compared to the one run by midwifes) because doctors were delivering babies after working on corpses. Semmelweis’ solution — that doctors wash their hands after working with corpses — seems like common sense today; at the time, however, Semmelweis was harassed and bullied by his peers, many of whom were offended at the notion that their hands could ever be unclean. His early identification of what Louis Pasteur would later recognize as germ theory went unrecognized in his lifetime.

By contrast, Dr. Katalin Karikó was recognized for her work during her lifetime. involve the creation of a synthetic single strand of an RNA molecule known as messenger RNA (or mRNA). While working as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 20th century, Karikó came up with the idea of an mRNA vaccine, or a vaccine that injects a bespoke version of mRNA into the body which then infects human cells and trains them to produce proteins like those found in a given virus. Although Karikó’s ideas were rejected by her peers for many years, by 2013 she had been hired by BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals to make those ideas into reality. That is why, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in late 2019, scientists were able to develop effective vaccines using mRNA technology by the end of 2020.

Speaking with Salon at the time, Karikó offered wisdom that applies to anyone who — like Mendel and Semmelweis — has valid scientific observations that are not sufficiently appreciated at the time they are presented.

“People that are in power, they can help you or block you,” Karikó told Salon. “And sometimes people select to make your life miserable. And now they cannot be happy with me because now they know that, ‘Oh, you know, we had the confrontation and . . .’ But I don’t spend too much time on these things.”

about science and history

“Very suspicious”: Experts skeptical after Trump employee drains pool into Mar-a-Lago server room

Prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump have raised questions about an incident in October when a Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort’s pool and flooded a room containing computer servers with surveillance video logs, according to CNN.

It’s unclear if the room was flooded intentionally or by mistake, according to the report, but prosecutors have found the series of events “suspicious” and asked at least one witness about it.

The incident came about two months after the FBI seized hundreds of classified documents from Trump’s residence as prosecutors obtained surveillance footage to review how the documents were stored and moved after the former president received a subpoena in May 2022.

Prosecutors have heard testimony that the IT equipment in the room was not damaged by the flood, according to CNN, but investigators are looking at whether Trump or a small group of people who work for him tried to obstruct the Justice Department’s probe.

Investigators have questioned witnesses about whether Trump directed others to obstruct the investigation and in recent weeks questioned Trump employees whether it is possible there are gaps in the surveillance footage that was turned over and whether it could have been tampered with.

Trump melts down on Truth Social over reports that special counsel “wants to indict me”

Prosecutors have focused their obstruction inquiries on Trump body man Walt Nauta and a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents before federal agents searched the property last year, according to the report. Sources told the outlet that the maintenance worker is the same person who drained the pool that led to the flooding.

Investigators last month questioned Trump Organization security officials Matthew Calamari Sr. and Matthew Calamari Jr. about the maintenance worker’s conversations and a text message from Nauta to Calamari Sr. asking to talk.

The maintenance worker spoke with investigators as well, and had his phone seized, sources told CNN.

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Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said it is no wonder prosecutors are suspicious.

“Prosecutors don’t believe in coincidences. It’s not surprising that they are very suspicious about the flooding of a room where Mar-a-Lago surveillance video logs were kept,” he tweeted. “A jury would likely be skeptical of this evidence as well.”

The D.C. watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tweeted that the flood was certainly “convenient” for the former president.

“Next up: my dog ate the docs?” quipped former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team.

The report came on the same day that Trump’s attorneys met with special counsel Jack Smith to make their case for the department to not charge the former president in connection to the documents, according to The Washington Post.

“Fasten your seat belts”: Experts on Trump “indictment watch” as Jack Smith grand jury reconvenes

“This meeting indicates to me is that we are at the end of the Mar-a-Lago piece of the Jack Smith investigation. This is the kind of thing defense attorneys would try and do as a last ditch effort,” former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC.

"This meeting indicates to me is that we are at the end of the Mar-a-Lago piece of the Jack Smith investigation. This is the kind of thing defense attorneys would try and do as a last ditch effort" – @neal_katyal w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/RyMkIRPT9x

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) June 5, 2023

Weissmann in an appearance on the network predicted that an indictment would come soon.

“The one thing I am pretty confident of is that we are going to see charges… this week,” he said.

"The open issue is where the charges will be brought and who if anyone may be charged alongside Donald Trump…The one thing I am pretty confident of is that we are going to see charges… this week" – @AWeissmann_ w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/EjleBLJ2TI

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) June 5, 2023

Smith’s investigators have been looking at potential obstruction as well as possible violations of the Espionage Act.

“Of all the things that this man has done, eight decades of lying and cheating and stealing, this case, this documents case is probably the easiest, shortest, simplest and yet carries the most severe penalties, likely penalties, of any of the cases, any of the legal issues that he’s ever faced,” conservative attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic, told MSNBC.

“But for this man who is basically a nihilistic moron, for him to go to jail potentially for a long time, these Espionage Act charges bring very heavy sentences to potentially go to jail for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents is actually kind of fitting.”

.@gtconway3d: "Of all the things that Trump's done—eight decades of lying, cheating, and stealing…For this man to go to jail for potentially a long time for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents, it's actually kind of fitting." pic.twitter.com/V7AG6t1nQm

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 6, 2023

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

A new round of anti-vax misinformation could ruin an otherwise calmer RSV season

COVID-19 hasn’t been the only threat to parents and their children since 2020. Concerns about the flu and the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have also escalated during recent winters, leading to what was termed a “tripledemic” last year. However, with upcoming advancements in RSV vaccines, the approaching winter may finally have a sense of calm — that is, if anti-vax misinformation doesn’t get in the way.

The FDA estimates that each year about 60,000 adults over the age of 65 are hospitalized with RSV; 6,000 to 10,000 die from the virus. Infants also face an increased risk. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year nearly 80,000 kids under 5 are hospitalized with RSV, and an estimated 300 die.

Last month, the FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine against RSV for adults age 60 and older, marking the second shot approved that month. The GSK vaccine was previously approved by the FDA. This month, the FDA will reconvene to discuss an upcoming pediatric vaccine that would pass immunity to fetuses by vaccinating pregnant women.

Unvaccinated pregnant women face a high risk of severe COVID-19

“For a long time, we thought of RSV as just being of concern to younger infants and causing mild illness, like colds, in older adults but we’re finding that it’s not quite as severe as something like influenza, but it causes about a quarter of the deaths and hospitalizations compared to influenza,” Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases and associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, told Salon.

“And that’s still pretty significant.”

The approaching winter may finally have a sense of calm — that is if anti-vax misinformation doesn’t get in the way.

Indeed, the FDA is clearing the path for approval to protect both the elderly and young infants. Two weeks ago, FDA advisers showed unanimous support for the Pfizer vaccine that would immunize pregnant women during the second or third trimester. A clinical study involving 7,400 people found that the vaccine had 81.8% efficacy in preventing severe illness caused by RSV up to three months after birth, and 69.4 percent efficacy in the first six months of life.

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In an op-ed published in STAT News, Sallie Permar, pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, and Karen Acker, hospital epidemiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, emphasized the urgency for RSV vaccines to be approved by the FDA as soon as possible.

“If we could wave a magic wand to ameliorate the all-but-certain confluence of a high-volume respiratory virus season, ongoing behavioral health patient needs, staffing shortages, and dwindling pediatric capacity, we would all run — not walk — to deliver this to children, families, and providers,” the authors wrote. “Globally, RSV is the second leading cause of death during the first year of a child’s life, after malaria.”

And while the magic wand appears to have been delivered, there are fears it could be intimidated by misinformation — especially among pregnant women.

As Salon has reported before, online pregnancy forums are rife with health misinformation, especially around vaccines. In mid-May, Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vax nonprofit, called the progress with the pediatric vaccine a “sad day for babies and mums,” emphasizing concerns about pre-term births. The framing is yet another example of how anti-vaxxers repeatedly decontextualize information to fit an anti-vaccine agenda. FDA’s reviewers of Pfizer’s international study of nearly 7,400 pregnant women agreed “the safety data seem generally favorable.”

However, they did raise concerns about a small difference — 5.7 percent versus 4.7 percent — in premature births between vaccinated mothers and unvaccinated moms. On average in the U.S., one in 10 babies are born prematurely. The FDA advisors said the difference wasn’t statistically significant. A total of 17 infants did die during the study, five of whom were born to vaccinated mothers. The FDA panel said none of the deaths were related to the vaccine, with the exception of one, as it was “unable to exclude the possibility” that one of the infant’s deaths could be related.

Previously, Dr. Melissa Simon, an obstetrician-gynecologist and professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Salon the fact that a lot of the misinformation clouds pregnancy stems from “structural issues,” such as “excluding pregnant and birthing and lactating persons” from research. “And that’s really unfortunate because when certain groups are left behind from being included in clinical trials, there is relatively less data.” But now, more data is here as pregnant people are being included in more studies.

An American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) spokesperson told Salon via email that “there are a number of details that need to be determined that will impact the implementation of the vaccine and integration into the practice setting and routine obstetric care.”

In other words, it hasn’t been approved just yet and advisors and scientists are doing their job to only approve it if it’s safe for pregnant women and their children.

“These include details around optimal timing of administration, co-administration, vaccine storage, other access considerations,” the spokesperson said. “Obstetrician-gynecologists recognize and appreciate the importance of preventing RSV in infants younger than six months of age and other populations at highest risk for severe illness, and immunizations are an essential part of preventive care for adults, including pregnant individuals.”

It also doesn’t help that the RSV vaccine has a worrisome history. One that was developed in the 1960s induced a more severe reaction to the virus in vaccinated kids.

“That was when there was much less known about the pathophysiology of RSV disease in infants,” Blumberg said. “For decades, nobody wanted to come near RSV vaccines with a 10-foot pole because of that experience, until people learned more about why that happened and really learned from that mistake and resulted in an immune response that was predicted to protect against disease not result in that risk of worsening disease.”

There is another vaccine in the works, nirsevimab, which could vaccinate children directly. In a real-world clinical trial, the vaccine reduced infant hospitalizations by 83 percent.

“The reason to vaccinate during pregnancy is so the mother develops antibodies that get passed on to the child, but now that there’s an alternative that’s on the horizon to vaccinate the child themselves directly, that just makes much more sense,” Blumberg said. “And then you don’t have to worry about the issue of possible preterm delivery or any other effects during pregnancy.”

about viral illnesses

“Protect the kids” exposed as a lie after Tennessee’s drag ban gets knocked down by a Trump judge

For a couple of years now, Republicans have been ramping up their increasingly unhinged attacks on LGBTQ people, usually with the same cover story: They don’t hate queer people! It’s just about protecting the children! This excuse has always been paper-thin, of course, and based on the risible premise that queer people, merely by existing, are “sexual” in some undefinable way that straight people are not. It’s how, for instance, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis can pass laws that presume that depicting a same-sex wedding in a book is “pornographic,” but an opposite-sex wedding is just fine for kids.

The “for the children” excuse is so flimsy, in fact, that even a Donald Trump-appointed judge in Tennessee was forced to dismiss it, late Friday night. Republican Gov. Bill Lee had signed a law banning drag wherever minors could see it, on the specious grounds that drag performances are “sexualized entertainment.” The law put “male or female impersonators” in the same bucket as “topless dancers,” falsely implying, for instance, that a dance performance at a Pride parade or a drag queen story hour is the same thing as a lap dance at an adults-only strip club.

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U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker saw right through that false equivalence. While agreeing that “Tennessee has a compelling government interest in protecting its minor population,” Parker wrote that this law is “both unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” This law isn’t about protecting minors, he wrote, so much as about “the impermissible purpose of chilling constitutionally-protected speech” and encouraging “discriminatory enforcement.”

Translated into plain English: Tennessee Republicans don’t care about kids. They just want an excuse to shut down Pride events, harass trans people, and arrest LGBTQ people for expressing themselves. That’s why Lee shrugged it off when photos of him dressed in drag for a high school performance surfaced. To Republicans, a straight man in a dress is just a laugh, but a gay man in a dress is “pornography.” It’s an excuse to classify LGBTQ people as inherently predatory and dangerous. It’s why the vicious slur “groomer” has become ubiquitous on the right, aimed at any queer person who is out of the closet.

Tennessee Republicans don’t care about kids. They just want an excuse to shut down Pride events, harass trans people, and arrest LGBTQ people for expressing themselves.

The decision is well-timed, and not just to save the various Pride events that many feared would have to be canceled in Tennessee this month. Increasingly, conservatives are abandoning the pretense that the escalating attacks on LGBTQ people are about “the children.” Instead, they’ve become more open about their true intent: restoring a social order where only cis straight people are “normal” and everyone else is deemed a pervert who is not fit to move about freely in society.

Tennessee GOP governor backing anti-drag bill confronted with photo of him in drag

That much was evident in the most recent right-wing tantrum over Target stocking Pride merchandise. Sure, there was a half-baked effort to find some kid angle, by spreading lies about the company marketing “tuck-friendly” bathing suits to children. But revealingly the right-wing outrage persisted despite many debunkings of this lie, showing the conspiracy theory was a mere pretext. Target’s management certainly understood this, as the company took down all manner of Pride merchandise, which they wouldn’t need to do if it was all a misunderstanding about a product that doesn’t exist.

To Republicans, a straight man in a dress is just a laugh, but a gay man in a dress is “pornography.”

This follows an even more shameless right-wing hysteria over Bud Light offering a minor endorsement deal to online trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. It’s basically impossible to pretend there’s something about “sexualizing” minors in a fully-dressed woman talking up a product that minors are legally banned from purchasing. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried, of course, with a ridiculous letter screeching about “underage” beer drinkers, even though Mulvaney is 26 years old. But mostly it was people like right-wing trash musician Kid Rock and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw unabashedly acting like Bud Light has cooties now because they saw a photo of a trans woman touching a Bud Light can.

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The Proud Boys were instrumental in ratcheting up anti-LGBTQ harassment under the guise of “protecting” children, mostly by targeting family-friendly drag shows and Pride events, with false claims that they were sexually explicit. As Business Insider reports, however, that thin pretext has dissolved. On Telegram channels, Proud Boys have been planning attacks on Pride events by joking that “‘LGBTQ’ stands for ‘Let’s Go Bully The Queers,'” and how they want to get a rise out of the “Fag community.” One member said he wants to “challenge this perversion of the Nuclear Family and Gender.” Repeatedly, Proud Boys discussed “taking back June,” tying their anger over Pride to anger over Juneteenth, a new federal holiday to celebrate the end of slavery.

In Montana, the harassment of state legislator Zooey Zephyr also illustrates how little Republicans believe their own lies about “protecting children.” As soon as Zephyr, who is trans, was elected, the GOP state house speaker Matt Regier started hounding her. As Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times wrote, he made clear “a lock would be installed on the main door to the multistall women’s bathroom to avoid the possibility of anyone having to share it with Zephyr.” He then seized on a speech Zephyr gave, with faux outrage over her supposed tone. Regier ultimately had Zephyr banned from the House floor. Soon a group of Republican women started to show up early to sit on the single bench Zephyr had access to, in order to bully her some more.

MAGA Republicans are obsessed with harassing drag shows — here’s why

What’s noteworthy is that Republicans didn’t even bother with tortured arguments trying to make all this childish harassment of Zephyr about “the children.” As with the Bud Light tantrum, it’s now unapologetic, naked hatred.

Also in Montana, a ban on drag was used to shut down an academic talk by a woman who is absolutely not a drag performer. Adria Jawort, a trans and Indigenous activist, had been scheduled to offer a history lecture.

The Butte Public Library confirmed to me this event was canceled due to belief it might violate HB 359, the drag show ban passed this session. Although the event was not drag-related but a talk about LGBTQ+ history. Trying to get more details from BSB county attorney. https://t.co/RVejD0qEqw

— John Hooks (@johnhooksMT) June 1, 2023

No one believes that there are children lining up for a boring academic talk at a public library. It just shows how silly — and hateful — all this “groomer” talk really is. All the behavior they deem as “sexualizing” when queer people do it is seen as perfectly fine for straight people: using the bathroom, dancing at a party, teaching history and getting married. Or even, in the case of Tennesse’s Gov. Lee, cross-dressing. It’s all “innocent” when straight people do it, and “grooming” with LGBTQ people do it, a double standard that’s so obvious that it feels stupefying to even point it out.

Still, it matters to have a judge point out the obvious, especially in an era where conservative judges are often all too eager to flagrantly endorse bad faith arguments. Absolutely no one believes the “protecting kids” lie — not even a Trump judge. It’s a wonder why Republicans bother to pretend to care about kids at all.

about Republicans’ war on LGBTQ+ people

“I felt like I was made for that moment”: Keith Ellison on prosecuting the George Floyd murder

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is no stranger to the spotlight. He was the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, back in 2006. After 12 years in the House, including two years as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, he became the first Muslim American elected to statewide office when he was elected to his current office in 2018. He won re-election last fall in a landmark election for Minnesota Democrats. But handling the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and the other Minneapolis police officers who murdered George Floyd, Ellison says, was in many ways the culmination of his life and career and unlike anything he had encountered before. While a state attorney general wouldn’t ordinarily prosecute local crimes, Ellison was appointed as a special prosecutor in the Floyd case by Gov. Tim Walz.

I recently spoke with Ellison — with whom I’ve been friendly for years — about his new book, “Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence” for an installment of “Salon Talks.” He admitted that with the entire world watching the Floyd case, he did feel an extra sense of responsibility for prosecuting the officers who had killed him. “It sounds weird even for me to say it, but the truth is my whole life I’ve been prepared for this moment,” Ellison explained. “I didn’t know it, but I mean, I was in the state legislature, I was in Congress, I came to this. I’ve been working on police stuff all my life, ever since I was 25 years old.”

To Ellison, the conviction of Chauvin and the other officers represents an important step toward breaking the cycle of police violence. “We need to win these cases,” Ellison explained, so that police officers understand they will be held accountable for their actions in criminal court if and when that is necessary. “Juries are ready to say, ‘This violates the law,'” he added, while stressing that it’s not enough. “We need Congress to act,” he said, by passing the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act. (Which is not likely to occur as long as Republicans hold the House.)

I also asked Ellison to reflect to the fact that nearly two and a half years since Donald Trump’s attempted coup and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, our former president has faced no criminal charges related to those events. “We have to enforce the idea that no one’s above the law and no one’s beneath the law,” Ellison said. And when it comes to “MAGA types,” he added, we need to face the fact that they are “just done with representative democracy.”

Watch my interview with Keith Ellison here or read a transcript of our conversation below to hear his take on the direction of justice in America, what it took to convict Chauvin and whether he has plans to run for higher office.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The foreword of your book is written by Philonise Floyd, George Floyd‘s brother. Why was that important to you? The book is obviously about George Floyd’s murder and how the criminal justice system responded afterward, but it begins with Philonise.

Philonise really went from being a very ordinary guy — extraordinary to the people who loved him and knew him, but ordinary in the eyes of the world. He’s driving a truck, he’s just a dude making a living, and then he’s thrust into the middle of this international conflict with his brother’s murder and he’s required to be a spokesperson. He’s required to stand up and articulate, on behalf of his family and so many millions, what this moment means. I thought that Philonise was the best person and I’m really grateful to him. As he was writing the foreword, [the killing of] Tyre Nichols happened. He’s the perfect person to pull back the curtain and start the show when it comes to this book.

Your office ended up being in charge of the prosecution of Derek Chauvin.

Right. All of them.

At the beginning, your office wasn’t involved in that. How did the attorney general of Minnesota become the one charged with prosecuting Chauvin and the other officers?

“The truth is, my whole life I’ve been prepared for [the George Floyd case]. I didn’t know it, but I was in the state legislature, I was in Congress, I came to this. I’ve been working on police stuff all my life.”

Well, quite honestly, I think it’s impossible to know what caused the eruption that Thursday night. It would have been about May 30, 2020, when the Third Precinct [of Minneapolis] goes up in flames. Earlier that day, the U.S. attorney and the county attorney had a press conference, and it was one of those moments where the press was ravenously hungry for any news, so then in those moments, anything you say becomes news.

The prosecutor in the county said, “Look, we’re still getting information, some good, some bad, and there’s some evidence coming in inconsistent with a charge.” He said a lot of things, but that is what got picked up. That sparked the family, a bunch of legislators and even some celebrities to start calling the governor saying, “Give Ellison the case.” That Saturday, he calls me and says, “Let’s do it together.” Absolutely. He’s a friend and I thought he could use the help.

I had people telling me, “Don’t get involved in that. If you win, the cops are going to hate you. If you lose, the people are going to hate you, so just stay out of it. Let him deal with it on his own.” But I’m not cut out like that.

By that Sunday, the governor is like, “Will you be on this case?” I’m like, “Sure, of course I’m going to step up and help my community.” People gave us the time we needed to pull the case together. We actually did re-evaluate the complaint and the counts that the officers were charged with, and then we moved on from there.

In retrospect, and maybe even at the time, did you feel a sense of responsibility? The world was watching, the country was watching, we’re in the middle of COVID, there’s people in the streets. Did you feel any more sense of responsibility in this case than in the typical case you handle in the AG’s office?

I think the answer is yes, and I’ll tell you why. It sounds weird even for me to say it. The truth is, my whole life I’ve been prepared for this moment. I didn’t know it, but I mean, I was in the state legislature, I was in Congress, I came to this. I’ve been working on police stuff for all my life, ever since I was 25 years old. I had been doing criminal defense, so I understood this case from the other side. I have been working on policing issues.

“There was something about the location, the time and everything about [George Floyd’s killing] that told me that if I don’t do anything and everything I can to try to bring a just resolution, I’m failing on life’s purpose.”

One of the things I talk about early in the book is that two blocks north of where this tragic incident happened with George Floyd, me and my law partners brought a civil case against an officer who shot a 15-year-old kid in the back. We sued him and we got a zero verdict against us. Our client got zeroed out and we spent a lot of money to try to bring the case forward. So that told me right then, right there: Wow. What was that loss for?

Well, I don’t know what it was for. Maybe it wasn’t for anything. But what it meant to me here is how hard these cases are to win. [That kid] was shot in the back. Now, he did have a water pistol. It was red and it looked like that, and yet he still got zeroed out.

So this [the Floyd case] was a grave matter. There was something about the location, the time and everything about this matter that told me that if I don’t do anything and everything I can to try to bring a just resolution, I’m failing on life’s purpose, maybe. That sounds kind of dramatic, but you asked me if I felt a sense of responsibility and if I’m going to be very honest, I’ll say that I felt I was made for that moment.

Author Marc Lamont Hill on George Floyd, America, “telling the truth and fighting for freedom”

In the bigger picture of criminal justice and policing, you mention the case Graham v. Connor in your book, which speaks to the issue of why police don’t get charged, why police officers are so rarely held liable? Tell us a little bit about that so people can understand.

Graham v. Connor takes place in North Carolina. There’s this guy, a very regular guy who happens to be a type-one diabetic. He has a diabetic episode and he’s in the car with his friend and he says, “Pull over, pull over now. I’ve got to get, like, orange juice or something because I can feel myself going into an episode.” So his friend pulls over, he goes in, he grabs an orange juice. He sees a long line. For some reason he doesn’t budge the line, he just puts the orange juice back and runs out to the car to see if he can find somewhere quicker.

“Graham v. Connor is based on the Fourth Amendment, which says there shall be no unreasonable search and seizure. It doesn’t say from the perspective of the officer. It doesn’t say without the benefit of hindsight. But the Supreme Court reads it into there.”

Well, this officer sees him go in and come out quickly and then follows the car. He pulls them over, and this guy is going into sort of an episode and is acting somewhat erratically. But there’s no evidence at all of a crime being committed. Nobody’s complaining. Nothing is wrong. The officer verbally abuses him. He loses consciousness. They throw him into the car, and they injure him in doing so. Then they find out that he’s done literally nothing wrong except for suffering the consequences of being a type-one diabetic. Then they drive him to his house and throw him out of the car like he’s a bag of trash. Then he sues, and And he gets a judge who is a segregationist, a judge who worked for [former North Carolina senator] Jesse Helms. This judge was known to want to maintain a segregated Jim Crow society. So he loses the case, and in fact, the judge directs a verdict for the state.

Now, it’s interesting, Dean, because we don’t have Graham v. Connor as the law at this point. We have a case called Johnson v. Glick, which says that a plaintiff has to prove malicious intent. Now, how in the world do you prove that, unless someone says, “I am maliciously intending to injure you?” That doesn’t happen very often, so it was thought that Graham v. Connor would be a step forward. But Graham v. Connor is based on the Fourth Amendment, which says there shall be no unreasonable search and seizure. It doesn’t say from the perspective of the officer. It doesn’t say without the benefit of hindsight. It doesn’t say any of that. But the Supreme Court reads it into there.

One of the things I put in the book is a colloquy between the state’s lawyer and Justice Thurgood Marshall, who is like, “Well, the man’s not violent. What are you talking about? What’s the problem?” And the lawyers are kind of dumbfounded and stuck. When Graham v. Connor is issued in 1989, it looks like an advance because it’s based on objective reasonableness. But it’s objective reasonableness from the perspective of the officer, without the benefit at hindsight. So in Graham v. Connor, when his case was tried, because it was remanded to the trial court, the defense was, “Well, the officer didn’t know he was having a diabetic fit. He was acting erratically and the officer gets to arrest him for his erratic behavior.” I’m just reading that case dumbfounded, thinking, there’s no crime reported, no evidence of a crime, no speeding. I mean, literally nothing. You have a right to walk into a store and walk out again.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Graham v. Connor essentially says that if an officer uses excessive force against you, they will escape any consequence. It’s an important case for people to know the underlying facts, because Graham v. Connor is what all 18,000 police departments across America use and are trained on.

Under that standard, police officers believe they can do just about anything, to be honest.

Yeah.

Let’s get back to the trial of Derek Chauvin. The entire nation is watching this. I remember it vividly. Is there anything that sticks with you when you think back on that trial?

Many things do. But I’ll tell you one moment when I had an unexpected emotional reaction. Imagine, Dean, that from the moment I got this case until the trial, I had reviewed the tape thousands of times. But one thing I didn’t get, and that was the moment when George Floyd is under the knee of Derek Chauvin and his eyes go and then they close. Dr. Tobin identified that as the moment when the life went out of George Floyd. You could see it and it was clear. It was one of those things that I’ll never forget.

That proved to me that we were well advised to throw a lot of energy into the medical case. Because a lot of people were thinking, “Well, what do you need the medical? What’s the big deal about the medical? He’s walking one minute, 10 minutes later, he’s dead. Obviously there was an intervening cause.” Well, the defense, doing their job, was there to pick every element apart, and we were wise not to just take it as face value.

“Anybody who’s cynical about humanity needs to see what those people did to try to save him. Don’t tell me that people don’t care. People do care. They tried to do what they could and yet they weren’t able to save his life.”

Another event: Mr. Charles McMillan, 61 years old, lived his life, has seen the tough, bitter part of what America, our country, can deliver to a Black man from the South without any formal education. Here this tough old guy is in tears over what he saw. He didn’t know George Floyd, but he was trying desperately to save George Floyd’s life. Anybody who’s cynical about humanity needs to see what those people did to try to save him. A young white woman, Genevieve Hansen, a firefighter on her day off, just going for a walk, sees this tragic incident. She intervenes, “Check his pulse. Check his pulse.” She probably got as close as anyone to getting arrested for intervening, for trying to save George Floyd’s life. She didn’t know him from a can of paint.

Here we see these human beings who don’t know George Floyd, putting themselves in harm’s way to try to save his life. They were multicultural. They were intergenerational, both sexes, and they were randomly selected and none of them knew George Floyd. So don’t tell me that people don’t care. People do care, and they tried to do what they could and yet they weren’t able to save his life. But then they came back a year later to try to explain to the jury what happened. That to me, I still find extraordinary. I still find it extraordinary and I could keep going.

You said famously after the verdict that this was not justice.

Right.

This was the beginning of accountability.

That’s right.

The historic Chauvin verdict isn’t “justice” — it’s a broken system trying to save itself

The idea behind your book is that we can break the cycle of police violence. What needs to be done next to do that, and how does the verdict in the Derek Chauvin case, and in the case of the other officers, contribute to breaking that cycle?

It chips away at breaking the cycle. It doesn’t break the cycle. Sometimes something is necessary, but insufficient, to solve a problem. If you’re going to make a cake you need flour, but if all you’ve got is flour, you don’t have a cake.

We need to win these cases. One thing we do know is that juries are ready to say, “This violates the law.” The federal case, which was sort of a parallel, which happened about a year later, we were doubtful as to whether or not a federal jury, which would be drawn from the southern half of the state of Minnesota, which would include rural areas [would find Chauvin guilty]. Well, they still came back with a guilty verdict, proving the juries are ready.

“I had people telling me, ‘Don’t get involved in that. If you win, the cops are going to hate you. If you lose, the people are going to hate you.'”

In another case that occurred in the middle of our trial, the case of [Minneapolis officer] Kim Potter, the jury came back on her when she mistakenly used a Glock when she was reaching for her Taser. Jurors are ready to say, “Here’s the law. Here’s what you did. We’re going to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But we need Congress to act. The George Floyd Justice and Policing Act is not passed yet. We have got to get this law passed. It is critical, not only in the specifics, but in the meaning of Congress saying we’re turning the page on an old, bad practice.

But standing in the way of that, to be honest, is the lack of support in the GOP base for any reform at all.

No doubt.

There was a poll that came out after the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s case, where 46% of Republicans thought it was the wrong verdict. In other words nearly half of all Republicans. If they can see the brutal, barbaric murder of George Floyd, and say, no, that cop shouldn’t be charged, then they’re not open to any kind of criminal justice reform. What do we do there?

The Chauvin conviction “chips away at breaking the cycle. It doesn’t break the cycle. Sometimes something is necessary, but insufficient, to solve a problem.”

Well, you’re right, that is somewhat concerning. But then maybe 54% believe that there should be. My point is, I think there is a national consensus for real change. Interestingly enough, during Jan. 6, you had police officers being brutally harmed, several die as a result, and they’re outraged by that. I think there is a universal recognition that we cannot allow arbitrary violence by state actors. The Fourth Amendment says there shall be no unreasonable search and seizure. If it means something, here’s what it means: It means that state actors cannot use arbitrary force to take your stuff or hurt you. That government can’t act arbitrarily violent towards you. I think that even the most conservative Republican would have to agree that that is a core constitutional principle.

When you introduce things like race, class and party, city versus rural, things get blurry. But I think that if you boil it down to what is actually happening there, it’s state violence, and that’s why people all over the world could see this as sort of emblematic. That’s why people in Edinburgh, Scotland, are like, “That’s wrong.” I think you and I talked about this before, but there’s this iconic picture of one person standing in front of a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. I don’t speak Mandarin, I don’t think you speak Mandarin, but you don’t need to in order to see that this is state power against the individual.

This picture of George Floyd with the knee on his neck of a the man in a uniform — ignore the colors of the people. They could be both the same color, whatever. No matter what the colors of the individuals are, the colors of the uniforms tell the story. Government brutal authority being exercised against a person who’s helpless to stop it. The whole world can see that that’s wrong. Hopefully Republicans can too.

You mentioned Jan. 6. To me it’s so important to have confidence in our criminal justice system. The conviction of Derek Chauvin and the other police officers, I think, does that for us. Donald Trump has not been charged in the nearly two and a half years since Jan. 6, 2021. You’re the attorney general of Minnesota. What’s your reaction to this?

My reaction is that we have to enforce the idea that no one’s above the law and no one’s beneath the law. Now, in the Floyd case, Derek Chauvin operated not because he was dumb and not because he didn’t know what the law was or because he wasn’t trained, but because he had every reason to believe he was above the law and that George Floyd was beneath the law. Meaning, we could do whatever we want to this guy and I’m never going to be accountable, because in our system people like me get to do whatever they want to people like him. We set out to prove that wasn’t true. That we have equal justice for all.

The Jan. 6 situation — I mean, our nation had better reflect on the constitutional principles that undergird our country, because if we don’t enforce them, they become words on a page. There can be no one in this country, not one single soul, who feels like, I operate above the law. I walk between the raindrops, I do whatever I want and nobody’s ever going to call me to account. This is constitutionally dangerous. It is a big mistake. And let me tell you, people will act on it. How can we as Americans, go over to the Philippines and say, “Oh, you all have to have a better system of justice.” They’re like, “Really? You talking?” We’ve got to be credible, and that means from the highest socioeconomic person to the lowest, there’s got to be equal justice.

You were in the House. You won your first congressional election in 2006. You were dealing with the Republican Party. At that time it felt extreme, right?

Yeah, it sure did.

Today Republicans are banning reproductive freedom, banning books, banning Black history, gender-affirming care. Threatening, in Florida, to take children from parents who dare do what a doctor says to get gender-affirming care. Where is this GOP going? It seems like there’s no limits to their use of the apparatus of state government to impose their religious beliefs or their right-wing beliefs on all of us.

“There can be no one in this country, not one single soul, who feels like, I operate above the law. I walk between the raindrops, I do whatever I want and nobody’s ever going to call me to account.”

Well, let me just say, I think that the MAGA types, those folks have an agenda that they’re just done with representative democracy. I think all the evidence available points in one direction: It is about power. Power now, power for certain people and not power for others. They had a long-term plan to capture the Supreme Court, and that’s where it’s at. I mean, this “replacement theory” thing, everybody needs to stop and say, what is this doctrine? Because what it really is, it’s a minority rule doctrine. It’s a doctrine that says we believe that people not like us are growing into the majority. So how do we rule from the minority? How do we do that? We control the courts, we undermine voting and we don’t like a world in which all the privileges don’t run in our favor. This whole thing about Bud Light, we’ve got to stop seeing this as ridiculous, which is how I saw it when I first saw it. It’s not ridiculous to them. It’s a highly symbolic indicator of authority and privilege, which they want to run only in their direction.

When you first got elected to Congress, you were the first Muslim American, and there was some backlash.

Had a little backlash.

Donald Trump built it to a crescendo with the Muslim ban. A week and a half ago, Donald Trump in New Hampshire said, “If I’m back in, we’re going to have a bigger travel ban.” He said point blank that we don’t want our buildings blown up. I try to tell people in the Muslim community, they’re going to come back for us.

You better believe it. So here’s the thing, Dean. In the last few months we’ve had six mosque burnings in Minnesota. Mosque burnings. We had a bombing at a mosque during Trump’s reign and he never said a word about it. So all of us said, “If it had been some Muslim doing this, it’d have been front-page news for a month.” But a mosque was literally bombed by people who drove all the way from the Chicago area, the White Rabbit militia, to bomb a mosque, and he doesn’t give even a little bit of a care.

“When I left Congress, I had a lot of friends who were like, ‘What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?'”

This is not the first time, but we are dealing with people who are anti-democratic, don’t believe in the rule of law and believe in privileges for themselves only. And they actually wink and nod at these violent types. I mean what did the upper crust, white-collar business types say about the Klan? They’re lowbrow, but let them do what they do, right? They’re lowbrow, but just leave them alone. That is what they’re worried about. I think that most people believe that all human beings are endowed with dignity, and deserve a fair economy. But I think those people believe in no set of values. We’ve got to wake up and understand they are snatching your country right up under your nose.

Will you be the first Muslim governor?

We’ll see. Honestly, I’m not looking forward to the next thing. I never have, really. When I left Congress, I had a lot of friends who were like, “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind? You walked away from a safe seat to run for a very unsafe seat?” And look, I have to follow the dictates of my conscience. So we’ll see. I don’t thirst for higher jobs or whatever. If I see a reason, we’ll pursue it. I’m not foreclosing it, but my heart’s not set on it either. There’s a lot of ways to serve, and that’s what it’s about for me.

Watch more

“Salon Talks” with political leaders

“He can and will” beat Trump: Jack Dorsey backs anti-vaxx RFK Jr. for president

Twitter had one hell of a Monday. The struggling social media platform was hit from every direction by a confluence of news stories bringing internal problems under harsh light. Former CEO Jack Dorsey and then-CEO Elon Musk enflamed political tempers by spotlighting anti-vaccine misinformation spreader and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with Dorsey endorsing him on Sunday and Musk hosting a live Twitter Spaces event Monday afternoon. Finally, the site-wide uproar culminated with the early appointment of Linda Yaccarino to the role of Twitter’s chief executive — and with Elon Musk becoming, like Dorsey, another ex-Twitter CEO.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that COVID-19 restrictions eradicated the middle class

What happened? Twitter’s advertising revenue was found to have plummeted by more than half under the reign of Elon Musk, according to the company’s own reports, with similarly dismal projections ahead; a group of Stanford researchers found unchecked child sexual abuse material on the site; and four U.S. senators announced that Twitter is now the subject of significant legal scrutiny over potential privacy violations.

Here’s how it all went down.

It started out with a tweet

In a June 4 tweet, ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey backed Kennedy’s 2024 run. Dorsey tweeted out a Fox News video in which Kennedy argues he can beat former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 general race, commenting: “He can and will.”

The endorsement was just the latest in a series of Dorsey’s tweets criticizing the Democratic Party and stirring a hive of fierce pushback from party members on the platform. Among the more ire-stoking moments: Dorsey’s assertion that Democratic National Committee leaders “seem to be more irrelevant by the day.”

Days earlier, Dorsey drew rebuke from some Twitter users when he described Democratic events as “Democrat primaries” — a swap largely considered an epithet by Democrats. His remarks came in response to a video of President Joe Biden who, in a recent speaking engagement, stumbled over a sandbag left on stage.

“Open the Democrat primaries and debates. This isn’t fair to anyone,” Dorsey said.

The furor seemed to peak when Dorsey complimented Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s decision to invite Kennedy to a Twitter Spaces event, held Monday afternoon.

Meatball in the machine: Ron DeSantis learns a tough lesson about depending on Elon Musk’s Twitter

Dorsey’s latest venture, Twitter alternative Bluesky, gained steam in its race against Twitter last week when the new platform surpassed 100,000 new users, with app downloads surging 600%. The success of the microblogging upstart, along with the continued downward spiral of Twitter amid rising technological problems, even has Facebook parent company Meta mulling a microblogging launch of its own.

Despite his Bluesky wins, as of April, Dorsey still held a $1 billion stake in Twitter — a stake large enough that he could financially pummel Twitter and Musk if he cashed it out. That stake is becoming riskier by the day, though.

Musk out, Yaccarino in: Twitter takes a beating

With threats mounting against the company from both government officials and advertising companies, Musk vacated his CEO role suddenly on Monday. A new report from Twitter said that the company’s critically needed advertising revenue had plummeted 59% through April under Musk, compared to the prior year. And Twitter expects to see year-over ad sales down by about 56% in each week moving ahead. Musk’s replacement, new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, is known for her connections to the advertising industry. She stepped into the role Monday, earlier than expected.

At the root of Twitter’s advertising woes, the company report cited the platform’s growing inability to regulate the worst parts of the site — hate speech, drug and gambling spam, and unchecked pornography. The content has increased significantly under Musk’s reign, largely attributed to Musk’s sweeping layoffs of Twitter Safety Teams.

Twitter algorithm recommends searches for animal torture videos after moderation cut: report

On Monday, though, the worst of those safety concerns emerged when the Stanford Internet Observatory released a damning report, finding Twitter allowed dozens of images of child sexual abuse to circulate on Twitter in recent months. Researchers pointed to a lack of basic safety enforcement, as reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, and said the problem appeared to have been resolved in May.

In his Twitter Spaces talk with Kennedy on Monday, Musk insisted the problem was a Free Speech issue.

“Half of our advertising disappeared overnight because we’re insisting on free speech,” he said, as reported by NBC News’ Ben Collins. “They’re literally trying to drive Twitter bankrupt.”

The Journal said Twitter suspended about 404,000 accounts that created or engaged with child sexual exploitation material just in the month of January — a 112% increase since November. From March to May, Stanford researchers still detected more than 40 previously-flagged images of child sexual abuse on Twitter.

About those Safety Teams

The sudden layoffs and departures at Twitter also drew the eyes of four U.S. senators who, in a Sunday letter to both Musk and Yaccarino, are now questioning Twitter’s privacy practices under Musk’s former tenure. The lawmakers wrote that the hasty launch of new Twitter products amid rapid staff loss has raised doubts over whether Twitter has met its legal obligations under two consent orders signed with the Federal Trade Commission in 2022 and 2011.

“Mr. Musk’s behavior reveals an apparent indifference towards Twitter’s longstanding legal obligations, which did not disappear when Mr. Musk took over the company,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. “Regardless of his personal wealth, Mr. Musk is not exempt from the law, and neither is the company he purchased.”

The letter’s four signatories are Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden and Mazie Hirono, of Oregon and Hawaii respectively. In a Monday tweet, Warren said wants answers.

The senators are calling on Musk and Yaccarino to answer a series of questions about how the staff shake-ups will impact Twitter’s FTC compliance.

It wouldn’t be the first time Twitter’s caught heat for potentially violating FTC consent orders. In late April, experts warned Twitter that the site’s new policy of adding blue Verified check-marks to high-profile users without their consent could amount to fraud.

“False endorsements violate FTC rules, legally exposing Musk,” said Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy and communications for the media advocacy group Free Press.

about Big Tech’s role in politics

Criminologists: Baseless anti-trans claims are fueling adoption of harmful laws

It has been seven years since North Carolina made headlines for enacting a “bathroom bill” – legislation intended to prevent transgender people from using restrooms that align with their gender identity.

After boycotts threatened to cost the state more than US$3.7 billion, legislators repealed the law in 2017. Since then, however, religious and political conservatives have successfully spread an anti-trans moral panic, or irrational fear, across the United States.

As far back as 2001, Republican lawmakers proposed the first of what are now nearly 900 anti-LGBTQ+ bills. More than 500 of these were introduced in 49 state legislatures and the U.S. Congress during the first five months of 2023. To date, at least 79 have passed.

Many of these anti-trans laws are written and financed by a group of far-right interest groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Liberty Counsel and the American Principles Project.

These groups claim their proposed laws would protect cisgender women and girls – those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth – from the sorts of violent trans people that are often depicted in movies and other media.

But as criminologists, we know these claims are without merit. No reliable data supports the argument that transgender people commit violent crimes at higher rates than cisgender men and women. In fact, transgender people are more than four times as likely to be the victim of a crime as cisgender people.

Expanding reach

Anti-trans laws like the one enacted in Kansas over the governor’s veto reach beyond restrooms to limit access to many sex-segregated spaces, including “locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers,” based on the sex assigned at birth to a person who seeks to use those spaces.

As of the end of May 2023, at least 18 states had enacted laws within the preceding 12 months that limit medically age-appropriate gender-affirming health care for trans minors, with similar bills pending in 14 more states. And Florida’s barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ regulations even prohibits the mere discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools through the 12th grade. Journalist Adam Rhodes called these efforts a “centrally coordinated attack on transgender existence.”

We believe these laws and bills illustrate the increasingly hostile legislative landscape for LGBTQ+ people despite polls showing that most people in the United States want trans people to be protected from discrimination in public spaces on the basis of their gender.

What the data shows

A variety of myths, false narratives, bad science, misconceptions and outright misrepresentations undergird anti-trans laws. The reality, however, is that trans-exclusionary laws do not protect cisgender women and girls from harassment or violence. Rather, they result in dramatic increases in violent victimization for transgender and gender-nonconforming adults and children.

When laws permit transgender people to access sex-segregated spaces in accordance with their gender identities, crime rates do not increase. There is no association between trans-inclusive policies and more crime. As one of us wrote in a recent paper, this is likely because, just like cisgender folks, “transgender people use locker rooms and restrooms to change clothes and go to the bathroom,” not for sexual gratification or predatory reasons.

Conversely, when trans people are forced by law to use sex-segregated spaces that align with the sex assigned to them at birth instead of their gender identity, two important facts should be noted.

First, no studies show that violent crime rates against cisgender women and girls in such spaces decrease. In other words, cisgender women and girls are no safer than they would be in the absence of anti-trans laws. Certainly, the possibility exists that a cisgender man might pose as a woman to go into certain spaces under false pretenses. But that same possibility remains regardless of whether transgender people are lawfully permitted in those spaces.

Second, trans people are significantly more likely to be victimized in sex-segregated spaces than are cisgender people. For instance, while incarcerated in facilities designated for men, trans women are nine to 13 times as likely to be sexually assaulted as the men with whom they are boarded.

In women’s prisons, correctional staff are responsible for 41% of women’s sexual victimization, with cisgender women committing the balance of nearly all prisoner-on-prisoner violence. Similarly, trans boys and girls who are barred from using the washrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity are respectively between 26% to 149% more likely to be sexually victimized in the locations they are forced to use than cisgender youths.

In society at large, between 84% and 90% of all crimes of sexual violence are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, not a stranger lurking in the shadows – or the showers or restroom stalls. But trans and nonbinary people feel very unsafe in bathrooms and locker rooms, though others experience relative safety there. In fact, the largest study of its kind found that upward of 75% of trans men and 64% of trans women reported that they routinely avoid public restrooms to minimize their chances of being harassed or assaulted.

Qween Jean, a transgender rights activist, is arrested May 31, 2023, during a trans-rights demonstration in New York City. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Lies drive harm

Because criminological data does not support trans-exclusionary laws or policies, advocates of anti-trans laws often resort to lies, flawed anecdotal evidence, or what fact-checkers have called “extreme cherry-picking” to support their position.

For instance, one of us documented how isolated news stories, often from notoriously transphobic tabloids, conflate the actions of sexual predators with the “dangerousness” of trans women. Although there are undeniably examples of actual transgender people committing crimes, even deeply troubling ones, they are not evidence of any behavioral trends among the broader class of trans people. No such data exists.

We believe the spate of anti-trans proposals represents a textbook example of crime-control theater – an unnecessary, ineffective and harmful legislative response to unfounded fearmongering.

Anti-trans laws are not just baseless. They’re hurtful and damaging, especially to LGBTQ+ teenagers. Recent polls indicate that more than 60% of these people experience deteriorating mental health – including depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts – as a result of laws and policies aimed at restricting their personhood.

The criminological research is clear that anti-trans laws do not help the people they are claimed to protect. In fact, these laws inflict harm on people who are even more vulnerable.

Henry F. Fradella, Professor, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Affiliate Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law., Arizona State University and Alexis Rowland, Ph.D. Student in Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine

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

Looking for home in an overheating world: If emissions continue, will we all be migrants someday?

Greenville, CA — Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville in a storm of torched trees and exploding shrubs. It took less than 30 minutes for the Dixie fire to transform my town’s tarnished Gold Rush charm into a heap of smoldering hand-hewn timbers and century-old brick walls.

Minutes earlier, the last of the nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. We fled with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would ever destroy our town. I was among the evacuees, escaping with a hastily assembled truckload of journals and notebooks, shoes and shovels, laptops and passports. We scattered in the sort of desperate diaspora that has become ever more common in towns like ours across the West.

The Dixie fire left more than 700 residents of Greenville and its surroundings homeless. (While my office in town was demolished, my home on its outskirts escaped the flames.) Displaced by wildfire in a forest both poorly managed and dried by a warming planet, we burned-out residents joined America’s swelling ranks of climate migrants. Many of us found temporary shelter in neighboring small towns. Others went to Reno or Los Angeles, Idaho, Missouri, or Kentucky, where relatives and friends were ready to offer at least temporary safety.

My neighbors in Greenville, Indian Falls, and Canyon Dam weren’t the only victims of climate-driven fires that summer. Near Lake Tahoe, 100 miles to the south, the Caldor fire crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, destroying more than 1,000 structures and forcing the entire city of South Lake Tahoe to evacuate. Nor were wildfires the only all-American calamities caused by our rapidly warming planet that year: Hurricane Ida pummeled Louisiana and Mississippi with 150-mile-an-hour winds; a crippling megadrought of a sort not seen in 1,200 years gripped the Southwest; and an unprecedented heat dome in the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius).

Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country, as Jake Bittle makes all too clear in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. By the end of 2021, one in three Americans had already experienced some kind of weather disaster driven by climate change and last year alone more than three million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters.

These days, it’s the sort of heartbreaking tale told around the globe, one that will, it seems, only worsen into the distant future. By 2050, it’s now believed that between 31 million and 72 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced due to water stress, sea level rise, or crop failures, according to an estimate in the most recent report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unless we dramatically curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come, scientists predict that, by century’s end, climate-change-caused events will affect every last one of us.

Where will we go to find safety from fire, floods, and extreme storms then? How long will those of us uprooted from our homes have to stay in evacuation sanctuaries? Will we ever find home again?

“Unpredictable, Chaotic, and Life-Changing”

The term climate migration has an orderly, almost bucolic ring to it, evoking as it does the age-old seasonal treks of caribou, wildebeests, and other charismatic species. In human terms, it suggests coastal residents dealing with flooding by simply moving inland and continuing their lives, or forest dwellers relocating from burn scars to places where the risk of wildfire is much lower. Unfortunately, in the years to come, count on one thing: climate migration will have a far less peaceful ring to it.

In a sense, of course, migration has always been the story of humanity. Throughout history, people have moved for a myriad of reasons. But what sets today’s growing climate-driven migration apart is the way it involuntarily displaces people, increasingly often at an unprecedented pace and scale. The more the planet warms, the more pressure so many of us will face to move, as those IPCC scientists made clear in their 2022 report.

According to the IPCC, most climate migration is still occurring within countries rather than across borders (though that, too, is growing). And while people of every income bracket will be hit by climate disasters, overall such migrants are only expected to increase social inequities. As the IPCC summary for policymakers puts it, “Across sectors and regions, the most vulnerable people and systems are observed to be disproportionately affected.”

But count on one thing: climate migration will be increasingly hard on everyone. As those scientists add: “Through displacement and involuntary migration from extreme weather and climate events, climate change has generated and perpetuated vulnerability.” In translation, that’s bureaucratese for widespread trauma to come.

And that, claims Bittle, is putting it mildly, since the fossil-fuelization of the atmosphere (and the oceans) is already creating disasters of a frequency and intensity that have no precedent in living memory. Over the past decade, the United States has, typically enough, experienced a succession of monumental climate disasters. Hurricanes have obliterated parts of the Gulf Coast, dumping more than 50 inches of rain in some places. Wildfires have denuded the California wilderness and destroyed thousands of homes. A once-in-a-millennium drought has dried up western rivers, even forcing farmers to stop planting crops.

As Bittle puts it, “The real story of climate change begins only once the skies clear and the fire burns out.” In fact, he insists, migration isn’t even the right word for the phenomena already taking place across this country. It implies an intentional action, while the response to ever-increasing climate disasters will be tumultuous and frenzied, as victims try to cope with the destruction of their homes and dreams, while searching for safe and affordable shelter.

His term for it is displacement, which, he adds, is “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.” (Scientists are similarly now using the term “climate displaced” rather than “refugee.”) And such displacement is already altering American geography. In the decades to come, he suggests, climate change will displace more people than the six million Blacks who began moving north in the 1920s to escape the Jim Crow regimes of the former southern plantation states — in other words, a population relocation greater than what became known as the Great Migration.

Where do people go and what do they do after an evacuation? “We’re just beginning to sort that out,” Deb Niemeier, a transportation engineer at the University of Maryland, told me. They almost always end up in places where they have connections, whether family ones or otherwise, and those, Niemeier points out, tend to be in urban settings.

One of only a handful of studies documenting where climate migrants have gone was launched in 2018 by civil engineer Sarah Grajdura, previously a student of Niemeier’s. She began interviewing evacuees in shelters only three weeks after the Camp fire, California’s deadliest blaze, killed 85 people in the sadly named town of Paradise. She followed up eight months later.

Where people settled and how long they stayed, she found, varied with income, age, and race, especially as time elapsed. Those with greater financial resources were able, in the end, to resettle nearer their original homes. Younger white evacuees accepted housing farther away, on average 117 miles from their original residences, while Black residents and other people of color generally couldn’t afford to move more than 21 miles from their burned-out town.

Retreat or Adapt?

The human upheaval underway should make it obvious to even the most skeptical that our world is changing — that we, in fact, are changing it — in a remarkably radical fashion. Carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere have raised the average temperature of the planet about two degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late nineteenth century. The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 328 feet showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37 degrees Celsius) just since 1969. Ice sheets are shrinking, glaciers are melting, and snow cover is decreasing. Global sea level has risen about eight inches in the last century, with the rate in the last two decades nearly double that of the century as a whole.

As more and more of us are uprooted by floods, rising seas, ever fiercer storms, and brutal wildfires, how we view the natural world has become ever more essential to our collective future. Our relationship to the places where we live needs to be re-envisioned. Historically, we Americans have sought to control nature with dams, sea walls, and an all-out federal campaign to suppress Western wildfires. Clearly, none of that is working any longer.

A handful of communities are starting to think differently about the ecosystems they share and how they interact with them. Several Gulf Coast communities are, for instance, accepting the inevitability of flooding and designing schools that float to keep their children protected. In New Orleans and elsewhere, entrepreneurs are experimenting with installing plastic water containers and manufactured dock floats inside the structural subframe of a house. The house and subframe would then be anchored to vertical guideposts, allowing that structure to rise and fall without floating away. In California, dozens of fire-prone communities are adopting the long-outlawed practices of Native Americans by setting small, controlled burns along forest edges to thwart future town-destroying fires and improve wildlife habitat.

Other communities are starting to accept that the places they chose as home and the houses they’ve built are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for a rapidly warming planet. If it’s not a fire on the horizon, it’s a flood. If not tomorrow, next month, or next year. Instead of waiting to become inadvertent climate migrants evacuating under duress, they are moving in what’s becoming known as a managed retreat.

Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, is an early example. In 1978, 600 residents retreated from the Kickapoo River to avoid its rising flood waters. After Superstorm Sandy swamped New York City in 2012, killing 24 people, homeowners in several neighborhoods on Staten Island decided not to wait for the inevitable future. They took buyouts from the state’s Office of Storm Recovery, moving to new homes away from the coast. Today, more than 600 properties in that area are being returned to nature and a salt marsh created where deer and turkeys, rabbits and racoons are already moving in. That marshland will, in turn, create a buffer for the homes that remain.

For Erica Gies, who reported on that Staten Island retreat, the possibility of living safely in a time of extreme storm events is transforming our relationship with water. “What does water want?” she asks in her book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. Re-envisioning the way we live with water, and with nature more generally, she says, will help create a better world “in which people are happier and communities more adaptable.”

Some places, however, are already beyond retreat. On the Bering Sea in 2019, thawing permafrost and erosion forced 380 villagers from Yup’ik, Alaska, to abandon homes where they had lived for centuries. And what about towns like Paradise and Greenville, each destroyed once by wildfire and still all too vulnerable? They are among the communities built “in a particular historical context that no longer exists,” as Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, puts it. “Whatever risk tolerances that we collectively decided were acceptable, for whatever reason, in whatever context, are no longer valid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2022.

The Pull of Home

For all the documentation of the threats posed to ecosystems that humanity has so violently altered, for all the dangers so many of us have experienced living in them, and for all the uncomfortable questions raised about their future vulnerability, such places often still hold a powerful, almost magnetic draw for us. Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, a Stanford University behavioral scientist, calls such feelings place attachment, a powerful commitment to the community people have — or had. Some of that attraction is, of course, simply the security of the familiar. Some is intangible: the smell of coastal fog, the sound of wind in the tops of sugar pines, the sag of wet sand underfoot. It’s the draw of home.

As Jake Bittle puts it, “For a lot of people, a hometown is a really essential part of their identity.” He reports on a man who lost his entire neighborhood to a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. He spent four years with family in Kentucky, but eventually rebuilt in his old neighborhood. The winding road home was even longer for a family that evacuated after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and other Gulf of Mexico communities in 2005. Even while forced to live elsewhere, they couldn’t help but envision going back “home.” It took them about eight years, but eventually they did so.

In our present world, sadly enough, the question always remains: For how long?

The importance of place and the compulsion to go back, despite ever-worsening odds, have Wong-Parodi and other scientists thinking about what resources are available when people do return. How can they better prepare for the known risks and the certainty that, over time, given our overheating planet, they’ll only increase?

When it comes to Greenville, my California town now in ruins, the pull to return, as Sue Weber, chair of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, points out, combines a yearning for the physical beauty of the place with a sense of community and hope. “I wouldn’t build back,” she says, “if I didn’t think there was a way to actually work collectively to create a safer environment.”

Less than two years after the Dixie fire, a third of the residents who fled Greenville are committed to rebuilding their homes and businesses. More than 20 already have. They are, however, applying Dixie’s harsh lessons to reconstruction, often using cross-laminated timber, Hardie board, and other less flammable materials. And when it comes to restoring the forests that surround the town, they are repurposing Gies’s question about water by asking what forests want. Answers are coming from the legacy of the Native Americans who managed these forests when they were far more resilient to fire and drought. The blackened specters that still haunt our hillsides will soon come down; the seedlings that take their place will be native species planted not in lines but in clumps. There will be space for fire to burn through, clearing out decadent brush and small trees to cleanse the land for new growth.

Climate disaster, Weber points out, inspires climate mitigation. “We are in a constant conversation about what that looks like for us… It’s going to take years to know whether we really survived or not.”

If humanity continues to emit greenhouse gases at anything like the current rate globally, all too many of the rest of us may not have to wait that long. We may once again become climate migrants embarking on our own torturous journeys, following in the footsteps of last year’s three million Americans.

And home will be that elusive pot of gold at the end of a climate-driven rainbow.

This cop got out of 44 tickets by saying over and over that his girlfriend stole his car

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Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.

“Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.

Then he’d raise his right hand and get sworn in. What came next was also consistent.

“Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021.

“Yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend earlier that morning, had a knock-down, drag-out fight, verbally, of course. She took my car without my knowledge,” he told a different judge when fighting a speeding ticket in August 2021.

“I broke up with my girlfriend that day and she took my car without my knowledge. … I didn’t get my car back for like three days. But it was her driving the car,” he said while contesting a speeding ticket, once again under oath, in May 2022.

The excuse worked, just as it had many times before.

At the ticket hearings, Kriv often provided what he said were legitimate police incident reports as evidence of the car thefts; they had officer names and badge numbers, and he explained that he got the reports at police headquarters.

But Kriv did not let on that he, himself, was a Chicago cop.

As bold as he was when fighting his tickets, he was equally brazen in his professional life. He attracted a remarkable number of complaints from citizens he encountered — and even from other officers. And just as he did in his personal life, he defended himself vigorously against the allegations.

Kriv doesn’t register as one of Chicago’s most notorious corrupt cops — those who tortured suspects for confessions or shook down drug dealers. But his on-duty conduct regularly flouted rules and disrupted lives. Once, he punched a handcuffed man in the back of his patrol car, records show.

But given Chicago’s long-standing and dramatic shortcomings in police discipline, none of his on-duty misconduct cost him his badge and gun.

It took a tip to an outside agency and questions about Kriv’s testimony as a private citizen in traffic court to unravel his career.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department would not comment for this story or answer any questions.

A lawyer for Kriv, informed of the reporting by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, said “many of the facts you compose are incomplete or not true,” though he did not say what was inaccurate. The lawyer, Tim Grace, said that Kriv had received nearly 150 commendations and recognitions and had earned two awards for saving lives.

“Officer Kriv has served his city with honor for over 25-plus years,” Grace said.

His Troubles Began Almost Immediately

In 1996, Kriv was sworn in as a Chicago police officer. The first complaint about him came about eight months later, while Kriv was still a probationary hire. A man said Kriv broke his car window with a flashlight while directing traffic; Kriv was not disciplined in that incident.

Supervisors reprimanded him a few months later, however, after Kriv failed to notice there was a marijuana cigarette on the back seat of his squad car.

But there was more to come, records show: being rude, offensive or physically abusive; flipping someone off; and writing in a police report that one woman was “white trash” and a “raving lunatic.”

He was held in contempt of court and arrested after he flung papers into the air and called the judge’s ruling “a joke.” He apologized in court the next day, and the contempt charge was vacated. An assistant deputy superintendent recommended against removing his police powers after the incident, records show. In another case, a different judge ordered him removed from a courtroom after he wouldn’t stop talking.

Most officers face only a handful of complaints over the course of their careers. But at least 92 misconduct complaints were filed against Kriv, according to city and police disciplinary records compiled and analyzed by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. Even more exceptional: About 28% of complaints against Kriv were found to have merit, compared with about 4% of complaints against all Chicago police officers going back decades.

In 2005, after a city Streets and Sanitation Department employee towed his illegally parked personal car, Kriv sent a letter via the city’s interoffice mail system threatening to ticket the cars of Streets and Sanitation workers in retaliation. He was suspended for 20 days. In 2006, he left the scene of a vehicle fire he had responded to, removed the numbers that identified his squad car and went into a strip club to visit a waitress, according to internal police investigation records. He was issued a 90-day suspension that was later knocked down to 45 days.

In 2009, Kriv was accused of punching a woman whom he’d arrested after seeing her arguing with her husband on the street. The woman was found not guilty at trial on charges of domestic battery and resisting arrest.

“I had to have surgery. I had to have plastic implanted under my eye because of this,” said Jessie Wangeman, who lives in Indianapolis. “My face is not symmetrical anymore. He really messed me up on the outside. And inside it was a really traumatic experience.”

Wangeman sued Kriv and the city of Chicago over the encounter; the city paid her $100,000 to settle in 2011. Wangeman declined to talk with investigators looking into Kriv’s alleged misconduct, and Kriv wasn’t disciplined.

Meanwhile, Kriv’s personal vehicles — a BMW sedan and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle — were ticketed 22 times between 2008 and 2013. He paid some of those tickets, records show.

At a traffic court hearing in December 2013, Kriv used the girlfriend alibi for the first time, authorities now allege.

“May I ask you why you’re contesting this ticket, Mr. Kriv?” the judge asked.

“Yes, my ex-girlfriend, well, took my car two days prior after I broke up with her. I filed a police report that it was stolen and they recovered it approximately a week after the fact,” he testified. “Here’s the police report that was done. I did have her arrested approximately three weeks ago and I got a court date coming up in January.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

False Statements and False Arrests

Kriv was investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty as a police officer. That included accusations of falsifying records, writing unwarranted tickets, performing improper searches, making false arrests.

One man accused Kriv of writing him false parking citations. A woman complained that Kriv issued her eight baseless citations in two weeks while her vehicle was parked in an assigned space on private property. And another man made two other complaints accusing Kriv of repeatedly writing tickets to him at his business as a way to harass him. Department investigators concluded that Kriv wrote unwarranted tickets to that man; investigations into the other allegations could not be pursued because the accusers did not sign formal complaints.

As a cop, Kriv’s specialty was DUI enforcement. He made more DUI arrests in Chicago than any other officer in 2021, and he topped the list statewide the same year, according to one anti-drunken-driving group.

But one woman sued him over her 2015 drunken driving arrest after she was acquitted at trial. The lawsuit alleged that Kriv falsely arrested her and made false statements against her. Kriv denied the allegations.

“He would lie under oath for a piece of bubble gum,” the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Kriv, told a reporter.

The woman later dropped the lawsuit because she said Kriv was disparaging and intimidating her.

Even outside of his job and his chutzpah in traffic court, Kriv’s history is notable.

While Kriv was growing up in Highland Park, his father, an attorney, funded a messy fraud scheme, survived an assassination attempt meant to silence him about it, and was sent to federal prison for a second fraud racket that involved sending falsified accident claims through the mail, according to court records at the National Archives. Kriv’s father testified at trial in the first fraud case and did not face charges for his role in that scheme.

Kriv then attended the University of Iowa for six years. A university spokesperson said he never graduated — though he claimed that he had in an application for another city job in 2013. Kriv’s attorney did not respond to a question about his educational history.

When Kriv was in his late 20s, the unemployment insurance division of the Illinois attorney general’s office sued him to recoup about $3,800 in benefits for which the government claimed he wasn’t eligible, records show. Details about what led to the attorney general’s claim are missing from court files, and there’s no public record of how it was resolved.

Neither the Police Department nor the city’s human resources division could locate Kriv’s initial application to the Police Department, so it’s unclear how much hiring officials knew about his background.

It’s also unclear whether the department knew how often Kriv was being ticketed for traffic violations — nine times in 2014 alone, records show. He got all of those tickets dismissed, including a speeding ticket issued in the fall for going 21 miles an hour over the speed limit near a school.

“My ex-girlfriend stole my car,” Kriv told the judge. “There is this police report over here that was done and, a matter of fact, I had another ticket I contested last week … another speed camera.

“They only charged her with trespassing because it was my girlfriend. She stole my key and racked up all these tickets here.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

When Other Cops Complained

Kriv’s conduct as a cop stands out in yet another way: Even other cops complained about him.

Internal affairs records show that a police lieutenant filed a complaint against Kriv in 2016 accusing Kriv of failing to arrest an off-duty sergeant who was involved in a crash, even though the sergeant was unsteady, was slurring his speech and had urinated in his pants — “wasted,” according to a police report. Kriv was suspended for 15 days for violating five department rules in that incident.

His police partner once reported that he made her get out of their squad car after an argument, forcing her to walk more than a half-mile back to their station. Investigators concluded there wasn’t enough evidence in that case to discipline Kriv.

In 2014, supervisors — including the head of the DUI task force that Kriv was on — filed a complaint against Kriv alleging that he disobeyed commands from a higher-ranking officer and impounded a car without justification after a traffic crash.

Over the other officers’ objections, Kriv declared that the driver of the car involved in the crash was drunk, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of his squad car, according to accounts from the driver, Jaime Garcia, and other officers. He also ordered Garcia’s Nissan Altima towed and impounded.

“He kept telling me, ‘I know you’re drunk, I know you’re drunk.’ I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock, I was scared,” Garcia said in an interview.

The officers on the scene filed the complaint against Kriv.

“For some reason, he was trying to put a false arrest on this guy. I apologized to him, said, ‘Sorry you had to go through this.’ I told him about filing a complaint,” said retired Lt. David Blanco, the supervisor that night. After its investigation, the department acknowledged Kriv was wrong to have impounded Garcia’s car, knowing there would be no DUI charges against him.

Kriv ultimately wasn’t disciplined for his behavior that night, once again benefiting from the Police Department’s feeble accountability system, which has long been marked by delays, red tape and lax punishment.

Though he regularly escaped punishment altogether for alleged misconduct on the job, in some cases, he was reprimanded or received suspensions of between one and 45 days. The department suspended Kriv at least 20 times for 170 days total, according to a Tribune-ProPublica analysis of his disciplinary records.

One citizen told the investigating agency that Kriv was unconcerned when he threatened to file a complaint. Kriv, the man said, told him that complaints “are not going to go anywhere,” no matter how many an officer was facing. The man’s complaint was closed after he declined to participate in the investigation.

Kriv appealed disciplinary decisions at least eight times over his career, including through the department’s grievance system. A 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that 85% of disciplinary cases handled through the department’s grievance process since 2010 had led to officers receiving shorter suspensions or, in many cases, having their punishments overturned entirely.

“It doesn’t hurt to grieve it. Why wouldn’t I?” Kriv told the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica for that story.

Kriv got a five-day suspension reduced to a reprimand, another five-day suspension reduced to two days, and a 90-day suspension — for going to the strip club while on duty — cut in half.

“It sounds to me like several of these cases — each of them standing on its own, independently — should have triggered a discharge case,” said Mark Iris, who until 2004 was the executive director of the Chicago Police Board, the civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago officers. He also studied the use of mathematical analysis to prevent police misconduct and taught at Northwestern University.

“The unit commanders had to have known this guy was a headache,” Iris said in an interview.

Records show the department never tried to fire Kriv.

Blanco, like many of the people Kriv encountered, said he doesn’t get how Kriv remained on the force.

“That’s what I couldn’t understand — with all the suspensions, why they didn’t get rid of this guy. There’s obviously a red light flashing over this guy’s head,” Blanco told ProPublica and the Tribune.

During Kriv’s career, the Chicago Police Department had eight superintendents, three iterations of an independent police investigation body and at least two versions of an internal affairs division. The Police Department has stalled on at least two attempts to implement an early-warning system to spot problem behavior.

In its 2019 consent decree with the Justice Department, the Police Department agreed to develop a system to identify officers at risk of misconduct, alert their supervisors and provide training. That system still has not been implemented, according to the latest consent decree update.

In addition, for most of Kriv’s career, the police union’s contract with the department allowed investigators to consider only the most recent five years of an officer’s disciplinary history. (The current union contract eliminates that requirement). That meant that even officers with extensive histories of misconduct could have looked problem-free when department leaders weighed discipline options.

As a result, when investigators in 2013 looked into a complaint against Kriv, his recent disciplinary history was clean, so they proceeded as if he’d never been disciplined. The truth was that, by then, he had been suspended or reprimanded for at least 15 different incidents, but the most recent complaints were more than five years old or didn’t appear on his record yet because they were still under investigation.

As Kriv successfully appealed Police Department discipline, he also was successfully beating more and more traffic tickets.

From 2015 through mid-2022, Kriv got 51 tickets but paid only two.

Other tickets — issued for reasons including exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour, running red lights, blocking an area and parking where he shouldn’t — were dismissed.

He got some tickets dismissed by making technical arguments — claiming a ticket wasn’t filled out properly, for example — but most were dismissed after he blamed his girlfriend, records show.

Kriv contested tickets using that defense before at least 23 different judges. Sometimes he went before the same judge with the same story, but those appearances were typically years apart.

At a hearing in 2018, he tried to get out of a speeding ticket issued in a school zone.

“My girlfriend and I got in an argument that morning,” he told the judge. “We broke up. She took my fob and she took my car and I do have a police report.”

“I didn’t get it back until later that night around 9 o’clock. And I did have her arrested about a week later. We went to her workplace, but here’s a copy of the police report.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

“The System’s Like a Joke”

Citywide, it’s rare for people to succeed in getting their tickets dismissed. In a typical year, the city issues about 1 million automated-camera tickets for speeding and red-light violations. People contest about 4% of those tickets, and about 1 in 10 win, according to an analysis of city ticket data.

There’s no indication the Police Department knew how often Kriv was contesting his tickets in court. There’s also no indication in records that the girlfriend he used as his alibi was real.

Last year, the city’s Office of Inspector General received a tip to look at Kriv — not for his work in uniform, but for a potentially fraudulent defense of a parking ticket he had received, records show.

The OIG followed that tip and concluded that Kriv had provided false testimony and fraudulent documentation related to parking and traffic violations since 2009, according to prosecutors. Since 2013, he had contested 44 tickets by saying his girlfriend had stolen his car. All 44 had been dismissed.

The office notified the Police Department that it was investigating Kriv.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office in October barred Kriv from testifying in court as a witness, placing him on a list of police officers whose truthfulness is in question. Nonetheless, the police department kept him on the streets and he continued to write tickets and make DUI arrests.

The final time Kriv took an oath to tell the truth and then blamed his girlfriend for a speeding ticket was in September of 2022, records show. Once again, the story worked.

“Well, I had her arrested,” Kriv said when the judge asked what happened to the woman. “They charged her with a misdemeanor trespassing to a vehicle. That pretty much went nowhere.

“She got, like, three months’ supervision or something like that. It’s kind of a, I don’t want to say the system’s like a joke, but it didn’t really do anything.”

As Kriv, who is 56, was defending himself in traffic court last year, he also was eyeing retirement, going back and forth with the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago to sort out his pension benefits. He was told he’d gain another year of seniority — and a larger pension — if he stayed on the force until Jan. 15.

On Jan. 12, the department collected his badge and stripped him of police powers.

On Jan. 14, Kriv got another speeding ticket.

On Jan. 17, Kriv retired.

The next day, Kriv’s car was ticketed again for speeding.

On Jan. 31, Cook County prosecutors charged Kriv with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies, for allegedly lying to judges under oath and providing fictitious police reports in four traffic ticket cases.

The girlfriend story, prosecutors allege, was fake. Prosecutors calculated that, by getting out of 44 tickets, Kriv saved himself $3,665.

The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment about its case against Kriv.

Kriv emailed the pension board the day after he was charged and released on $10,000 bond, writing: “When do I start getting my pension checks and does it come bi-weekly or once a month?” His pension started at about $6,000 a month, according to the board.

Deborah Witzburg, the inspector general whose office helped build the case against Kriv, declined to comment for this story. In a news release about the charges, she said: “The truthfulness and credibility of police officers is foundational to the fair administration of justice, and to CPD’s effectiveness as a law enforcement agency.”

Grace, Kriv’s attorney, noted that the criminal charges are not related to his duties as a police officer. “He understands the importance of accountability by all citizens when it comes to paying his outstanding tickets and looks forward to resolving this matter by making good on any oversights he may have,” Grace said.

In late March, a Cook County judge called out, “Jeffrey Kriv,” and the former officer stepped forward to be arraigned. He pleaded not guilty. Each offense is punishable by up to five years in prison.

When reached by phone, Kriv said he didn’t want to talk because “nobody gets a fair shake with the media” and his attorney had advised him not to say anything.

“When it is all said and done, this will be dismissed,” he said. “There is nothing to it.”

Kriv got three more speeding tickets soon after he retired in mid-January. He didn’t contest any of them, and he paid the fines.

Then he got three more speeding tickets.

“Pattern of bad behavior”: Top MAGA election denier group accused of using donations to get rich

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Conservative activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips used the nonprofit True the Vote to enrich themselves, according to a complaint filed to the IRS.

On Monday, the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign for Accountability called for an investigation into True the Vote, which has made repeated false claims about voter fraud in elections. The complaint said True the Vote may have violated state and federal law when the charity used donations to issue loans to Engelbrecht, its founder, and lucrative contracts to Gregg Phillips, a longtime director. The organization also failed to disclose the payments to insiders in its tax returns, including excessive legal bills paid to its general counsel at the time, who filed election-related lawsuits in four states, the complaint said.

“Such disclosure lapses heighten suspicion regarding whether True the Vote and or its current or former officers and directors intended to conceal the payments from the public or IRS,” the complaint said. The self-dealing contracts and loans were first reported by Reveal.

Engelbrecht started Texas-based True the Vote in 2010 after getting involved in Tea Party activism in the Houston area. Over the years, she and Phillips have promoted probes into voter fraud in their fundraising efforts, but they have failed to deliver evidence of such activity for years. The pair catapulted to national prominence when conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza featured the nonprofit’s discredited work in the film “2,000 Mules,” which played in theaters across the country.

Engelbrecht and Phillips have defended their voting work, and their attorney has previously said there was nothing wrong about the loans and contracts. True the Vote’s attorneys, Engelbrecht and Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.

The federal government allows nonprofit organizations to operate tax-free, and in return they are required to disclose substantial information about their finances to make sure donor funds are used appropriately. Charities like True the Vote are also not allowed to engage in certain political activity.

“I hope that the IRS and other applicable authorities take seriously what appears to be a pattern of bad behavior by Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, and that makes the pursuit of accountability that much more important,” said Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability. The organization previously filed a separate complaint in 2020 about True the Vote engaging in political activity with Georgia’s Republican Party. The IRS did not respond to that complaint.

The group’s legal woes have mounted following the D’Souza movie. A Georgia voter sued the pair and D’Souza for defamation because he said he was wrongfully accused of committing voter fraud. The case is pending. A state investigation found the voter was dropping off ballots for himself and family members, which is legal. Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office asked federal authorities to investigate True the Vote’s finances after Engelbrecht and Phillips did not produce purported evidence on voter fraud to investigators in 2022.

James Bopp Jr., the former general counsel, is now suing True the Vote in federal court for breach of contract for nearly $1 million in unpaid legal bills dating back several years, according to court records obtained by ProPublica. True the Vote has countersued Bopp’s law firm, denying the unpaid invoices and accusing it of engaging in fraud and substandard lawyering, the records show.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bopp said that True the Vote’s counterclaim has no merits. “We were shocked they responded this way. They did nothing but praise our work,” he said. “This is what unscrupulous people will do when they try to avoid the repayment of debt.”

In January, ProPublica and The Dallas Morning News reported Engelbrecht and Phillips created another charity, the Freedom Hospital. It aimed to help children and elderly people affected by the war in Ukraine with medical care. Its website, which has since been taken down, said it raised halfway to $25 million for a mobile hospital. ProPublica and the News found the effort never materialized. Attorneys for Engelbrecht and Phillips said that it was a good-faith effort and that his clients only raised $268 for the project through PayPal. Lawyers said donations were returned “at Mr. Phillips’ direction.”

In its most recently available tax return, True the Vote in 2021 raised about $1.7 million but fell $289,157 into the red. The 2021 return no longer includes Phillips as a director. In 2020, the organization raised $5 million. For 2019, the organization had given a reporter and the IRS two widely different tax returns that were riddled with inconsistencies over key questions about governance and Engelbrecht’s $113,000 loan. At the time, True the Vote said it planned to file an amended return. It does not appear to have been filed with the IRS.

Despite Texas law stating directors of nonprofits can’t receive loans from their own organizations, Engelbrecht — who was a director and an employee at the time — regularly received loans from the nonprofit, ranging from about $40,000 to $113,000, according to tax filings. She also earned a salary.

Phillips first joined True the Vote as a board member in 2014. Phillips received at least $750,000 related to a research analysis contract. The Campaign for Accountability, in its complaint, raised questions about what, if any, services were actually rendered.

Bopp was paid approximately $280,000 over a seven day period related to filing and supervising attorneys on election-related lawsuits to challenge the results in key states, according to court records. Originally, there were seven lawsuits planned to be filed, but Bopp filed only four. He quickly withdrew them. Bopp previously justified the costs to file the complaints as legitimate because each state had different laws.

“Such legal fees seem excessive for a few days of work in lawsuits that never proceeded past an initial complaint and which The Bopp Law Firm voluntarily dismissed shortly after filing,” the complaint said.

In 2020, True the Vote did not report those contracts in its tax returns, which are required for contracts above $100,000. “Ms. Engelbrecht, as President of True the Vote, appears to have voluntarily and intentionally filed a false, incorrect, and incomplete Form 990,” the complaint said.