A new Daughter of the Confederacy: The hate pageantry of Marjorie Taylor Greene

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a true daughter of the South in some of the worst ways possible.

Last week, the Georgia congresswoman showed the world, again, that she is a white supremacist who represents the worst of (white) Southern culture and history when she lied about Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who is a Black man, after they had a public “argument” outside of the Capitol. Greene claimed that she was terrified and felt threatened by her Democratic colleague.

Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s lies are the same ones that white women across the South (and other parts of the country) told about “giant negroes” and “black beast rapists” and other “black predators” in order to get thousands of innocent Black men (and Black women and Black children) lynched. In all, the South that Marjorie Taylor-Greene honors is one of white supremacy in its varied forms such as white-on-Black chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, lynchings, and other examples of white racial terrorism, white violence, and racial authoritarianism more generally. This South is the place that historian Joel Williamson famously described as having “a rage for order” that means white domination and control over Black and brown people in order to keep them in “their place.”

Greene is a product of the racist culture and white supremacist environment of Forsyth County, Georgia.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s South is a place where white-on-Black chattel slavery was a “benign institution” and the Black slaves were “happy”, and the white slavers were “benevolent” and “kind”. Greene’s world is also a place where the white supremacist fantasies of “Gone with the Wind” and the white utopia of “The Andy Griffith Show” and Mayberry were actually real. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Southern dreams are an opine and nostalgia for a reborn Confederacy and other cursed fantasies of Whiteness and the Trumpocene and MAGA movement’s promises and threats to “Make American Great Again” – which in practice means “Make America Fully White Again.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fear is fake

The reality of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other neo-Confederate’s fantasies and self-soothing lies about the South were laid bare by Alexander Stephens, who was the Vice President of the Confederacy, in his infamous 1861 “Cornerstone Speech” where he said proudly that:

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

In a video posted on Twitter last week, Greene bragged about beginning the process to impeach President Biden for non-existent crimes. In that video, which was recorded in her garage while she lifted weights, a cooler adorned with a large Confederate flag sticker can be seen in the background. The Confederate flag is a white supremacist hate symbol that takes on further meaning within the context of Greene’s years-long pattern of white supremacist behavior, speech, and politics. She has spoken at “white nationalist” gatherings and claims to be a defender of supposedly downtrodden white men. She has also spoken proudly about Confederate statues and other monuments. She has shown herself to be an anti-Semite who spouts vile conspiracy theories about “Jewish space lasers” and QAnon and “globalists.”

Greene also believes in the white supremacist “birther” conspiracy theory and its lies that Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, was a fraud and usurper. She supported Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 coup attempt and the attack by his terrorists on the Capitol, which was an attempt to end the country’s multiracial democracy.

In many ways, Greene is a product of the racist culture and white supremacist environment of Forsyth County, Georgia. In an excellent essay at the Daily Beast, which merits being quoted at length, Kali Holloway details how:

When Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new congresswoman known for her racist and anti-Semitic rants, was a senior at South Forsyth County High School in 1992, a few dozen Black marchers made their way through the Georgia county’s rain-slicked streets singing old protest songs and carrying signs reading “We Shall Overcome” and “Black and White Together.” The route was flanked by hundreds of snarling white racists waving Confederate flags and shouting ″Go home, n—-ers.”

The marchers had been marking five years since the 1987 “Walk for Brotherhood” drew international condemnation to all-white Forsyth County. Newspaper accounts describe protesters being pelted with so many “rocks, bottles and mud thrown from a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members and their supporters” that they were forced to abandon the two-and-half mile route. Forsyth County had maintained an unwritten whites-only policy dating to 1912, when white vigilantes lynched a black man and drove out nearly all of the African American residents. The county’s reputation as too dangerous for Black folks to even drive through—a courthouse lawn sign in the 1950s and ’60s warned “N—-er, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You” — was well earned. ”I have been in the civil rights movement for 30 years,” Hosea Williams, an acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr and organizer of the Forsyth County march, told the New York Times in 1987. “I’m telling you we’ve got a South Africa in the backyard of Atlanta, Georgia.”

Holloway continues:

Forsyth County today is nearly one-quarter Asian and Hispanic. But only 4 percent of its denizens are Black, in a state where one-third of the people are Black. The county was recently ranked one of the richest counties in Georgia, its grand houses and country clubs obscuring a history of Black bloodshed and standing on sites once occupied by Black churches and homes. That land was long ago stolen from Black folks during a campaign of terror that has been called “the most successful racial cleansing in U.S. history.”

The Confederate flag is often reflexively defended with claims of “Southern pride” and “states’ rights” and that it represents “heritage, not hate.” Such language are deflections and slogans that are intended to hide and rewrite the South’s real and complex history of white-on-Black slavery and racial violence and terror. Such claims are also attempts to whitewash history in order to absolve White America of any agency and responsibility for how it created and continues to benefit from a system of institutional, systemic, and interpersonal racism and white privilege.

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Moreover, “Southern pride”, as commonly used, is language that is narrow, myopic, and a product of the white racial frame as it intentionally ignores and excludes being legitimately proud of the long Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement, the democratic triumphs of Reconstruction, abolitionists, slave uprisings and rebellions, maroonage and other forms of resistance that tore down the white supremacist order. The Southern pride of Marjorie Taylor Greene and other such neo-Confederate reactionaries and revanchists also does not celebrate other things that the sons and daughters of the South could potentially be proud of such as a rich multiracial and multicultural history that gifted America and the world with amazing literature, food, and music and other forms of cultural vibrancy.

It is not a coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other hate groups in America, Europe, other parts of the world claim the Confederate flag as their banner and symbol: they know its true meaning and power.

Of course, because the Confederate flag is a symbol, it can potentially have other meanings beyond hatred and white supremacy. For example, the Confederate flag has often been interpreted as being a symbol of a common working class Southern identity across the color line. Antiracist and other progressive and left groups have also used the Confederate flag as a way of “taking back” Southern history from white supremacists and other defenders of white-on-Black domination and hierarchy and other “traditional” values.

There are also quotidian ways that different individuals and groups relate to and make sense of the Confederate flag and the idea of the South outside of any explicitly political intent. For example, there are many Black folks, like me, who are fans of Southern Rock and groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd. In arenas across the South and other parts of the United States, white, Black, and brown people have cheered on their favorite professional wrestlers – who yes, wore the Confederate flag, and in some cases even carried one with them to the ring. And there are many Black people of a certain age and generation who watched the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show and got excited when they saw “Bo” and “Luke” driving their car, the “General Lee.”

The potential complexities of how different people relate to the Confederate flag does not change the fact that as deployed by the post-civil rights era Republican Party and “conservative” movement (and now the MAGAites and other Trump supporters and larger white right) that flag is a symbol of white supremacy and a revolutionary neofascist project to end the country’s multiracial democracy.

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What will Marjorie Taylor Greene likely do next in her 21st-century Age of Trump lynching theater and larger public performance?

Of course, Greene will claim to be a victim of some type of “Woke” bogeyman and “anti-white” “mob” and “the left” who want to hurt and “replace” “patriotic” White Americans like her.

But I would not at all be surprised if Marjorie Taylor Greene records a video or has a press conference where she proudly shares her United Daughters of the Confederacy certificate and then starts mouth bloviating – and crying – about “heritage, not hate” and “Southern pride” and “reverse racism” and “white guilt.”

In this age of democracy crisis (that Trumpocene) and resurgent white supremacy and neofascism and all of its violence and trouble, a good and decent white person who happened to have such a certificate or other such objects would put it away in the back of their closet in a box or some other such place out of sight. Even better yet, as an act of protest, that United Daughters of the Confederacy certificate could be publicly burned.

Perhaps a Confederate certificate or other such things are part of a person’s family history that they discovered during a genealogy project or were hand-me-downs from a now-dead relative? Those are facts of history that should be reflected upon for what they reveal about our country’s complexities and our relationships to it, but not celebrated as something noble or good.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene will not reflect upon her love of the South and what it really means in the context of America’s real history. Instead, she will use her Southern fantasies, dreams, fictions, and lies as a weapon in a project of obtaining more white power and ending America’s multiracial pluralist democracy. “The South Shall (indeed) Rise Again,” carrying a Confederate flag, wearing a red Trump MAGA hat, and being lifted aloft by the Republican Party. History does indeed repeat itself — first as tragedy and then as farce.

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Expert: Jack Smith subpoena for foreign deals suggests DOJ concerned Trump tried to “monetize” docs

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team issued a subpoena for information about former President Donald Trump’s foreign deals since he took office, according to The New York Times.

Smith’s team overseeing the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago has “cast a wider net than previously understood as they scrutinize whether he broke the law” by taking documents home from the White House and failing to comply with a subpoena for their return, according to the report.

The subpoena specifically sought details on the Trump Organization’s real estate licensing and development deals in China, Saudi Araba, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Kuwait, Oman and France dating back to 2017.

The Trump Organization vowed not to make any foreign deals while Trump was at the White House and the only known deal was with a Saudi-based real estate company to license the Trump name to a residential, hotel and golf complex in Oman last fall.

Smith’s team also subpoenaed Trump Organization records related to Trump’s dealings with the Saudi-backed golf company LIV Golf.

“Shocked at the stupidity”: Prosecutors obtain lawyer notes that blow up Trump’s Mar-a-Lago defense

“While the Trump Organization has, for decades, been a global real estate empire, we made a strict pledge to not enter in any new foreign deals while President Trump was in office, a commitment that the company fully complied with,” a Trump Organization spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

The subpoena suggests Smith’s team is looking at potential connections between Trump’s foreign deals and the classified documents. It’s unclear whether the Trump Organization has turned over the materials sought by the subpoena or whether Smith has any other evidence to back the theory, according to the Times, which noted that prosecutors have sought to understand “not only what sorts of materials Mr. Trump removed from the White House, but also why he might have taken them with him.”

Documents related to some Middle Eastern countries, China, and French President Emmanuel Macron were among those recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

“Following the money is a fairly common practice in any white collar case, but when it comes to classified documents and foreign business ties, alarm bells go off,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade.

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, said the subpoena suggests Smith’s case against Trump has “gotten even stronger.”

“Basically, the background here is the prosecutor’s fear, the public’s fear, that Donald Trump monetizes everything,” he told MSNBC. “He monetized Jan. 6th, of all things. He monetizes his impeachment and the like. So, I think the prosecutor’s concern here has been when he took these highly sensitive classified documents, was he trying to monetize those as well?”

The DOJ has long looked at potential violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction statutes in the case but “what this says is perhaps there is even more,” Katyal said.

“There is a whole other set of potential criminal charges,” he said.

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Former Justice Department official Mary McCord said prosecutors are undoubtedly looking at “why would he be obstructing if they are thinking of bringing an obstruction charge.”

“If you’re DOJ, you’re looking for the why, because you’ve got to be able to tell a jury you do bring a case, why,” she told MSNBC. “What is the modus operandi, what is the intent, and following the money, following possible places of vulnerability and weakness that might have motivated Trump to do some of the things that it’s looking like there may be evidence that he did, that is, have boxes moved, attempt to obstruct justice. That’s going to be a focus of the investigation.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

First female Saudi astronaut boards the ISS, marking another first for Arabs in space

When Mission Specialist Rayyanah Barnawi docked to the space-facing port of the Harmony module on Monday, she became the first Saudi Arabian woman to board the International Space Station. Barnawi, a scientist specializing in cancer stem cell research, is one of four all-private crew members on SpaceX‘s Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2).

“This is a dream come true for everyone,” Barnawi said before the flight. “Just being able to understand that this is possible… If me and Ali can do it, then they can do it, too.”

Ali, as Barnawi calls him, is fellow Saudi Mission Specialist Ali Al Qarni, an F-15 Strike Eagle fighter pilot for Royal Saudi Air Force. Though the mission’s full cost has remains undisclosed so far, previous seats came with a price tag of $55 million, according to the Washington Post. Sponsored by their home country, they will be Saudi Arabia’s first two astronauts to join the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is a marvel of scientific and technological prowess but also serves as a beacon of international cooperation, often demonstrating how nations can cooperate on issues of global importance.

NASA hopes to clean up space junk; experts say the days of uncluttered night skies are “over”

Barnawi gave an audio report on her first moments among the stars, as captured in a tweet from Reuters.

“It feels amazing to be viewing earth from this capsule,” Barnawi said. “To the people around the world: The future is very bright. And I’d like you to dream big, believe in yourself, and believe in the future of humanity.”

“The sky is no limit to our ambition. It is only the beginning,” Barnawi wrote in a video tweet from the station.

With the four new arrivals, the ISS now holds 11 crew members — including United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyedi, who in April became the first Arab astronaut to complete a spacewalk. Al Neyedi is the fourth Arab astronaut to reach space, a legacy dating back to 1985 with Saudi citizen and Discovery shuttle specialist Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim astronaut in space. Saudi Arabian astronauts haven’t returned to space since Discovery — at least, not until Sunday.

“For the first time ever,” Al Neyedi tweeted from aboard the ISS’s orbiting outpost, “three Arab astronauts will be in space together.”

Following in Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud's pioneering footsteps, 2 Saudi astronauts will launch on their 1st mission to the ISS and for 1st time ever, 3 Arab astronauts will be in space together. As we wish them a great launch, here's a recent view of Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 I took. pic.twitter.com/T33R59iA10

— Sultan AlNeyadi (@Astro_Alneyadi) May 21, 2023

However, as The National’s Sarwat Nasir pointed out, Egypt’s Sara Sabry could potentially be considered the first Arab woman in space. Although Barnawi is currently about 408 km (254 miles) above the earth in the ISS, last year Sabry launched on one of Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket flights, which reach about 100 km (60 miles) above sea level — where NASA says space is roughly considered to begin. By comparison, Ax-2’s initial orbit was about 125 miles above earth.

Debuting the new Falcon 9 booster, Ax-2 is SpaceX’s 10th human spaceflight mission for SpaceX, and the second ISS-bound mission for Houston-based Axiom Space. During their eight-day mission, Barnawi said the team are working on at least 20 experiments — 14 of which are being led by Saudi scientists — ranging from immune-cell biology research to cloud seeding in microgravity.

“For the first time ever, three Arab astronauts will be in space together.”

Along with the Saudi mission specialists, Ax-2 includes American racecar driver and businessman John Schoffner, the vessel’s private-paying pilot. And Ax-2’s commander is none other than space legend Peggy Whitson, the first woman to command the ISS (doing so twice) and NASA’s first female chief astronaut. Whitson has more space walks under her tethered belt than any other woman — and at 63, she holds the record for oldest woman to orbit the earth.

Whitson’s Sunday launch marked her first ride with Axiom Space following her 2018 retirement from NASA, and her fourth space mission overall. Her third mission in 2016, a nearly 10 month stay on the ISS, marked Whitson as the American with the most time in space. True to form, Whitson also became the first female commander of a private spaceflight Sunday.

“Welcome home to zero-G, Peggy,” said SpaceX Chief Engineer Bill Gerstenmeier when the crew reached orbit. Whitson called it a “phenomenal ride.”

“There are so many lessons learned after being up in space for 665 days,” Whitson said in a recent interview with Spaceflight Now. “I’ve got one or two lessons I’ve maybe learned the hard way, and I’m trying to save them some time because our mission is relatively short. So we want to make sure we get the most out of every one of those days.”

Ax-2 crew will depart the ISS on May 30, aiming for a Florida splashdown two days sooner than originally planned, in order to free up the station’s docking port ahead of for SpaceX’s Jun. 3 unpiloted re-supply mission. Another NASA-contracted SpaceX flight is slated to launch in August.

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This controversial sci-fi blockbuster about climate change still polarizes scientists today

At the start of the third act of the 2004 sci-fi disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow," teenager and academic decathlon participant Laura Chapman shares her deep feelings of despair with her boyfriend Sam Hall.

"Everything I've ever cared about, everything I've worked for… has all been preparation for a future that no longer exists," Laura (Emmy Rossum) tells Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) as she shivers due to a combo of a recent blood infection and an apocalyptic snowstorm. "I know you always thought I took the competition too seriously. You were right. It was all for nothing."

"We passed out fliers at screenings, and brought images of real-world climate disasters to ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting."

Despite largely being remembered as a special effects-fueled extravaganza, this quiet dramatic moment may best epitomize the complex legacy of "The Day After Tomorrow," directed and co-written (along with Jeffrey Nachmanoff) by Roland Emmerich of "Independence Day" fame. It was the first Hollywood blockbuster to use its premise to focus on climate change and make bank while doing so.

A semi-adaptation of the 1999 book "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber on a budget of $125 million (or nearly 200 million in today's dollars), "The Day After Tomorrow" grossed a whopping $552 million (in 2023, that's more than $883 million). It primarily tells the story of Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a paleoclimatologist who unsuccessfully tries to warn America's political leaders — most notably Vice President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Welsh), an obvious satire on real-life Vice President Dick Cheney — that climate change is about to rapidly cause a new ice age.

Like many Emmerich blockbusters (such as "Godzilla" and "2012"), "The Day After Tomorrow" includes spectacular scenes of mass destruction, with apocalyptic ice storms smothering landmarks in New York City and ultimately covering the entire northern hemisphere. Yet in addition to being entertaining, "The Day After Tomorrow" also attempted to make an important political point by raising awareness about how greenhouse gas emissions are destroying our planet. As the film reaches its 19-year anniversary this week, it should in theory be celebrated as ahead of its time — particularly in scenes like the one with Rossum, who articulated views later expressed by Greta Thunberg and countless other future climate protesters.

This 25-year-old sci-fi disaster movie is still lauded by scientists — here's why

If that's so, then why do so many scientists view the film with contempt? Simply put: It's a movie about listening to science — but it also butchers most of it in the process.

"I don't recall a lot except that the whole science was incredibly wrong," Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Salon by email. His views echoed each scientist who spoke to Salon for this article, criticizing the movie's central premise of a rapid ice age and observing that "one does not get an ice age out of global warming." Although Trenberth acknowledged that science fiction "can be helpful in setting the stage for people, relationships and politics," he scoffed when Salon referred to "The Day After Tomorrow" as a "work of art."

"You are kidding?" he sarcastically replied.

Trenberth has good company among prominent scientists in disliking Emmerich's arguable magnum opus. Dr. Michael E. Mann is a professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and, like Trenberth, one of the world's most prominent climatologists. Prior to the film's release, a climate advocacy group contacted Mann with an early copy of the script. They wanted to know if the movie should be used to raise awareness. Mann warned them against it.

"In some ways, it trivializes concern about the climate crisis because it presents such a caricature of the science," Mann wrote to Salon. This is not to say that Mann believes the movie to be totally devoid of scientific merit: For example, there is an opening scene about a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island breaking off, which Jack Hall describes as "sensational."

"In fact that first scene was based on an actual event (the collapse of Larsen B ice shelf) that had already occurred in 2002," Mann wrote to Salon. "There have been some similar-sized ice shelf collapses since. These are of concern because they potentially destabilize the inland ice (which, unlike an ice shelf which is already floating on water, contribute to sea level rise)."

These pluses, though, are outweighed by the minuses, at least in Mann's view. Indeed, for many years he would watch "The Day After Tomorrow" with first-year seminar students to deconstruct exactly what it gets right and what it gets wrong — and they regularly found that "it gets a lot wrong."

"The animation of the 'ocean conveyor' that Dennis Quaid shows to the rapt audience at the international climate conference is actually going in the wrong direction," Mann pointed out. "A collapse of the conveyor wouldn't cause another ice age, it would just slow the warming in some regions surrounding the North Atlantic. And it would play out over decades not days. You don't drill an ice core on the ice shelf as he and his crew were doing in the opening scenes, but inland where you get a much longer record back in time. And an ice core record is just a series of measurements. There's no physics in it. So you couldn't use it to build a 'forecasting model' as he does in the film."

Mann's students also criticized Emmerich's decision to cast Gyllenhaal as a nerd: "But the thing my students were most skeptical about in the film was Jake Gyllenhaal participating in an academic decathlon. They just couldn't suspend disbelief on that one!"

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"The thing my students were most skeptical about in the film was Jake Gyllenhaal participating in an academic decathlon. They just couldn't suspend disbelief on that one!"

Despite this harsh view from some scientists, there are others who applaud the movie's existence. One of them is Emory University Physics Professor Sidney Perkowitz, who was so critical of the 2003 sci-fi flick "The Core" that his words helped catalyze the creation of the Science & Entertainment Exchange. As its name indicates, the mission of the Science & Entertainment Exchange is to promote positive impressions of science for the general public. While Perkowitz derided "The Core" for taking excessive liberties with scientific accuracy, he did not have the same perspective about "The Day After Tomorrow."

"Despite scientific flaws, [The Day After Tomorrow] carried a message to millions that was important then and is more important now," Perkowitz wrote to Salon. He quoted his 2007 book "Hollywood Science," where he covers the movie in depth. In particular he noted that it had actually changed people's minds about the reality of global warming, prompting Perkowitz to give the movie a Special Award. After acknowledging criticisms of the plot and dialogue as trite, Perkowitz wrote that "the film has redeeming features. Though presented in clichéd style, the story illustrates scientific commitment through the conflict between Jack Hall's work and his relations with his wife and son."

Perkowitz also enjoyed the special effects, visual and audio alike, and observed "Jack's speeches to the UN delegates and to the President include true scientific nuggets about global warming. In this way, 'The Day After Tomorrow' draws attention to a real and current problem, with greater odds of doing serious harm than any asteroid strike or alien invasion."

As proof of this beneficial impact, Perkowitz points in his book to a survey by environmental science and policy expert Anthony Leiserowitz taken among 529 US adults before and after they saw the movie. It was viewed by roughly 21 million American adults in theaters upon being released, and millions more through DVD sales and streaming.

"[Leiserowitz] asked about concerns over global warming and the possibility of changing one's own behavior as a result, and about political preferences," Perkowitz explained. "For those who had seen the film, he concluded that it had a 'significant impact' on climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, policy priorities… The film led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming [and] encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority… The movie even appears to have influenced voter preferences."

This is not to say that "The Day After Tomorrow" changed the public conversation on a massive scale. At the end of the day a movie is, after all, just a movie — meaning it has limited reach.

"The film caused no change in overall public attitudes toward global warming because its audience, though huge, is only a fraction of the US adult population," Perkowitz observed. "Even enormously successful movies aren't seen by a majority of Americans and so can't immediately swing popular opinion."

Yet this does not mean that "The Day After Tomorrow" only had a negligible impact. "According to Leiserowitz's analysis, media coverage of the film and its science was ten times greater than was accorded the report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific report that solidified worries about global warming in 2001," Perkowitz writes in his book.

"Despite scientific flaws, [The Day After Tomorrow] carried a message to millions that was important then and is more important now."

"The Day After Tomorrow" also tackled partisan politics with a boldness not normally seen in mainstream Hollywood fare. Emmerich's movie has an undeniable "liberal tilt," as Perkowitz put it, such as clearly basing its fictional vice president on Cheney and having Americans illegally cross the Mexican border to escape the apocalyptic storms. Additionally, the movie raises provocative questions about how our species will preserve its culture if we are unable to prevent the climate change crisis from reaching a tipping point — a question that humanity has yet to convincingly answer. The impetus for these conversations in the film is that a group of survivors need to burn books to stay warm (a plight that on one occasion leads to the movie's most memorable laugh-out-loud line).

"Besides the book-burning discussion, [The Day After Tomorrow] even shows symbolically that all our stored knowledge, at least for Western civilization, is threatened when the tsunami due to climate change reaches NY's 42nd Street Library," Perkowitz observed to Salon. "But in the real world, most people and institutions haven't yet emotionally accepted that climate change is a real global threat. With a few exceptions, we haven't even begun preparing to help millions of people survive, let alone try to save the culture that defines civilization."

Although there have been efforts to preserve business and banking records, as well as the basis of the world's food supply (such as at Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault), "I expect that if serious action to survive the effects of climate change ever comes, it will be by the skin of our teeth at the last possible minute, with saving print and digital books, art treasures and so on at the bottom of the list."

One group that hopes things don't get that bad is Greenpeace, an international nonprofit 501(c)(3) that focuses on environmental issues. After it was released in 2004, Greenpeace tried to use "The Day After Tomorrow" as a call to action.

"We passed out fliers at screenings, and brought images of real-world climate disasters to ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting," John Hocevar, a marine biologist and director of Greenpeace's oceans campaign, wrote to Salon. He feels that the movie "got the big story right. If we don't stop extracting and burning oil, coal and gas, we are in serious trouble in ways that may be difficult to predict precisely but will nonetheless cost trillions of dollars and many, many lives."

While he concedes that the movie "didn't try too hard to get the specifics right," he added that "it's hard to get too upset about that because everyone knows that whether it is a disaster movie or real life, no one listens to the scientists until it is too late. Hopefully this is the time we decide to break that pattern."

"The film led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming [and] encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority."

Victoria Scrimer, Ph.D., a lecturer in theater and performance studies at the University of Maryland who used to work for Greenpeace, has written an essay with her thoughts on "The Day After Tomorrow." Scrimer argues that people need compelling stories to understand their reality, and that "The Day After Tomorrow" is significant for that reason.

"A lot of environmental disaster is what we might call boring (it takes place over a long period of time, with several different, sometimes unidentified causes, largely unspectacular until it's too late, etc.), and some research suggests humans are ill equipped to perceive and respond to long term phenomenon like climate change," Scrimer explained. "For instance, a 1994 study of risk perception suggests that we fail to recognize climate change risk because it does not fit into a conventional dramatic framework. The study suggests that 'climatic change' belongs to a class of 'hidden hazards' or problems which could pass 'unnoticed or unattended to' until their effects reach such a scale that can no longer be ignored."

This doesn't mean that Scrimer believes "The Day After Tomorrow" is a great movie. "I think it's valuable for how it highlights some problems with how we as a species prioritize information and concern and see movies like 'The Day After Tomorrow' as one way to do that." That is why "despite the inaccuracy of the film's anthropocentric, hyper-rapid depiction of climate disaster which troubled some scientists, many others were happy to grant poetic license to filmmakers for the sake of pushing climate change into the media spotlight. And it is true that this film did help bring awareness to the issue."

Perkowitz, for his part, also said that "The Day After Tomorrow" is "not a great film." Yet while "greatness" from a quality standpoint is purely subjective, there is an objective definition of "greatness" that applies to "The Day After Tomorrow." It is most apparent during the Rossum-Gyllenhaal dialogue, when Laura Chapman talks about preparing for a future that no longer exists, as well as during scenes when library patrons argue over whether to preserve The Gutenberg Bible and the works of philosopher Frederich Nietzsche for future generations.

If nothing else, "The Day After Tomorrow" is a historically significant film. While earlier movies like "Waterworld" and "Soylent Green" also depicted cataclysmic climate change, the topic in those films was more set dressing than anything central to the plot — and "Waterworld" famously flopped at the box office. By contrast, "The Day After Tomorrow" was the first Hollywood blockbuster to focus primarily on climate change and succeed, and was clearly distinctive enough that nearly 20 years after its release people still remember it and harbor strong opinions. Good, bad or indifferent, "The Day After Tomorrow" deserves to be seen — and, if humanity fails to thwart climate change, preserved like that Gutenberg Bible, as a relic from the earliest days when artists and scientists alike tried to pull humanity from the edge of the climate change cliff.

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“We got to rise up, everyone”: Rep. Jamaal Bowman battles the normalization of Trump

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., may only be in his second term in the House of Representatives, but he is not wasting any time trying to shake up the system. He has recently and very publicly challenged GOP members of Congress, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Thomas Massie on issues from saving lives from gun violence to the need to expel indicted serial liar Rep. George Santos from Congress. He has even broken ranks with many Democrats on certain issues, such as standing up for Palestinian rights, and opposing government bans of TikTok. We discussed that and more on “Salon Talks,” where Bowman did not hold back.

Bowman shared his view that some GOP members of Congress oppose laws to reduce deaths by gun violence because they are motivated by the racist “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that white people are being systematically replaced by people of color. Bowman explained why this fear makes Republicans OK about more “illegal guns being trafficked into poor Black and brown communities, which leads to more Black and brown people being killed.” On the danger posed by white supremacist terrorism, an issue recently amplified by President Biden, Bowman wants to see the federal government use “any means necessary we have to address this threat.”

The former educator has also made it his mission to oppose the “normalization” of Donald Trump, slamming Elon Musk’s MAGA rhetoric, calling out Trump-loving members of Congress like Rep. Byron Donalds on cable TV, and blasting CNN itself for giving a known liar and sexual offender a platform at the Trump’s recent town hall.

Breaking with some members of his own party, Bowman spoke passionately in opposition to a federal ban on TikTok, something Republican-controlled state legislature in Montana accomplished last week. Bowman noted that the real reason for a ban is not about possible Chinese government data harvesting. Instead, he argued, Republicans want to shut down this wildly popular social media app because its content is shared by younger people who “lean left,” and often addresses issues “like gun rights, trans rights, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, Black history, multicultural history.” With that said, Bowman does favor “a comprehensive federal piece of legislation that looks at safety, security, privacy, mental health on social media.” Watch my entire wide-ranging video interview with Bowman here, or read below for more.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You’ve been very outspoken on the need to address gun violence. You challenged Congressman Thomas Massie in the halls of the Capitol. If you could do whatever you want to save lives from gun violence, what would it look like?

So first, we have to vote the right people into office and vote the wrong people out of office. That not only includes the House of Representatives, that includes the Senate as well. There are 33 Senate seats up for grabs. If we can increase voter turnout in those states and certain counties, we can win big in the Senate and we can do some big things; not just on gun violence, but on everything else.

As you know, local communities, particularly low-income communities of color, are disproportionately impacted by gun violence, particularly gun trafficking. What we need to do is a few things. One, we need a ban on assault rifles outright. Two, we need universal background checks. Three, we need universal red flag laws. Four, we need universal safe storage. Five, we need to hold gun traffickers accountable and have more collaboration with law enforcement across states and the federal government as well as local government. And then, six, we need to close loopholes at gun shows and online purchasing.

There’s a lot that needs to be done. Obviously, it’s an uphill battle. That’s why I started with the fact that the people we have in office are the wrong people. They do not want to move on this issue, and they have to go as quickly as possible.

The right loves to talk about being pro-police. But when you speak to police officers as a member of Congress, do they want laws that might make it less lethal for both civilians and themselves in terms of guns?

“We can win big in the Senate and we can do some big things; not just on gun violence, but on everything else.”

Yes, that’s exactly right. Because guns, particularly legal guns, kill police officers as well. Mass shootings kill and threaten police officers as well. They support common sense gun laws. There are many who support the Second Amendment, who hunt and other things, want common sense gun laws. The majority of Americans want common sense gun laws. It’s asinine that my colleagues in Congress continue to side with the NRA in support of more guns.

But it fits their agenda, right? They have an agenda that is focused on something called a great replacement theory, which is a white supremacist theory. The more illegal guns continue to be trafficked into poor Black and brown communities, which leads to more Black and brown people being killed, Republicans are OK with that. Unfortunately, they seem to also be fine with our kids — regardless of background, race or class or religion — being killed by assault rifle. So they’re a party of death, not of life, as they like to call themselves. This is why we got to make sure we get them out of office. That’s the key.

President Biden recently spoke about white supremacy being the greatest threat to our nation. We just saw a gunman in Dallas wearing “right wing death squad,“ a phrase attached to right wingers. The FBI says the greatest terrorist threat on our soil are white supremacists. What would you like to see done? I mean, is it about treating it like al-Qaida or ISIS? Surveillance and neutralizing the threat? What can be done legally?

By any means necessary we have to address this threat, whatever that may look like. I think the bigger part of it is we need more people raising their voices and recognizing and acknowledging that this threat actually exists, and more people speaking truth to power to condemn it and suppress it and get rid of it. Because it doesn’t just manifest in mass shootings; it manifests in policy, it manifests in hiring practices. It manifests in how we talk about particular groups, whether it’s the trans community, women, people of color, the Jewish community, the Muslim community, etc.

We need a mass movement against this to make sure there’s not a corner of this country that accepts this, and if there is a corner, it’s in the far corners where we never deal with it or see it again.

Absolutely law enforcement has a role here. Law enforcement has a long history of surveilling poor communities and communities of color. Absolutely we need to know who’s a danger to our American way of life, like the insurrectionists. They’re still out there, and they’re still coordinating and organizing on social media and other spaces. So absolutely, by any means necessary.

Biden calls out “domestic terrorism”: That’s important, but is it enough to shift the narrative?

A few weeks ago you were on CNN with Republican Congressman Byron Donalds, a big Trump supporter. You said to him about his endorsement of Trump, “You’re endorsing an insurrectionist.” I can’t applaud that enough, because that’s how we stop the normalization of a man who attempted a coup and incited an insurrection on our Capitol. Do you hope other Democrats start using this language?

That’s a key word there: “normalizing.” I’m very concerned with the normalizing of Trump, the normalizing of Elon Musk and some of the things he says and does. Bill Maher seems to be a part of this normalizing, and so many others, with Ron DeSantis and others attacking the “woke mind virus.” They coined this term. When I ask people, “What does it mean to be woke?” Young people say, “Socially aware,” that’s it. That’s what being woke is, it’s about being socially aware.

“[Republicans] seem to be fine with our kids — regardless of background, race or class or religion — being killed by assault rifle. They’re a party of death, not of life, as they claim to be.”

So yes, I hope my colleagues do use that language because Trump is an insurrectionist. He confirmed it in his CNN town hall the way he celebrated many of the insurrectionists and what he said, talking about how much they love America and they have big hearts. Many of his talking points that night were talking points rooted in white supremacy and great replacement theory.

We cannot allow this to be normalized because I see a rise in conservative voices, not just on social media, but in mainstream media. What I’m concerned about also is mainstream media, local media and national, leaning to the right on certain issues in certain ways that are very, very dangerous. Like CNN choosing to broadcast this town hall with a known liar, a known sexual offender and someone who almost destroyed our entire country. I couldn’t believe CNN did that.

Trump lied shamelessly in CNN’s Town Hall — but he’s just a symptom of our national dysfunction

Donald Trump made a big part of his 2016 campaign demonizing Muslims and calling them terrorists. Meanwhile, he literally incited a terrorist attack on Jan. 6, an act of domestic terrorism. And he’s defending the terrorists. It is surreal to see this play out in real time after he incited hate crimes against the Muslim community, and now he’s going to pardon the terrorists. That’s what he said on CNN.

That’s right. He said he’s going to look at it and probably pardon most of them. What’s even scarier is there are tens of millions of people who still support him. It’s a reality check, I think, for the rest of us. It’s a reality check for the country. This cannot be an election where we stay home, where we don’t get involved, when we don’t turn out. It’s not just about our individual votes. We got to knock on the doors next to us and around our community.

And in New York, we can say, “In New York, we’re going to be fine.” We can’t take anything for granted. We got to do it in New York too. But we got to do it everywhere. We got to do it in Iowa, we got to do it in Florida, we got to do it in Georgia. We got to do it across the country because low voter turnout is the biggest threat to our democracy, and Republicans are trying to suppress the vote in many of those states. This is an “all hands on deck” situation. We cannot let him get back into office. We got to move heaven and earth to stop that from happening.

Their second in line is Ron DeSantis. You and I have talked about his book bans in the past and his ban on Black history. This is a guy who chimed in on the killer of Jordan Neely being charged with manslaughter. Here’s DeSantis, thousands of miles away in Florida, saying, “The guy’s a good Samaritan. We have to have his back,” about a guy who put an unarmed man in a chokehold, a man who didn’t threaten anyone or touch anyone, and killed him on the subway.

“It’s a reality check for the country. This cannot be an election where we stay home, where we don’t get involved, when we don’t turn out.”

It’s really, like you said, surreal. It’s heartbreakingly devastating, the response from many on the right. So first of all, he’s able to raise $2 million for his defense, at least, and it’s probably going to go up. What that indicates to me as a Black man, as someone who’s from New York, is that those people who donated to this person’s defense are OK with Black people being killed in public in broad daylight without being a physical threat to anyone. This person was apparently yelling on the train, but witnesses have said he did not hit anyone and he did not seem to pose a threat. And this ex-Marine apparently just put him in a chokehold and killed him. There’s so many other ways he could have responded to that to contain him, to hold him, to stop him. There were two other people there helping him to contain Mr. Neely, and yet he still had to die.

This is why we screamed years ago, I believe it after Trayvon Martin, that Black Lives Matter emerged, because it’s like, what the hell? You’re just going to kill us indiscriminately and it’s OK? Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, on and on and on. So yeah, man, it’s a really scary time, and that’s why we got to all get in the game because it could get way, way worse when you have influential, powerful people — not just DeSantis, I go back to Elon Musk using not just right-wing rhetoric, but MAGA Republican rhetoric. He’s a very influential, powerful person. Who knows who’s going to be influenced by his voice and his power because of who he is? That’s why we got to rise up, everyone.

Jordan Neely and the politics of disposability

I agree. Do you think DeSantis would weigh in if it was a Black man who killed a white man on that subway?

No. Well, not in favor of that. It would be a Kyle Rittenhouse situation. No, he would not. He would not weigh in at all.

Another big issue that came up in the town hall is reproductive freedom. Donald Trump said in the town hall, “I terminated Roe v. Wade and I’m honored to do it.” How do you think that might play out in 2024?

I hope he will be crushed for that. I say hope, because you remember, even though he was accused of sexual assault throughout his first campaign, he still got a very large percentage of white women voting for him. So my hope is he is crucified for that comment, but who the hell knows? I mean, again, there are tens of millions of people who support him. He said all kinds of crazy things in that town hall. It’s defending the Second Amendment to the hilt. Are you kidding me? Gun violence is the No. 1 issue right now. A majority of American people support doing something. He doesn’t want to do anything, and he doesn’t even speak about it with any empathy.

To your point, I’m with you. I wish CNN didn’t do it, but I’m OK with it just to show us again how crazy he is. However, people are very vulnerable and they like the way he feigns strength and leadership. They like that. He’s a patriarch, he’s macho. People like that and they are drawn to that, even though he’s out of his mind, in my opinion. So we’ll see. He should get crushed, but he’s going to do well because, again, America is what America is.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fear is fake

Donald Trump is the defender of white nationalism and white supremacy, and there’s a very strong bond there. It’s different from politicians you like because of their policies. He’s viewed as their savior because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of demographic change. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me, because nothing explains the devotion to him. His policies were nothing; it’s not about that.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. He says something that’s true. He says, “The system is rigged and broken.” That is true. But he blames progressives and liberals and Democrats and people of color for it. He doesn’t blame the people he also gets a lot of support from, the wealthy elite. He doesn’t blame them for it, and they should be blamed for it.

“This is an all hands on deck situation. We cannot let him get back into office.”

The idea of white supremacy that lives in politics as well, not as the Ku Klux Klan, but as deference to the white patriarchy. So yes, those aspects of the system are broken, but he blames the wrong people. He blames who the working class and working poor whites blame for their lot in life, and that’s how he gets them. So he has the wealthy elite, and he has a whole base of working-class white supporters, and he also has evangelical supporters as well. So he has three very strong bases. He has a coalition to help him. That’s why we can’t take him for granted. That’s why we have to push back on everything he does and says right now.

How do you think President Biden has done? Where we are now in the midst of the re-election campaign?

I have some concerns about him moving a little bit to the right on certain issues, particularly as it relates to how we support asylum seekers who need support at our border. Yes, there’s a crisis at the border. It’s a humanitarian crisis. We’re not doing enough to provide humanitarian aid in a post-Title 42 world, and so I would love for him to be stronger and more aggressive there. I wish he did not approve the Willow drilling project in Alaska. I think that was a mistake.

I just want him to lean in on his record. He has a good record to run on, the CHIPS and Science Act, the infrastructure bill, the IRA, the Safer Communities Act, the appointment of Black judges, the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson. He’s done some very strong things. Run on those things, but also continue to engage young people, continue to engage people of color, continue to engage progressives and I think he wins in a landslide. Don’t start waffling, trying to go back to the right or center just because you think you need independent white moderate men. Yes, you need everyone, but the energy and the passion and excitement is with young people and progressives, so you got to lean into them. I hope he continues to do that.

Young people came out in big numbers in 2022 and they’re getting more engaged. When I was younger, if you got engaged in the politics, it was more, “Well, I like these policies or I don’t, maybe they affect me.” Now gun violence is in their faces. The loss of reproductive freedom is there. Climate change, they understand they’re going to be on this planet longer than you and I, and it is real. How much do you think young people play a role in 2024?

Critical.

What more can Democrats do to engage them, bring them out and get them involved?

Well first of all, stop talking about banning TikTok where there’s no evidence that you should ban it. Do not do that. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I’ve been talking to my colleagues about this. We have the data. There are states with low voter turnout, there are counties with low voter turnout. We have to invest money there and money in the people there to turn out the vote in those areas. That’s one.

“The energy and the passion and excitement is with young people and progressives, so you got to lean into them.”

Along with that is engaging young people and engaging the young groups out there. There’s Gen Z for Change, an amazing group. There’s Voters of Tomorrow. Sunrise Movement is another group. Obviously the Justice Democrats and Working Families Party do a good job of engaging young people. What I hope to see is the party come together, progressives with more moderate, conservative Dems.

What I have seen since I got into Congress, which troubles me, is you have moderate and conservative Dems demonizing progressives and blaming progressives when things go wrong. First of all, that’s not an electoral strategy that will get us to victory. But even more importantly, that’s not leadership. We need leadership that knows how to bring people together to get the wins that we need. Progressives are a voice with and for young people. Young people love the Squad. Young people love the work that Delia Ramirez and Summer Lee and Maxwell Frost are doing. Lean into that as much as possible, and that’s how we get them all out to help us win in 2024.

You mentioned TikTok, and you’re one of the few members of Congress who stood up and said, “Don’t ban this.” I don’t know if it’s ever going to get banned on the federal level, but do you see any concern with China? Or do you think there’s an effort by the right to ban TikTok because young people are using it to organize, and they tend to be voting Democrat? What’s your take?

Yeah, so that’s correct, the latter. Like, 150 million Americans are on TikTok. They seem to lean left when you look at a lot of the content that’s on there, and they’re more likely to vote Democrat and talk about the issues and organize around the issues that young people care about, like gun rights, trans rights, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, Black history, multicultural history. That’s what’s on my TikTok feed. So that’s very exciting, and that’s why the right and others were going so hard. Too many Democrats were going with them to attack it and ban it. I do not see and have not seen and have not received any congressional briefing, bipartisan briefing, confidential briefing on Chinese espionage as it relates to TikTok. I have not seen any.

“I hate that we, meaning Democrats, often cave to Republican talking points without educating the American people and pulling them in so that they understand exactly what the hell is happening.”

Having said that, the Chinese and everyone is monitoring everything we do on all social media, not just TikTok. That was my point. We need a comprehensive federal piece of legislation that looks at safety, security, privacy, mental health on social media, and do something about it. Facebook allowed Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. There are kids who have mental health struggles based on their usage of Instagram. Do not marginalize TikTok because you’re scapegoating them and not dealing with the real problem. Let’s deal with the real problem if that’s what we want to do.

Thankfully, for the moment there’s a pause in all that nonsense. Hopefully we can get to a point of comprehensive social media legislation, but we won’t because the American companies have the second biggest lobbying outfit in all of Washington, second, I think, to either fossil fuel or the pharmaceutical companies.

The debt ceiling negotiations are going on right now. We all hope there’ll be a deal. I can’t tell if there will be or not. In your point of view, are Republicans and the House negotiating in good faith? Do you think some of them want to cause a default because they think it hurts President Biden and can help Donald Trump next year?

No, they aren’t negotiating in good faith. Yes, they want to do everything in their power to hurt President Biden and the Democrats. If that’s with rhetoric, they’ll use that. If that’s with a default, they’ll use that. If we default, it’s going to ultimately be on Republicans if that happens, but we have to communicate that effectively.

There’s going to be a deal. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. Again, I’m concerned that we’re even negotiating because at the end of the day, we always raised the debt limit. We did it three times under Trump. There’s questions about the 14th Amendment and if it’s even constitutional.

But the bigger question is, in my opinion, educate the American people on what we’re talking about. They’re throwing out this number, $34 trillion. Well, whoa, whoa. That’s the debt. That’s not the deficit. The deficit is different. The deficit relates to our GDP, how much we spend and how much we take in. And then when we talk about the debt, we’re talking about debt to GDP, which is something that we have to talk about and look at that percentage and talk about where we make adjustments.

Lastly, Republicans don’t want to tax the wealthy and don’t want to tax large corporations. If we do that, that will be tremendously helpful with our debt. So let’s have the full conversation. I hate that we, meaning Democrats, often cave to Republican talking points without educating the American people and pulling them in so they understand exactly what the hell is happening, and so we can get their support.

Watch more

from “Salon Talks” on the 2024 election

Fox News falls for another hoax, as the Dominion defamation settlement pays off

On Friday night, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham did something nearly unheard of on the propaganda-masquerading-as-news network: She admitted that a story Fox had been hyping was wrong.

For a week, Fox News and other right-wing outlets had been heavily hyping claims that “homeless veterans” were being forced out of a hotel in upstate New York to make room for Central American refugees. Due to diligent reporting from local reporters at the Mid Hudson News, however, the story quickly unraveled. The hotel denied the claims and had receipts to refute the right-wing narrative. By the end of the week, the Mid Hudson News had a group of homeless men ready to talk about how Sharon Toney-Finch, the source of this tale and the head of a veteran advocacy group, had recruited them to pretend they were the displaced veterans. The whole thing was a hoax.

“Turns out the group behind the claim made it up,” Ingraham said, in a rare moment of honesty. However, she swiftly returned to the comfier space of mendacity, saying, “We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing.”

This, of course, is total nonsense. Ingraham knows exactly why someone would fake such a story: Because it works. Whether Toney-Finch’s goals were money, fame, or politics, she appears to have correctly surmised that a surefire way to get wall-to-wall coverage in right-wing media is to roll out some B.S. story that validates the bigoted beliefs of their audience. Indeed, history shows that hoaxes and fake stories like this don’t just routinely take off in right-wing media, but often gain enough momentum to launch into the mainstream media, giving the lies more traction and validation across the political spectrum. That’s what happened with “Clinton’s emails,” a nothingburger story that nonetheless shaped voter opinions, because mainstream journalists kept asking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to explain herself, without ever telling audiences there was nothing to explain.

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The pattern plays out the same way again and again: Right-wing operatives claim to have a “whistleblower” or “undercover footage” or some other evidence of a “scandal.” The right-wing media cover it breathlessly, and the mainstream media, afraid of being left behind, soon amplify the false story. Eventually, the lies get debunked, but only after the story has lodged into the public imagination. Typically, the debunkings are much quieter, as well, which means most Americans who heard the original hoax never hear the truth.

Eventually, the lies get debunked, but only after the story has lodged into the public imagination.

It’s a strategy that was used to sell the Iraq War, by hyping false claims that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction. “Benghazi”. “Planned Parenthood sells fetal parts.” Claims that the now-destroyed anti-poverty organization ACORN was covering up for sex traffickers. Same story over and over: Right wing hoaxes, fueled by mainstream coverage, spread rapidly. Even the Satanic panic of the 80s fits the mold. Stories of Satanic ritual abuse were first floated by deceptive conservative sources, only to flow into the mainstream press that didn’t look too closely at people’s false claims. The truth eventually comes out with these kinds of stories, but it’s usually too late to stop the damage.

Fox News texts reveal the truth: The Big Lie was a con — that the viewers were in on

However, there are some intriguing signs that the mainstream media is finally starting to learn skepticism, instead of simply rushing forward to give airtime to shadily sourced right-wing fairy tales. A few years ago, for instance, there was a good chance that CNN and NPR and the New York Times would have been right up there with Fox, publishing stories about these “homeless vets” allegations, only to issue much-quieter debunking stories days later. This time, however, mainstream outlets were careful not to take the bait, only covering the story once it was clear it wasn’t true, and centering their coverage around the hoax itself, not the allegations.

What’s changed? Plenty.

For one thing, here has been increasing pressure on mainstream outlets to not do another “Clinton’s emails.” Due to Donald Trump’s profligate lying, there’s also a lot more public discussion about the nature of disinformation, making it all the more embarrassing for media outlets that succumb to the siren call to amplify it. But what has really made an impact is the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, which resulted in a $787 million settlement earlier this spring.

Who knows how permanent the lesson will be, but for now, there’s little doubt that the settlement and the public court filings before it have destroyed Fox’s longstanding but undeserved reputation as a “news” organization. Prior to the lawsuit, there was a general-but-false view that, while Fox is conservative, they aren’t deliberate peddlers of disinformation. So when a story was published on Fox, it created not just permission for other outlets to treat it as credible, but pressure on them to cover it, lest they be accused of “bias” against conservatives.

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Dominion’s lawyers released a bunch of insider text messages and communications from Fox leadership, however, that proved beyond all doubt that the network knowingly spreads lies. Not only did the documents demonstrate Fox hosts and executives openly discussing how to amplify and validate Trump’s election lies, there was even talk of punishing employees who dared tell the truth about who won the 2020 election. It made it impossible for the rest of the press to keep up the pretense that information on Fox is trustworthy.

Ironically, it was that very pretense that made it so easy for Fox to pump false stories into the mainstream media. That’s likely why Ingraham felt the need to admit the “homeless veterans” story was a hoax. If Fox is ever going to regain its power to push misleading or even fake stories into the news again, they’ll need to start convincing mainstream journalists they’re a “real” news outlet. Offering a correction on-air, no matter how insincere, helps prop up the illusion that Fox is anything but the dishonest propaganda outlet it actually is.

Fox News has lost control of its viewers

Will it work? On one hand, there’s still a strong desire in the mainstream media to prove they’re not “biased” by giving Fox News and Republicans the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there’s other signs that the Beltway press has generally become better at debunking Republican lies before giving them airtime.

For instance, both Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have been trying for over a year to use their House committee chairs to spread disinformation. They use all the usual propaganda techniques, such as false claims to have “whistleblowers” or reliance on untrustworthy sources. But rather than credulously quoting Republican claims without contextualizing them, the press has been doing a much better job of focusing coverage on the lack of credibility — or the lack of existence — of these supposed “witnesses”. Jordan in particular seems frustrated that it’s a lot harder that it used to be to get the press to parrot his lies uncritically.

Unfortunately, disinformation has a lot more channels to go through than it used to. Obviously, social media is the biggest purveyor of GOP lies, helping outright nonsense spread faster than even Fox News could dream of. Plus, there’s a number of alternative media bad actors, like Joe Rogan, who are only happy to do the “tell the big lie, and then quietly admit it wasn’t true” game on topics like whether schools offer litter boxes to kids who “identify as cats.”

Still, it cannot be understated how important it is to have mainstream media validating right wing nonsense. It’s why Trump was so eager to go on CNN to tell lies, even though Fox News has a much larger audience. The veneer of Beltway acceptance goes a long way towards reassuring people who want to buy into conspiracy theories that they aren’t “crazy” or “fringe.” There was a time when a preposterous story like the “homeless vets displaced by migrants” hoax could have exploded across mainstream media before anyone bothered to check if it was true. That the press turned its nose up to this right wing bait is a hopeful sign of progress.

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: Two peas in a (white nationalist) pod

He appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who shocked the nation with rulings that dramatically took away rights. He sided with the racists who used “states’ rights” to push through undemocratic policies locally. And he’s the only American president who lost a reelection bid but returned to office in the following election.

Yes, I’m thinking of former New York governor and Democrat Grover Cleveland who first won the presidency in 1884, lost his reelection bid in 1888, only to successfully regain the presidency in 1892 against then-incumbent Benjamin Harrison.

In 2024, Donald Trump hopes to repeat that history in all its ugliness by becoming the second former president to recapture the White House. And mind you, the consequences of that second Cleveland administration were devastating. Three of his Supreme Court appointees — Melville W. Fuller, Rufus W. Peckham, and Edward D. White — were part of the majority in the crucial and devastating 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that would sanction racial segregation across the nation and so solidify an American apartheid system that didn’t end legally until the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In a similar vein, it’s hard to imagine how destructive a second Trump administration would be, given his first time in office. In virtually every area of public policy, the Trump administration proved a setback for women, people of color, working-class communities, LGBTQ individuals, environmental advocates, and those fighting to expand human and democratic rights. His three hyper-conservative Supreme Court appointees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away abortion rights for millions without hesitation, while there have also been significant setbacks in the areas of gun safety, religious freedom, workers’ rights, and more.

But in truth, it’s not the policymaking that Donald Trump truly longs for. Above all, he clearly misses the corruption, cruelty, and sense of power that came with his presidency. His dream of an authoritarian state in which he can punish his enemies endlessly without accountability (while enriching himself and his family) was thwarted in 2020 when voters rejected his candidacy. The bitterness of that loss still eats at his very being and drives his current presidential bid. As he himself stated, in a second term he seeks “retribution” against one and all.

For those still in the Republican Party, Trump is once again the overwhelming early favorite. While 61% of Americans don’t want him as president again — 89% of Democrats and 64% of independents — a whopping 76% of Republicans are Trumpian to the core, according to a March 2023 Marist poll. If impeachments, a slew of coming indictments, and a conviction for libel don’t deter his GOP supporters — indeed, they seem to have had the opposite effect — then it’s easy to see Trump winning the nomination in a landslide.

Yet, in a number of ways, as the Republican Party continues to move ever more to the right, MAGA has already evolved beyond him. Despite the media oxygen he continues to consume, the current moment is less about him than most of us believe. Just as Cleveland reflected the growing racial retrenchment of the white South in the late 1800s, Trump embodies the growing entrenchment of an ever more extremist wing of American politics.

As hyper-MAGA losing Pennsylvania senatorial candidate Kathy Barnette correctly stated, “MAGA does not belong to President Trump.” In referring to the ascendant far-right wing of the Republican Party last year, she claimed that “our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values.” Rather it was “President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.” What she neglected to add was that his conversion was completely transactional: he needed their support, and they needed his.

Once committed, Trump leaned fully into the politics of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism that still animate the base of the party and its most prominent leaders at the local, state, and federal levels. Before, during, and since his presidency, he’s hurled racist invective at every category of black Americans — black women, black women journalists, black athletes, black elected officials, black appointed officials, black law-enforcement officers, black election workers, black prosecutors, black youth, black countries, black historic figures, black activists, black-dominated cities, and black political leaders. In rallies and speeches, he regularly refers to any black person who holds him to account as a “racist,” tapping into the prejudices of his base, a crew who nominally contend that racism no longer exists.

Trump — and the most horrendous member of Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — have championed the January 6th violent insurrectionists. Only recently in a CNN town hall, he promised to pardon “a large portion” of them, if reelected, to the cheers of his supporters who conveniently ignore the fact that he didn’t pardon them in his last two weeks as president.

It should be noted that, in his time in office, he failed to keep any of the major promises he made on the campaign trail, including building that border wall, ending Obamacare, passing an infrastructure bill, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. His one signature piece of legislation proved to be a tax cut that transferred billions of dollars to the already super-rich. His other big achievement, of course, was to stack the Supreme Court with those three ultra-conservative justices who have taken away rights, including the 50-year-old national right to an abortion.

Despite an impulse to hide the most draconian aspects of the GOP policy agenda, it can be glimpsed via Republican initiatives in Congress and those of governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures. At the moment, their far-right trek towards authoritarianism remains largely in sync with Trump’s political and personal aspirations for power.

The DeSantis Dilemma

There is remarkably little difference between Trump and his main challengers for the presidential nomination when it comes to the politics and policies of the contemporary Republican Party. Take Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

For much of the last year, the mainstream media focused its attention on a potential cage match between a resurgent Trump and the now politically deflating DeSantis. It was the undisciplined populist versus the inflexible ideologue, the former president’s ability to articulate the most dangerous far-right ideas against DeSantis’s proven ability to actually implement them.

For many on the left and in the progressive world, the debate has been over which of them would be worse, which would be quicker to destroy the country. Would DeSantis’s less chaotic approach ultimately be worse than that of the scandal-magnet Trump? Would a growing list of potential indictments benefit or harm Trump? Who would prevail in the battle of the brands — Make America Great Again (MAGA) or Make Florida America (MFA)?

In the end, the differences between the two of them are likely to prove superficial indeed. In the areas where Americans would be most severely affected, there’s hardly a fly’s hair of separation between them. Beyond the fact that both are mercurial, petty, narcissistic bigots, as well as textbook definitions of toxic masculinity, it’s in the realm of politics and public policy where they might take somewhat different roads that, unfortunately, would head this country toward the very same destination: an undemocratic, authoritarian state whose foundational creed would be racism and unrelenting bigotry.

A dive into the policy wasteland of both reveals a distinctly unsurprising convergence. DeSantis has become infamous for the anti-woke initiatives that have roiled Florida’s education system from elementary school to college. Books have been (figuratively and perhaps literally) burned, teachers fired, school boards overthrown, and — from English and history to math and social science — curriculums revamped to fit a right-wing agenda. Almost singlehandedly, the governor has pushed through “anti-woke” policies and signed legislation aimed at reconstructing the state’s education system from top to bottom.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump was no slouch when it came to attacking wokeness. On September 4, 2020, he ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum that directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

In September 2020, with only two months left in office, in a move likely meant to counter the actions of DeSantis, Trump launched a “1776 Commission” whose purpose was to develop a curriculum that would promote a “patriotic education” about race and the nation’s history. This was a pathetic effort to refute the New York Times’s “1619 Project” that argued slavery and racism were central to the birth of the nation, a theory that has driven conservatives into a frenzied state of panic.

Cynically, that commission issued its “1776 Report” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — January 18, 2021 — only two days before Trump left office in humiliation. It would be soundly criticized for its host of inaccuracies, its right-wing ideological bent, and even plagiarism that whitewashed American history, its founders, and their racism. A second Trump administration would undoubtedly go all in to put DeSantis in the shade by presenting a distinctly falsified, though politically useful version of that history.

Suppressing the Vote and Cheering Street Violence

DeSantis’s ideological opposition to abortion is in sync with Trump’s transactional one. While some GOP big names are calling for a national ban, both DeSantis and Trump are trying to find a sweet spot where they can build support, especially among evangelical extremists, while still retaining some possibility of winning educated white suburban women. Unlikely as that is, in a distinctly cowardly move, DeSantis signed his extreme Florida anti-abortion law late on a Thursday night behind closed doors, while Trump continues to fume and worry (legitimately) about paying the cost for losing women voters in a general election.

DeSantis loves to highlight the work of his Gestapo-like election police unit as his contribution to enforcing “voter integrity.” Established in 2022, the unit operates out of Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS) and includes a statewide prosecutor. It will undoubtedly shock no one that most of those arrested in its initial months were overwhelmingly people of color. Virtually all of them were dealing with a confusing election system that had restored voting rights to some but not all ex-felons. (That system had, in fact, actually issued voter ID cards to former felons who weren’t eligible.) DeSantis proudly praised the arrests, no matter that most of them were later tossed out of court. In fact, local prosecutors refused hundreds of OECS referrals.

In terms of voting rights, though, has DeSantis topped Trump’s effort to throw out millions of black votes, attack black election workers, and have his Justice Department support every voter-suppression policy passed by GOP state legislatures? Not yet, he hasn’t. And don’t forget that Trump also created an ill-fated, disingenuous Presidential Commission on Election Integrity within months of taking office in 2017. Its real purpose was to collect state election data and weaponize it against Democratic voters. That effort, however, proved so clumsily fraudulent that even Republican-controlled states refused to submit information and the Commission was dissolved within seven months. Six years later, with the clear aim of suppressing Democratic and black voters, Trump has been calling for same-day-only in-person voting with paper ballots.

And finally, don’t forget how both Trump and DeSantis (as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott) have brazenly celebrated the street violence perpetrated by armed white men. Trump hosted Kyle Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago in November 2021. Rittenhouse had shot and killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, while wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, during racial-justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. He became a cause célèbre of the far-right media and the MAGA movement and was eventually found not guilty, leading to Trump’s invitation. The former president has also loudly pledged to pardon charged or convicted violent January 6th insurrectionists.

Not to be outdone, DeSantis recently praised Daniel Penny who killed Jordan Neely, a slim, young black man having a mental health crisis on a New York City subway car. Penny, a trained ex-Marine, applied a chokehold for many minutes. Neely’s death was ruled a homicide and Penny has now been arrested for it. Far-right Republicans were quick to issue statements of solidarity and to support fundraising for his legal case. DeSantis referred to Penny as a “good Samaritan” and shared a link to his fundraising page, while somehow associating the incident with that number one billionaire scoundrel for conservatives, George Soros.

By their behavior and words, Trump and DeSantis provide a permission zone for white nationalist violence.

In the end, the two of them aren’t so much highlighting their differences as competing to see who can be the most extreme, issue by issue. As Trump made clear in his recent CNN town hall — functionally, a Trump rally — he has no intention of tacking towards the middle. Quite the opposite, as he heads for Election Day 2024, his hurricane of lies will only grow more extreme, shameless, and dangerous, while the GOP base cheers him on.

DeSantis has, so far, been reduced to running against Trump on the issue of “electability.” He claims Trump can’t win in a general election – possibly true (if the economy doesn’t go into recession) – and is calling on GOP voters to put aside their Trumpian passions and be more practical. Essentially, this is the same argument being made by other soon-to-be also-rans like former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, and Senator Tim Scott. They all cower when it comes to really going after Trump, becoming instead the political equivalents of passive-aggressive 13-year-olds. Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who may join the race and has gone from frenemy to all-out never-Trumper, has shown little divergence from the former president’s most basic policies.

Trump Misses the Corruption, Cruelty, and Power

What distinguishes DeSantis from the rest of the pack and aligns him more fully with The Donald is that they both have an urge to be cruel for no other reason than that they can be. Few political leaders have ever been quite as thin-skinned as Trump. His pettiness is legendary, while it clearly gives him pleasure to inflict pain on others. DeSantis has a similar personality. His treatment of immigrants, the way he describes LGBTQ individuals, and his press releases and speeches against any perceived opponent are filled to the brim with invective and venom.

DeSantis’s Make Florida America, or MFA, is a genuine threat and his own version of a MAGA move. A Trump or DeSantis administration would ensure at least four long years of brutal retaliation and murderous policies through the prism of white nationalist Great Replacement rhetoric.

Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump — or rather it’s not only Trump — or DeSantis either. The horror of our moment is the way the base of the contemporary Republican Party has come to embrace the most extreme views and policies around.

So, here’s a final question for this difficult moment: In a forest of fascism, does it matter which tree is the tallest?

He believed school board was pushing “transgender bulls**t.” He ended up arrested — and emboldened

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

An image of a shooting target — with two bullet holes to the head and five scattered around the chest — serves as a warning to visitors who climb the brick steps and pass the American flag to reach Eric Jensen’s front door.

“If you can read this you’re in range,” the sign says. Another warning, posted near the doorbell, states: “No Solicitation. … This property charges $50 per minute to listen to any vaccine/medical advice.” He ordered that one in 2021, after mobile units offering COVID-19 vaccines began riding through his community outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

For years, Jensen had been looking for a way to voice his many grievances, related not just to masks and vaccines but to “transgender bullshit” and library books “trying to convert kids to gay” and other perceived dangers he says his five younger children face in the public school system. (The 65-year-old retiree has four other children who are adults.) Then he found a place where he could finally be heard.

“You gotta start from the bottom and work yourself up,” Jensen said, not long after he reluctantly opened his front door last November. “I mean, you can’t just go to your governors and try to make a difference. So you start at the bottom, and the bottom is school boards.”

He had intended to wage a campaign against the school board to bring about change. Instead, his efforts got him arrested.

At first he was hesitant to talk about what happened in the lead-up to the February 2022 incident. In the weeks after the arrest, he didn’t comment in any of the news stories that covered it.

Then, as the months wore on and his charges were dropped, he realized that standing up to authorities wasn’t going to lead to any sort of punishment: “I thought, ‘Holy shit, I didn’t have to go through a whole lot of aggravation there.'” He said that, walking away from the ordeal, he felt emboldened.

ProPublica identified 59 people arrested or charged over an 18-month period as a result of turmoil at school board meetings across the country. In the coming weeks, ProPublica will continue to publish stories about how that unrest has played out in various communities and upended once-staid school board meetings.

In the dozens of incidents ProPublica examined, some of which involved threats and violence, only one person who disrupted a meeting was given a jail sentence: a college student protesting in support of transgender rights. By contrast, almost all of the other individuals, including Jensen, railed against the adoption of mask mandates, the teaching of “divisive concepts” concerning racial inequality and the availability of books with LGBTQ+ themes in school libraries. Also like Jensen, the vast majority of people arrested or charged faced few consequences.

Jensen didn’t come up with the idea to target the school board on his own. He’d volunteered to help two women connected to the state chapter of a national group that was rapidly gaining followers through social media sites and YouTube channels promoting the convoluted QAnon conspiracy theory.

Jensen, a solid, gray-haired man with piercing blue eyes, retired about five years ago, though his wife still works as a custodian at the elementary school. He’d been a project manager for a metal building manufacturer that transferred him to North Carolina from Ohio. Prior to that, he and his family owned a campground for three decades.

He described how, several years ago, he made the decision to abandon mainstream media. He said it used to be that “I was always watching the news. But once I found out how much they lie, you have to get back into alternative media to find out the actual truth.” He said he has since become convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive, Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates are dead, and the COVID-19 vaccine is actually a “death shot.” Echoing a debunked claim, he explained his belief that the vaccine changes your DNA in a way that allows those who patented the modified genetic sequence to “own” you, which is part of an effort to kill people off and depopulate the planet. “I’ve seen it many times, where they’ve got plastic caskets lined up,” he said. “There must be a million of them sitting there in lots waiting for these people to die.”

In January of 2022, shortly after he became interested in what he saw as threats posed by school boards, he logged onto the messaging service Telegram. “I started putting feelers out, trying to find, you know, groups that were involved with it and see what they were doing,” he said.

A Telegram group called North Carolina Bonds for the Win seemed like the right fit. The national Bonds for the Win movement had been gaining steam, promoting its mission to force school districts to drop so-called unconstitutional practices including COVID-19 safety protocols and the distribution of alleged “obscene materials” to minors. To accomplish its goal, its followers would serve local school boards with reams of paperwork outlining an intent to sue their districts’ surety bond (or risk-management plan) providers. The movement, dubbed “paper terrorism” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, aims to force school districts into “compliance” to avoid losing federal funding.

The tactic was already being tested in North Carolina’s largest school district, where earlier that January a mother had crossed a security barrier to serve the Wake County school board with papers, warning, “You’ve violated your oath of office.” Another local report described how police turned off lights in an attempt to clear people out of an Iredell-Statesville school board meeting. The people yelled, “You’ve been served!” to the school board members and told police they wouldn’t leave unless they were arrested.

“And that’s when I found these ladies.” Jensen said of the two women leading efforts in his school district for North Carolina Bonds for the Win.

On Feb. 22, 2022, Jensen arrived at the lobby of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board meeting and met the women, Deborah Tuttle and Regina Garner, face-to-face for the first time. They handed him a cardboard box of paperwork, which he understood to be “explanations about how they [district officials] were going to get sued against their bonds” for teaching critical race theory — an academic framework sometimes taught at the college level and above that examines U.S. history through the lens of racism — and allowing books containing “profanity” in schools. He also said the documents included proof that masks don’t work.

Tuttle and Garner did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

Just minutes into the meeting, the school board chairperson watched with curiosity and a dose of trepidation as a man with a huge box took a seat a few rows back. She texted the board members sitting next to her, alerting them to the man. They, too, wanted to know what was in the box.

“He was just staring at us, and we were a little worried for our safety,” chairperson Deanna Kaplan recalled.

Both Garner and Tuttle signed up to address the board during the public-comment period. Garner complained about the district’s failure to uphold the Constitution and accused school officials of practicing medicine without a license and violating child abuse laws. Then Tuttle stepped up. “There’s a lot more violations that she didn’t get to, but you can read those for yourself when we serve you your letters of intent,” she told the board.

As the women spoke, Kaplan grew more uneasy about the man with the box. “Then,” she said, “he started charging at us.”

As Jensen, clutching the box, neared the superintendent, school security officers grabbed him and pulled him out of the meeting room. In the adjacent hallway, he strained against the three men it took to hold him down.

“You work for me!” Jensen repeatedly yelled as security guards tried to shackle his wrists and ankles. His deep voice echoed from the hallway into the meeting room, where some attendees began screaming and board members sat in disbelief as they watched the mounting chaos.

As the board hastily called for an impromptu recess, one man yelled: “Commie cowards!”

“Commie bitch!” yelled another.

“If you walk out, you’re walking away from your job!” Tuttle yelled from the podium.

“There was somebody in the audience that was yelling, ‘The patriots are coming.’ I mean, it was just like a zoo. It was crazy,” Kaplan recalled. “The board members were concerned for our safety.”

Two months after his arrest, Jensen came to court prepared to represent himself on misdemeanor counts of trespass and resisting a public officer. He said he carried a folder with some notes he’d made and a printout of the Constitution. As the judge entered the courtroom, Jensen said, he proudly refused to comply with the order, “All rise.”

“That puts that judge above you,” Jensen later explained. “And that judge is not above you. He’s below you. Or she’s below you.”

Jensen said his refusal to stand angered the bailiff. He also said that before he could even open his folder of evidence, the judge dismissed his case.

Court records show Jensen received a voluntary dismissal. Prosecutors have not responded to requests for comment. A court clerk said that the slew of misdemeanor dismissals that day may have resulted from the court’s attempt to clear a pandemic backlog.

Regarding the judge and the courthouse staff, Jensen said: “I didn’t allow them to boss me around.” As for the security guards who arrested him, he said he’s now considering filing assault charges against one of them “because he grabbed me and threw me down for no reason.”

He described how, overall, the experience left him feeling empowered, although he was disappointed that the movement that inspired his efforts had fizzled.

“The ladies that I was with, they pretty much dropped it,” he said, adding that their decision “kind of threw me, because they weren’t going to fight for it.” Garner ended up running for a seat on the school board, but she was unsuccessful.

Jensen did face one consequence: He said he was banned from school property for any purpose other than to pick up and drop off his children. “But that’s it,” he said. A spokesperson for the Winston-Salem Forsyth County school district confirmed the ban but declined to detail the terms of it, citing legal concerns. He said the bans typically last a year. “In general, the letters outline situations when principals can grant permission for the person to come on campus. They, however, must ask and be granted that permission by school administrators.”

Jensen admitted during the conversation in November that he hasn’t exactly complied with the ban: When he showed up for his youngest daughter’s elementary school graduation last spring, a neighbor called school security on him. But, he said, school officials let him stay. (The district spokesperson said Jensen was allowed to attend the graduation “in an effort to reduce stress and embarrassment for his student and on the condition that he maintained appropriate behavior.”) Jensen also said he’s not that worried about what would happen if he violated the ban again.

He’s since declined to speak further about his experiences or be photographed for this story.

“One of these days, I’m tempted to just walk in and allow them to throw me out or arrest me or whatever, because they have no right to do it,” Jensen said, not long before closing his door. “So we’ll see what shakes out if I do.”

“Look at the polling”: James Comer brags that GOP’s Biden crusade is boosting Trump’s numbers

House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., bragged that the House Republicans’ investigation into President Joe Biden and his family is boosting former President Donald Trump in the polls.

Comer provided a telling response when Fox host Ashley Strohmier asked about the probe of Biden family finances.

“We have to talk about this and we’ve talked about this on the show, about how the media cannot ignore this any longer,” said Strohmier. “In an op-ed in The Washington Post says millions flow to Biden family members, don’t pretend is doesn’t matter. Do you think because of your investigation that moved this needle with the media?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s no question,” Comer replied. “You look at the polling, and right now Donald Trump is seven points ahead of Joe Biden and trending upward, Joe Biden’s trending downward. And I believe that the media is looking around, scratching their head, and they’re realizing the American people are keeping up with our investigation. And they realize there’s something wrong here. It’s not normal for the President of the United States’ children and grandchildren and in-laws and nieces and nephews to receive wires from foreign nationals. That’s what we’ve proven.”

James Comer mocked after claiming informant his “entire charade was built on” is “missing”

Comer’s remark harkens back to Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s, R-Calif., 2015 gaffe in which the future House Speaker was too explicit in detailing how the Benghazi investigations would hurt then-candidate Hillary Clinton at the polls.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said, speaking to Fox News in 2015. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

In a separate recent interview, CNN’s Pamela Brown asked Comer if he and the committee had “found anything illegal while he [President Biden] was actually in office.”

“Well, we found a lot that’s certainly unethical. We found a lot that should be illegal — the line is blurry,” Comer replied.

PAMELA BROWN: Have you found anything illegal while Biden was actually in office?

JAMES COMER: We found a lot that should be illegal. @atrupar pic.twitter.com/JHh8KRYma1

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) May 22, 2023

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Even some Fox News hosts have questioned the lack of evidence that has come out of the probe despite Republicans’ touting allegations of corruption against the president’s family.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point,” host Steve Doocy said to Comer during a “Fox and Friends” interview earlier this month.

“You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy continued. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is — there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally,” he added.

“You know it’s bad when you’ve lost Fox,” tweeted Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., after the interview.

You know it’s bad when you’ve lost Fox … https://t.co/HR7bNE875h

— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) May 11, 2023

“You don’t have any facts”: Fox News host calls out James Comer’s flailing Biden probe

Comer drew mockery last week after claiming that the so-called “informant” that provided evidence to the committee was missing.

“Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer said. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”

Comer insisted that “no president has ever been accused of the things that the Biden family’s been accused of.”

“Hold on a second, congressman. Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?” host Maria Bartiromo asked.

“Well, we’re hopeful that we can find the informant,” Comer responded. “Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot or being high profile or anything like that.”

Comer added that nine of the 10 informants “that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they’re one of three things. They’re either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing.”

Maria Bartiromo learns from James Comer that the informant that made the alleged allegations against Joe Biden, can’t be located by Republicans. They have an “informant” but they supposedly can’t find him.

REP. JAMES COMER: Well, we we're hopeful that we can find the appropriate… pic.twitter.com/i4qltoP3xD

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) May 14, 2023

about the GOP probe

Bud Light tried to please everyone—and ended up angering everyone—with its Dylan Mulvaney response

Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, received two important letters last week.

One letter was from the office of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announcing that he was launching a Senate investigation into the brand. The other letter was from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which rates companies based on their commitment to LGBTQ safety and equality. The organization let Anheuser-Busch know that their Corporate Equality Index score had been suspended, effective immediately.

Despite the wildly different updates each letter contained, they were both actually supported by the same basic argument. Earlier this year, Anheuser-Busch partnered with trans activist and influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a short sequence of social media posts, which enraged several outspoken conservative pundits and public figures, including the likes of Kid Rock and Dan Crenshaw.

“The groomer of beers”: Conservatives vow to boycott Bud Light over partnership with trans activist

This resulted in both ridiculous stunts — like Kid Rock tearfully shooting cases of Bud Light in an empty field — and dangerously transphobic rhetoric, such as when Townhall.com columnist Derek Hunter deemed it the “groomer of beers.”

As the controversy over the one-off social media partnership between Mulvaney and Bud Light continued to escalate, customers on both sides of the political aisle waited for a response from the brand. Would it again become the concert rider beer of choice for conservative country stars like Travis Tritt? Or would it continue to be the brand that produces rainbow-patterned aluminum bottles for Pride Month?

Eventually, in an effort to do both, the brand did neither.

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth said in an April 14 statement titled “Our Responsibility to America.”

This vague statement masquerading as a tepid call for unity simply angered everyone.

He said the company has “a proud history supporting our communities, military, first responders, sports fans and hard-working Americans everywhere,” and that he would “continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation.”

This vague statement masquerading as a tepid call for unity simply angered everyone who was invested — resulting in last week’s rush in the Anheuser-Busch mailroom.

Cruz, along with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., wrote that they wanted the Beer Institute’s Code Compliance Review Board, which oversees the brewing industry, to open an investigation into Anheuser-Busch’s “recent and ongoing marketing partnership with Dylan Mulvaney” to determine whether the campaign violated the Institute’s code “prohibiting marketing to individuals younger than the legal drinking age.”

The letter read, in part:

The evidence detailed below overwhelmingly shows that Dylan Mulvaney’s audience skews significantly younger than the legal drinking age and violates the Beer Institute’s Advertising/Marketing Code and Buying Guidelines. We would urge you, in your capacity at Anheuser-Busch, to avoid a lengthy investigation by the Beer Institute by instead having Anheuser-Busch publicly sever its relationship with Dylan Mulvaney, publicly apologize to the American people for marketing alcoholic beverages to minors, and direct Dylan Mulvaney to remove any Anheuser-Busch content from his social media platforms.

As several political writers, including Huffington Post’s Ron Dicker, have pointed out, the nature of Cruz and Blackburn’s request — as well the fact that Whitworth actually chairs the organization they’re petitioning — make it seem like a political stunt (and one in which they purposely misgendered Mulvaney, for the record).

However, the letter from Jay Brown, senior vice president of programs at the HRC, struck a more serious tone.

As CNN Business reported, Brown told the publication that “when we saw the company working with Dylan, that was a good sign. It was a sign of inclusion. What we were really disturbed by was the company’s reaction once the backlash started happening.”

In April, Brown sent Anheuser-Busch an initial request, asking the company to make a public statement in support of Mulvaney and the trans community and to offer transgender inclusion training to its executives. He also asked to meet with the brand’s leadership team.

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“We are happy to engage in a dialogue,” Brown told CNN. “And if it’s not those three things, to figure out what might make the most sense.”

Then last week, as reported by CNN, Brown sent another letter informing the company of the suspension of its rating.

It’s not necessarily a permanent designation. Brown noted that the company could be reinstated if the HRC’s concerns were addressed within the next three months. So far this week, Anheuser-Busch has remained fairly quiet, both in response to this demand and the one from Cruz.

While it’s unclear how the company will move forward, one thing is certain. While the so-called “culture war” is itself largely overblown, the Bud Light controversy shows that if brands are going to enter the fray, they’ve eventually got to pick a side — or risk alienating both.

about this topic

Food prices are rising but farmers’ profits are still small — here’s why

More than 60 food industry representatives came together at a recent Downing Street summit to discuss the UK food crisis. It was billed as an opportunity to brainstorm solutions to rising food prices, falling production and uncertainty over trade agreements with overseas partners.

Reports from attendees after the event have been mixed, with many seeing it only as a first step forward. There is much more work to do to tackle rising food prices.

A report issued by the government after the event showcased long-term government investment in infrastructure and the environment, which was welcomed by the National Union of Farmers.

But it only had one short section on fair supply chains — and that didn’t address the underlying problems. My research into unseen food supply costs shows transparency and fairness is vital to tackling current food-related challenges in the UK.

The UK needs healthy, nutritious and affordable food provided in a way that is fair to everyone involved. In a cost of living crisis, the media spotlight is going to fall on those in food poverty and on rising food prices.

These are crucial issues to address, but to have any real impact, the discussion must extend even further to cover the systemic unfairness throughout the UK food supply system.

Our food system is dominated by supermarket-style retailing and mass catering, which deal in bulk orders, food storage and big premises, making it very expensive to run with surprisingly few economies of scale.

The overheads — the everyday expenses of these businesses, such as paying for staff and electricity — are huge. The profits returned to producers are minimal as a result.

The Food Research Collaboration, Author provided

I carried out research on food costs and pricing for Sustain, an organization that represents the farming and fishing industries.

I found that out of the entire price you might pay for one grocery item, around 98%-99% goes to production and overheads for intermediary companies such as processors and distributors and then retailers. Farmers and growers are left with the crumbs — sometimes as little as 1p of profit for each item of produce.

Discounts along the food supply chain

However many schemes the government has, the day-to-day survival of UK food businesses depends on a fair return on the work done to get food from farm to fork. But consumers want lower prices and to achieve this, buyers from retailers, catering and public procurement negotiate discounts.

As a director of a fresh produce distributor I interviewed for an earlier project said:

Everyone wants the prices that come from trading [haggling] but the quality that comes from long-term relationships.

When buying and selling food, organizations along the supply chain need some level of surplus for contingencies and reinvestment. Expectations of discounts from other parts of the chain, such as retailers, takes money away from those at the beginning: the farmers, growers and processors.

Along with negotiations for volume discounts, my research shows that these suppliers are often paid a price based on just the costs of producing the item, also called the marginal costs. This means seeds, feed, fertilizers and manual labour in the case of farmers or ingredients, processing costs and packaging for manufacturers.

The trouble is, the factors that go into marginal costs — costs once overheads are covered — aren’t equal across the chain. For a supermarket, marginal cost includes all the expenses of running a store, which is typically over 90% of their costs. So they set prices which enable them to cover that amount.

Other members of the supply chain such as farmers and growers or bakers, class about 70% of their costs as overheads, leaving marginal costs of around 30%. A system where one party gets to cover over 90% of their costs while another can only cover 30% is not fair.

More than 4 million people are employed in the food and drink industry in the UK — around 13% of the UK workforce. Many of these people working for food businesses need help to put food on the table because of the cost of living crisis.

But their low wages stem from things like discounting and marginal cost negotiations by companies across the supply chain.

Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium (BRC), has said retailers “are investing heavily in lower prices for the future”, expanding affordable food ranges, locking the price of many essentials and offering support to vulnerable groups.

The need for transparency

Calls for greater transparency in food supply chains were implicit in the report from the recent government forum, but there are no explicit plans to do this. This would take government action at national and international level.

For example, when conducting my research, I found a lot of detailed data was available on the cost of production for food by farmers and growers due to a long post-second world war history of creating benchmarks for production and fostering better business practices. But not as much data was available from the retail side of the market.

While many listed companies have to segment their financial information, sales categories are often only broken down into “Fuel” and “Everything Else”. A BRC spokesperson said: “This information is commercially sensitive, if it was published it would have an adverse impact on competition, the very thing which has kept prices lower for consumers.”

But even if it is commercially sensitive information, the current situation hardly leads to transparency about costs and profits across the supply chain.

The dairy and other regulations proposed in the Agriculture Act 2020 and highlighted by the government following its recent Farm to Fork forum are codes of practice, not fundamental regulations or legal requirements. Unless stronger rules are created to tackle the underlying unfairness of food supply chains, the overall picture will not change in a way that benefits everyone, including consumers and producers.

Lisa Jack, Professor of Accounting, University of Portsmouth

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

Ex-prosecutor: Former Trump lawyer may be “waving red flag” at DOJ that he wants to “testify”

A former Trump attorney’s media appearance may be a sign that he is poised to cooperate with the Justice Department, according to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.

Vance in a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” discussed newly-resigned lawyer Timothy Parlatore’s decision to depart from Trump’s legal team over infighting. Parlatore was part of Trump’s team of lawyers regarding the DOJ’s Mar-a-Lago and 2020 presidential election probes.

Speaking to CNN on Saturday, Parlatore shared that “the real reason” he left is “is because there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” singling out Boris Epshteyn, who Parlatore said “served as a kind of a filter” for sharing information with the former president.

Trump lawyer quits — and throws fellow Trump attorney under the bus in DOJ probe

The New York Times reported that Epshteyn often left “the former president’s legal team at a disadvantage in dealing with the Justice Department, which is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office and his efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.”

“It’s almost as though there’s a turf war going on here among the lawyers,” Vance said. “You know, often, when you see a lawyer leave a legal team that might signify that there’s a plea deal in the works or that there’s some legal reason behind the change. Here, it looks like a pure turf battle. But when Paraltore goes out and reveals this sort of information, it’s almost as though he’s pointing a finger at Boris Epshteyn and including him in the group of people involved in obstructing justice in this situation.”

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“We don’t usually see lawyers come out and make statements like this after they leave a legal team. You know, it’s CYA, it’s maybe waving a red flag at the Justice Department and saying he would like to come back and testify in a grand jury. I think that would make it the third time for him,” she continued.

“You know, Trump’s lawyers don’t seem to believe that when people say ‘everything Trump touches dies,’ that it includes the lawyers. But clearly, it does. Because they’ve put themselves at risk in a number of different ways,” she added. “And so, we see lawyers leave and have to worry about whether they’re next. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where so many lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, are all invoked as part of possible criminal activity.”

about Trump’s legal woes

“Nothing is off the table”: Jim Jordan says he’ll give a “hard look” at launching new Hillary probe

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he is open to investigating former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in response to the release of special counsel John Durham’s report.

Durham, who failed to secure a single conviction in his yearslong probe of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, last week released a report that contained little new information and was widely panned by legal experts as a partisan “flop.”

Though the report found similar concerns as the 2019 inspector general report that already addressed the flaws in the FBI probe, Trump and his allies have touted the report as evidence that the bureau was biased against Trump.

“A big fat nothing”: Legal experts say “bogus” John Durham report proves “he’s failed miserably”

“Do you want to see another investigation of Hillary and Bill Clinton?” Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Jordan during a Sunday interview. “Because in the Durham report, John Durham wrote that while they were pursuing Trump, they made no effort to investigate the claim that Hillary Clinton was taking money from foreigners for her Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation,” Bartiromo said.

“They not only didn’t investigate her like they did President Trump, they gave her campaign a defensive briefing!” Jordan replied. “They should have done the same for President Trump because they literally had no evidence.”

“We’re going to give that a good hard look,” he continued, saying that he would consult with his lawyers and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “But nothing is off the table because it is critical the American people understand how their government, their agencies have been turned on them, the taxpayer, and we get all the facts out there.”

Jim Jordan teases a new congressional investigation into Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/gBuUw0NwIF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2023

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Shortly after the release of Durham’s report, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., tweeted that “the Russian hoax was a figment of Hillary Clinton’s imagination.”

The Russian hoax was a figment of Hillary Clinton’s imagination.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) May 16, 2023

MSNBC contributor Steve Benen argued in a Monday article that “Blackburn’s comment was a timely reminder that the former secretary of State remains very much on Republicans’ minds.” Benen followed by unpacking Jordan’s ostensibly “animated” interest in pursuing a probe of the Clinton’s, though he conceded that it was Bartiromo, not Jordan, who brought up the prospect. Benen concluded by stating that the GOP’s longtime fixation on Hillary Clinton — ranging from calls for her incarceration to untenable lawsuits — is “just creepy,” especially given that she hasn’t held public office in over ten years.

about Jim Jordan

Proposed SNAP work requirements target many low-income people who already work

The big idea

Roughly half of the people who would be affected by a proposed expansion of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program work requirements already do what’s needed to meet those requirements. There’s also evidence suggesting that many of the rest have caregiving or health conditions that prevent them from working.

Formerly known as food stamps, SNAP helps low-income people buy groceries.

Republicans want the federal government to make SNAP benefits for adults age 50 to 55 without dependents or disabilities contingent on spending 80 hours per month on work activities, which may include employment, short-term training and community service. This proposed change is in a package that the Republican-led House of Representatives passed in April 2023 that seeks to cut spending on several social programs.

Currently, the requirements only apply to adults under 50 without dependents who aren’t disabled.

We’re basing these estimates on our analysis of nationally representative time-diary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey.

We analyzed the time that low-income Americans ages 50-55 who didn’t have a disability or child at home spent working, caring for others or dealing with their personal health and well-being from 2012 to 2021.

We found that in most years, more than half of them worked at least 20 hours per week. We estimated that, on average, those who met the work requirement actually worked about 41-51 hours per week — a full-time schedule.

We also determined that relative to their counterparts who met the work requirements, those who did not spent 10 times as much time managing their own health, five times as much time on child care, and more than five times as much time caring for an elderly or disabled adult.

Why it matters

The GOP bill is grounded in a belief that people who get SNAP benefits and aid through other assistance programs are not employed but capable of working, and that enforcing work requirements can increase employment and earnings.

But that’s a misconception.

This measure and several others like it are part of a package that would raise the debt limit to avert a potential U.S. default and a global economic crisis.

Our findings support widespread concerns that expanding SNAP work requirements would sever food assistance benefits for an estimated 275,000 low-income people between the ages of 50 and 55, including many with health conditions and who care for others.

That’s troubling because the cost of professional child care and elder care, as well as the care for the disabled, is very high in the U.S.

It’s reasonable to expect that the new work requirements would force many people to make hard choices between the caregiving arrangements for their loved ones and keeping their benefits. Also, since people who have poor health may not be able to work, they may find themselves unable to put food on the table if they lose SNAP benefits.

What other research is being done

SNAP is associated with many positive trends beyond getting enough to eat. These include spending less on health care, having better health and becoming more financially secure.

Further, when Americans use SNAP to buy groceries, studies have shown that it stimulates the economy where they live, supporting low-income communities.

Additional research has found that work requirements tied to aid programs don’t get more low-income people to enter the labor force. Studies also have found that these policies cause many people who are eligible for assistance to lose their benefits due to paperwork hassles and unclear guidelines.

Katherine Engel, PhD Student in Public Administration and Policy, American University School of Public Affairs and Taryn Morrissey, Professor of Public Administration and Policy, American University School of Public Affairs

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

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

“Succession” mourns the Roy “family way” in all its tragic glory

In reviewing the entirety of “Succession” you’ll find that every character-building move has been leading to this penultimate episode, “Church and State.” Obviously, right? Logan Roy has been dead most of the season yet maintains a constant, leaden presence pressing upon each of his children.

During the span of days comprising this fourth season the truth of who Shiv (Sarah Snook), Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) are to each other and themselves, and the world, emerges more clearly with each hideous fit and start. Logan, meanwhile, remains a mystery to all of them and us, since it was never fully explained how he became such a ferocious despot.

It makes sense that Jesse Armstrong would save those revelations for this long-awaited funeral episode where we discover at long last why Logan despised weakness, what drove him to shape the world to his will and why he kept everyone at such a distance.

“You’re having a Wambsgans. Huh.”

Everything spirals back to his baby sister Rose, who died under “mysterious circumstances,” quotes intended. Logan always knew the circumstances, and so did his very estranged brother Ewan (James Cromwell), but he insisted that nobody ever speak about Rose.

This is part of the Roy Family Way, a term invoked by Shiv as she discusses how she’ll raise her baby. The “family way,” you see, involves rarely, if ever, interacting with one’s children. When you’re rich enough, you don’t have to be bothered with that inconvenience.

Her own mother’s response to that plan? “That will work fine,” says Caroline (Harriet Walter). “If you don’t see it, that’s fine.”

“I mean, they don’t grow up emotionally stunted, do they?” Shiv asks, her voice tinged with sarcasm that Caroline either ignores or doesn’t understand.

Mama Raptor replies, “I shouldn’t think so. What do you think?” Then she squeezes a frigid patrician laugh through her clenched smile.

“Succession”: Beware the idiot who Gregs

Indeed, the Roy Family Way may have originated as a byproduct of Logan’s zeal for unparalleled world dominance. It could have been intended as an experiment to see whether he could raise killers. How did that turn out? The answer’s melody has been playing in the background all season long, but never so plaintively than on this grim day.

But we’re jumping ahead. Rewinding to the top of the day, before Shiv breaks the baby news, she nervously watches ATN’s reports of anti-Mencken protests breaking out in the streets of major cities, including in front of network headquarters. Ever the pragmatist, she calls Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) and advises him to dump his news about GoJo’s inflated subscriber numbers immediately to bury them in the post-election horror.

Matsson is doubtful. “If you have a little dickie, maybe you don’t go to the nudist beach?” But ultimately, he follows Shiv’s advice and instructs Ebba to cook up a release.

Alexander Skarsgard and Sarah Snook in “Succession” (Macall Polay/HBO)

High up in the sky, Roman merrily waltzes around his apartment to the tune of the world exploding, thanks to him tilting the election in favor of friend of “H” Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk). Channeling that energy, he rehearses his fact-heavy, feelings-scant eulogy.

“Sad, sad, sad,” he melodically freestyles, before pumping himself up with some positive self-talk: “I am the man. I am the man. As you can see, here I am talking loudly about my father,” he says. “Don’t I perhaps remind you of him, just a little? . . . Bow down to me. I selected a president. Do you see his pecker in my pocket?”

Not everyone begins the day so confidently. In his car, Ken fields a call from Rava (Natalie Gold) letting him know she’s skipping the funeral and taking the kids upstate because the city doesn’t feel safe.

Enraged, he zooms to his ex’s place to accuse her of hurting him. But Rava’s maternal instincts are right: “Nothing is fine.”

In the office, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) laments that the New York Times has a timeline of ATN’s decision-making chain in the paper, and it’s pretty accurate, down to his minimal role. But Greg (Nicholas Braun) is only half-listening, expressing the need to be at the funeral, claiming he needs to grieve (read: network and kiss ass). “I do too! I’m a wheel man, I’m a casket wheel man. I’m front right!”

At long last this is the episode that shows, what drove Logan Roy to shape the world to his will, and why he kept everyone at such a distance.

Angry that he’s going to miss the saddest party of the year, Tom tells Greg to hoof it to the service expressly to tell their new president that he made the call. Greg huffs and puffs there on a rental bike.

Back in the car, Ken is joined by Rome and Shiv, who decides now is as good a time as any to announce she’s pregnant. They react as you’d expect. “You’re having a Wambsgans. Huh,” Rome deadpans, adding, “I just thought you were eating your feelings.” Then he goes blue, cracking a few incest jokes until Ken shuts him up.

They meet Jess near the church, and she immediately takes orders from Ken. Item one: book an appointment with family lawyers to sue Rava for full custody. Then he sees Jess scheduled a meeting with him for Tuesday. When he asks her about it, Ken’s loyal personal assistant tells him it can wait.

So of course he pries it out of her: she’s quitting. At this Kendall turns his fury on Jess, calling her juvenile and dumb before winding up with, “Nice timing Jess. Lovely day to tell me. Really thoughtful.”

Inside the church, as the crowd waits for Logan’s casket to arrive, the Roys press the flesh.

Harriet Walter, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Jeremy Strong in “Succession” (Macall Polay/HBO)

Ken and Shiv are standing together when their treacherous mother walks over. Caroline hugs Ken, and after icily embracing Shiv, kicks off a baby reveal exchange for the ages.

“Oh,” Caroline says, looking pointedly at Shiv. “Are you uh, OK?”

“Yup,” she says.

Caroline asks again, in a slightly different tone. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

Caroline: “Blimey!”

Shiv: “Hmm. I know.”

Caroline: “Well . . . I never. Well, well.”

Shiv: “. . . Thank you?”

Caroline: “Exactly.”

And that is about as close to a display of mother-daughter affection as we’re likely to see from these two.

Shiv excuses herself to find an uncharacteristically well-behaved Matsson pleased that Shiv’s advice was correct. Then she pitches her plan for a Mencken workaround: Offer her as an American CEO. Matsson, points out she’s very inexperienced – also, he hears, pregnant? She counters that she’s fine with the Swede pulling her puppet strings, speaking aloud her fantasy narrative about her kid never seeing her. Exactly what a sexist CEO loves to hear.

Elsewhere, we see Caroline pull Kerry into the exes and widows row along with a woman named Sally Ann, who introduces her to Marcia as “her Kerry, so to speak. So . . . it’s all water under the bridge now, so to speak. Shall we go pile in?” Is this magnanimous, or cruel?

“Oh Logan would hate this,” Caroline says wickedly. Marcia offers, “At least he won’t grind his teeth tonight.” At this Kerry bursts into tears, and Marcia reaches over and takes the mistress’ hand in hers. It is the warmest we’ve ever seen of her. It’s also the least she can do as the woman walking away from Logan Roy with the most cake.

If “Succession” is a competition that ends with a winner, we’d be foolish to count out Marcia

The casket arrives, signaling a somber procession followed by the officiant announcing that those who know and love Logan best will speak. Ewan shocks the church by getting up first and fast. Greg tries to stop him, as does Shiv. But Ewan shakes off Greg’s weak grip and heads to the podium.

“What sort of people would stop a brother speaking for the sake of a share price?” Ewan says, “It is not for me to judge my brother. History will tell that story. I can just give you a couple of instances about him.”

One is the missing piece we’ve been waiting for.

Once Ewan and Logan made it over to North America, their uncle, “who was a character” and had money, sent Logan away to a better school. Logan was sickly and hated it. Ewan says “he mewed and he cried, and in the end, he got out and came home under his own steam.”

By the time Logan made it home their baby sister Rose was there.

Ewan pauses, then continues, “He always believed that he brought home the polio with him, which took her. I don’t even know if that’s true. But our aunt and our uncle never did anything to disabuse him of that notion. They let it lie with him.

“I loved him, I suppose, and I suppose some of you did too, in whatever way he would let us, and that we could manage,” Ewan says. “But I can’t help but say he has wrought the most terrible things.”

Ewan goes on, poetically summarizing Logan’s sins until he reaches his closer. “He was mean, and he made a mean estimation of the world. He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men. Perhaps he had to because he had a meagerness about him. And maybe I do too, I don’t know. But I try. I try. I don’t know when, but sometime he decided not to try anymore. And it was a terrible shame. Godspeed, my brother, and God bless.”

“He has wrought the most terrible things.”

Ewan’s memorial is honest and unsparing, but genuinely moving. It refuses to lionize Logan, but it’s still a tough act to follow. And Roman is shaken. He heads to the podium with his cards full of his father’s accomplishments and nothing about who he was.

He nervously tries to speak, but only a few whimpered words emerge. Then he steps away from the mic and he beckons Shiv and Kendall to him before he loudly breaks down, for the first time, and in front of some of the world’s most powerful people. “Is he in there?” Roman says, gesturing at the casket and emitting a whine in a high register before Shiv helps him to their pew.

Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook in “Succession” (Macall Polay/HBO)

It falls to Kendall to deliver their rebuttal to Ewan. He looks at Roman’s notes for a moment, then abandons them entirely. “I don’t know how much I know, but I know my father,” he says.

Armstrong’s writing is consistently sharp and poignant, but Kendall’s funerary oration gives wings to this heavy scene. Between the dialogue, Strong’s devastating and impassioned delivery, and Mark Mylod’s intimate framing, it is near perfection.

“My father was a brute. He was tough. But also, he built and he acted. And there are many people out there who will tell you no, and there are a thousand reasons not to, to not act. He had a vitality, a force, that could hurt. And it did. But my god, the sheer . . . look at it – the lives, and the livings, and the things that he made. And the money. Yeah. The money.

“The lifeblood, the oxygen of this, this . . . this wonderful, civilization we have built from the mud,” Kendall continues. “The money, the corpuscles of life gushing around this nation, this world, filling men and women all around with desire, quickening the ambition to own and make and trade and profit, and build and improve.”

Armstrong’s writing is consistently sharp and poignant, but Kendall’s funerary oration gives wings to this heavy scene.

Matsson smiles at this, perhaps impressed, perhaps amused. Across the aisle, and a row or two behind him, Mencken also grins enigmatically.

Kendall continues: “I mean, great geysers of life he willed. Of buildings he made stand. Of ships, steel hulls, amusements, newspapers, shows and films, and life. Bloody complicated life. He made life happen. He made me, and my three siblings.” Caroline doesn’t seem to appreciate that.

Kendall goes on to admit that Logan could be terrible and push people to the side, but writes that off as part of his will to be, and be seen. “And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him, to denigrate that force, that magnificent, awful force of him, but my God I hope it’s in me. Because if we can’t match his vim, then God knows the future will be sluggish and gray.”

He closes with, “He was comfortable with this world, and he knew it. He knew it, and he liked it. And I say, Amen to that.” The church breaks out in applause.

After this, Shiv takes the podium. She is not as eloquent as her older brother, but she is solid as she tells the story of how, when they were kids, Logan used to yell at them for being too loud as they played outside his office. They had no idea, she said, that he was speaking with presidents, kings, queens and heads of state.

“He kept us outside. But he kept everyone outside,” she says, tearfully. “When he let you in, when the sun shone, it was warm, really, it was warm in the light. But it was hard to be his daughter. I can’t not . . . It was. Oh, he was hard on women. He couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head. But he did OK. You did OK, Dad. We’re all here, and we’re doing OK. We’re doing OK. So, goodbye, my dear, dear world of a father.”

With that, the funeral mass ends, as does the sibling amity. Hugo whispers to Kendall about Shiv’s plan to step in as CEO if Matsson were to buy ATN, which Mencken may accept.

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At the cemetery, Shiv, Ken and Rome see the mausoleum Logan purchased that only Connor (Alan Ruck) seemed to know about, an architectural combination of Greek revival extravagance and brutalist intimidation. “Was he in a bidding war with Stalin and Liberace?” jokes Shiv. Dad didn’t want to go into the ground, Connor says. So apparently he paid $5 million for the monument at auction, the spoils of a pet supply website CEO who had it commissioned, then changed his mind.

With a few final prayers, they head to the St. Regis New York for the after party . . . er, repast.

Before Shiv gets into her car Marcia walks over and offers, “I loved him very much. I miss him very much. He broke my heart, and he broke your hearts too.”

Kieran Culkin in “Succession” (Macall Polay/HBO)

Kendall, meanwhile, enlists Hugo in his war. “Life isn’t nice. It’s contingent. People who say they love you also f**k you. So this is an explicit plan to f**k the deal, and me rule the world. And you can come, but it won’t be a collaboration, OK? You’ll be my dog. But the scraps from the table will be millions. Happy?”

“Woof woof,” Hugo says. Ken, satisfied, looks one last time at Dad’s perma-kennel before heading to the hotel as the sounds of unrest draw nearer.

Kendall’s first move is to emotionally blackmail Colin before ordering him to come to work for him.

Then he makes a beeline for Mencken as Shiv and Matsson look on from a table across the room. Kendall congratulates the POTUS-elect, then says he wants to touch base – you know, seeing all that ATN did to catapult him from the racist fringes to the White House, pending lawsuits and all. Mencken coldly responds that Kendall is just the sound system. “Now you want to choose the track?”

Ken is taken aback, but presses Mencken to drop something publicly vis-à-vis his regulatory concerns regarding foreign tech – you know, the GoJo-killing tat Ken and Rome were expecting in exchange for pressing Mencken to ATN’s tit.

“I’ll try to help,” is all Mencken will say.

“Try to help?” Then Cousin Greg stupidly lumbers up, bringing Rome into the mix, who Mencken greets with, “Hey, hey, hey! It’s the Grim Weeper. Tiny Tears. Kidding. You good?” – establishing whose pecker is in whose pocket. Then Connor skulks in to query Mencken on the ambassadorship he was expecting.

Jeremy Strong and Justin Kirk in “Succession” (Macall Polay/HBO)

Just when it’s looking like a s**t show at the Blood Sausage Fest, Shiv walks up, announces herself as the extraction team, and walks Mencken over to Matsson’s much quieter table, where the Swede delivers a clean, minimalist contrast to the Roy boys’ beta male desperation.

Matsson points out that ATN, as it currently stands, is outdated, whereas GoJo offers Mencken a multi-platform global bullhorn.

So he offers Mencken a choice that never seems clearer than it does in this room: Tiny men in his pocket, or a gateway to worldwide cultural influence, through him, with Shiv as his American CEO.

Mencken hesitates, bringing up Shiv’s ideological opposition to him. “My dad was flexible. I’m flexible,” she says. “I know how things go . . . My feelings are irrelevant. Our audience loves Jeryd, and I respect our audience.”

With that, Mencken takes his leave.

Enter Tom, who demands to know why Shiv didn’t tell him about their pregnancy during their brief reunion. She offers a few weak excuses before boiling it down to: it seems so sad. That’s Caroline’s cue to bust in and congratulate her son-in-law.

“Well if it wasn’t such a total f***ing disaster, it would be a dream come true!” says Tom bitterly. That’s when Caroline’s girl mentions “the family way.”

Once Caroline releases her prey, Shiv takes pity on an exhausted, crying Tom, sending him back to their condo to recuperate. As he walks off, Shiv’s phone buzzes. It’s Matsson. “It’s a yes” from Mencken.

“Let’s make a meatball burger,” Shiv says, taking a moment to absorb her triumph, before shooting a gloating gaze at her brothers.

Kendall sits with Rome and tells him about Shiv’s gambit, admitting they don’t have a lot of leverage. Then, instead of offering him comfort, he tells his kid brother that he f***ed it.” Kendall’s right. Mencken was always in it for himself, and the one man that he might have listened to, Roman, publicly collapsed under the weight of an important task.

Kendall declares it’s time to officially position themselves as rebel boys versus Shiv. Entirely overwhelmed, Roman leaps off the couch and heads for the door.

As he speeds by the Village Elders’ table, we hear audio of Roman’s breakdown emitting from Karl’s phone. Somebody filmed and posted it online. “He sounds like a sow that’s about to get the stun gun and knows it,” Karl says. “It’s circulating!”

Outside, Rome barrels into the heart of the anti-Mencken protests and confronts a couple of demonstrators until someone knocks him down with a punch. He lays there as people step around and over him as if hoping to get trampled . . . but it doesn’t happen. Someone reaches down to help him up, and Roman swings on the guy, which gets him knocked down again. When Roman finally stands again, he surrenders to the flow in a grief-stricken daze.

about “Succession”

“There’s so much evidence”: Former Trump White House lawyer predicts he will “go to jail”

A former Trump attorney predicted that the former president will “go to jail” for mishandling classified documents.

Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer from 2017 to 2018, in an interview with CNN on Thursday, discussed the National Archive’s recent decision to hand over 16 records to the Justice Department that show Trump knew he was not allowed to take documents to his residence.

“I would not necessarily expand the case to try to prove the Espionage Act piece of it because there is so much evidence of guilty knowledge on the espionage piece that all they really have to do is show that Trump moved these documents at various times when DOJ was either demanding them or actually present, that he filed falsely with the Justice Department, had his lawyers file falsely with the Justice Department, an affidavit to the effect that none existed—which was shattered by the documents that they then discovered after the search—and the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents,” Cobb said.

“I think this is a tight obstruction case,” Cobb added. “Yes, I do think he will go to jail on it.”

“Shocked at the stupidity”: Prosecutors obtain lawyer notes that blow up Trump’s Mar-a-Lago defense

Former Attorney General Bill Barr also predicted that Trump could face legal peril in the Mar-a-Lago probe.

It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents. He was given a long time to send them back. And they were subpoenaed. And I’ve said all along that he wouldn’t get in trouble, probably, just for taking them, just as Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or Pence is not going to get in trouble,” Barr told CBS News.

“The problem,” he continued, “is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them? And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”

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Trump has repeatedly argued that he could automatically declassify any documents, stating in a CNN town hall that “they become automatically declassified when I took them.”

Barr said he doesn’t “think that argument’s gonna fly.”

“I don’t think the idea that you know, he automatically — that they were somehow automatically declassified when they were put in the boxes,” he said. “I don’t think that will fly.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

Trump lawyer quits — and throws fellow Trump attorney under the bus in DOJ probe

One of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys quit and quickly threw a fellow member of the legal team under the bus.

Tim Parlatore served as an attorney for Trump in the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents and efforts to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election. Last August, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in West Palm Beach, Florida, uncovering troves of material, including documents labeled as classified. Politico reported that the search “led not only to issues involving document retention by other political leaders, including President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, but also sparked questions as to what, if anything, a former president can lawfully do in terms of retaining classified material.”

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the DOJ probes, will likely soon decide whether to charge Trump in either or both cases.

“Shocked at the stupidity”: Prosecutors obtain lawyer notes that blow up Trump’s Mar-a-Lago defense

Parlatore’s resignation was announced Wednesday by CNN.

“It’s personal, and it’s got nothing to do with my belief in the strength of the case,” he told Politico.

Speaking to CNN’s Paula Reid, Parlatore blamed another member of the former president’s legal team for his departure.

“The real reason is because there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” he said. “There is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”

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Parlatore stated that Epeshtyn “served as a kind of a filter” for sharing information with the ex-president and “attempted to interfere with” the legal team’s attempts to search various Trump properties for documents.

“It’s difficult enough fighting against DOJ and, in this case, special counsel,” Parlatore continued. “But when you also have people within the tent that are also trying to undermine you, block you, and really make it so that I can’t do what I know that I need to do as a lawyer, and when I am getting into fights like that, that’s detracting from what is necessary to defend the client and ultimately not in the clients best interest, so I made the ultimate decision to withdraw.”

A Trump spokesperson has refuted Paraltore’s claims, saying, “Mr. Parlatore is no longer a member of the legal team. His statements regarding current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false.”

Reid: You said that Boris tried to prevent you from conducting searches. What searches? pic.twitter.com/7fVQm0GE4L

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 20, 2023

about Trump’s lawyers

“Shocked at the stupidity”: Prosecutors obtain lawyer notes that blow up Trump’s Mar-a-Lago defense

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has obtained lawyer notes showing that former President Donald Trump was warned that he could not keep any classified documents in response to a subpoena he failed to comply with last year, according to The Guardian.

Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, who was ordered to testify before a grand jury by a judge after prosecutors pierced his attorney-client privilege claims, conveyed the previously unreported warning to the former president last year, according to the report. The warning “could be significant” in Smith’s probe because it shows that he was aware of his subpoena obligations, according to the report.

“Trump knew. He’s always known,” tweeted MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang.

“Very damaging”: Legal experts say new Mar-a-Lago evidence could “blow up” in Trump’s face at trial

The warning was included in about 50 pages of contemporaneous notes written by Corcoran.

Corcoran in June found about 40 classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago storage room. He met with Justice Department investigators and later drafted a letter affirming that no other materials were at the property. But the FBI later found about 100 more classified documents while executing a court-authorized warrant in August.

Prosecutors are investigating whether Trump intentionally sought to obstruct the subpoena. They have particularly “fixated” on Trump valet Walt Nauta, who told prosecutors that Trump personally told him to move boxes out of the storage room before and after the subpoena was issued.

Corcoran’s notes “revealed how Trump and Nauta had unusually detailed knowledge of the botched subpoena response, including where Corcoran intended to search and not search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as when Corcoran was actually doing his search,” according to The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.

Though prosecutors are typically barred from reviewing attorney notes, Corcoran’s attorney-client privilege claims were pierced after a judge agreed with prosecutors that Trump may have used Corcoran’s legal services to further a crime.

“Evidence could be huge”: Experts stunned how fast court denied Trump bid to block lawyer testimony

The notes described how Corcoran told Nauta about the subpoena ahead of the search because he needed him to unlock the storage room, which prosecutors have taken a sign that the aide was closely involved in the search, according to the report. Corcoran also wrote that Nauta offered to help him go through the boxes, though the attorney declined.

Corcoran’s notes also revealed that the search took several days and there were times when the storage room may have been left unattended during the search, according to the report.

Prosecutors would need to show that Trump instructed Nauta to remove boxes he expressly knew included classified documents covered by a subpoena with the intention of hiding them from his attorney’s search, the report noted.

Trump’s attorneys have argued that the subpoena response is incomplete because Corcoran was not as thorough as he should have been because he delayed the search and did not realize how many boxes were in the storage room.

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The DOJ interviewed Nauta last year and believed that he was not forthcoming about his account of moving the boxes. Prosecutors threatened to charge Nauta with lying to the FBI after he gave contradictory answers but Nauta stopped cooperating with prosecutors after his lawyer demanded an immunity deal. Prosecutors have since asked other witnesses about what Nauta did with the boxes, according to the report.

“This is nothing more than a targeted, politically motivated witch-hunt against President Trump that is concocted to meddle in an election and prevent the American people from returning him to the White House,” a Trump spokesperson told The Guardian.

MSNBC host Mike Brzezinski interviewed Lowell about his report, noting that “every time I read into this, I’m just shocked at the stupidity of those, honestly, of former President Trump, moving documents in and out of his office before and after the subpoena, and I guess having people do it for him.”

Lowell explained that the previously unreported warning is a “problem for the former president.”

“And it becomes a problem for his legal team and there’s a whole bunch of other stuff in the notes about how the valet had unusually detailed knowledge about where the lawyer was conducting his searches for classified documents,” he told MSNBC, “and I think the special counsel’s office is looking at this as the core, the heart of the obstruction investigation.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

The ambitious Republican plot to take it all down

Picture it, if you will, it’s January 21, 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2017 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right-wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.

Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous:

Former Defense Sec. Robert Gates tells @margbrennan he's "concerned" that former Pres. Trump is the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination because he's been "very clear that he wants to dramatically change, if not dismantle, some major institutions" in U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/uBUlpHcGPE

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 21, 2023

There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Recall former adviser Steve Bannon bellowing about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertions of unchecked executive power for example. As it happened, Trump was so far in over his head and ran such a chaotic, scandal-filled administration that they were unable to institute many systematic changes to test their theories but they came away with the knowledge that given another chance with a corrupt demagogue they could make changes to the system that could help them stay in power indefinitely.

Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals.

There has been a cascade of stories discussing the poor roll out of Trump’s campaign and how he’s still stuck in the repetitive groove of his grievances over the 2016 campaign and his loss in 2020. His appearance on CNN’s generous kick-off campaign rally for him a couple of weeks ago reinforced that idea, as he repeated all his punch lines and the audience cheered and clapped ecstatically. It certainly left the impression that if Trump were to win the election next year we would be in for a repeat of his first term: turmoil, scandal and ineptitude in which the most terrifying consequence is that a crisis hits or someone makes a catastrophic error. Last time, you’ll recall, we got hit with the first deadly global pandemic in a hundred years and Trump publicly told America to take unproven snake oil cures and instructed scientists to look into having people ingest disinfectants since they kill the virus on surfaces.

It was a disaster.

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Many people died and many more families were decimated but I fear that too many Americans may think that a rerun of the The Trump Show won’t be a catastrophe since most of us survived his tenure. But it won’t be a rerun. Since the day Trump left the White House for his exile at Mar-a-Lago, well-funded right-wing organizations have been planning the return to power with a fully developed agenda and plan to enact it. All they have to do is put the Sharpie in Trump’s hand to sign what they put in front of him after which he can run out to the cameras and whine and complain about whomever is his target that day as his minions turn the executive branch into a full functioning partisan operation.

Last summer, Axios’ Jonathan Swan wrote a long report on what they’ve been planning:

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say…The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

Schedule F is an executive order which would reassign potentially tens of thousands of federal employees they determine to have policy influence so they would lose their civil service protections. Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals intent on depriving them of their natural right to rule without restraint.

How we let fascism creep in

The plan is being produced by a number of Republican groups and coordinated by some names with which you are no doubt familiar, like former Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer Jeffrey Clark, former Devin Nunes and Pentagon staffer Kash Patel, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows all of whom are caught up in Trump’s legal messes as well. They plan to salt every department with GOP toadies from the military to the DOJ to the Department of Education to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are drawing up lists of candidates. (That same right-wing institution similarly staffed the provisional government in Iraq with young neocons to disastrous results.)

The beauty of this plan is that it doesn’t actually matter if Trump wins again. They can use it just as easily for another Republican. But it would be especially well-suited for Trump’s principal rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported on DeSantis’ desire to use every bit of executive power to achieve his goals:

“One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he writes in The Courage to Be Free. “I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.

There’s no need to reiterate all the ways in which he uses every lever and coerces the legislature to enact the most extreme agenda of any state in America and now promises to take it national. Should he win he will run with the Schedule F plan and probably come up with a few of his own. This is what defines him as a political leader.

In fact, from the sound of all the Republicans on the trail extolling the alleged “bombshell” that’s actually a dud of the Durham Report as if it’s some huge indictment of the “deep state” that has to be completely dismantled, it’s obvious that this is going to be a Republican Party project, not a Trump project at all. They are all organizing themselves around blatant lies about elections, democracy, law and justice, health, foreign policy and national security and their partisan institutions are plotting to use those lies to remake the federal government.

It’s an ambitious plan but with the courts on their side and a congressional majority, it’s eminently doable. It’s imperative that the American people do not let them attain power again as long as this is their agenda or there may be no going back.

Transgender identity has a history as long as human beings have existed

Believe it or not, there once was a time when trans people could be the stars of popular fiction without arousing nationwide controversy and manufactured outrage.

“Even though it’s ‘just’ a short story, it must have resonated with readers because it appeared in one of the most popular magazines of the day.”

In Victorian America, a literary journal known as The Knickerbocker was as popular as movies or TV shows are today. Despite only being published for one-third of a century (1833 to 1865), it served as a platform for immortal writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Alternatively known as New-York Monthly Magazine, The Knickerbocker both catered to mainstream popular culture and aspired to elevate it.

This makes it particularly notable that, in 1857, an anonymously-authored short story clearly and sympathetically depicted a trans woman. If modern transphobes are to be believed, transgender identities are a liberal ideological talking point that pose an existential threat to “traditional” ideas about sex. Yet the reality is that transgender individuals have existed long before any of our modern political debates.

Montana Republican suggests she would prefer daughter die by suicide than allow her to transition

Take the plot of “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman.” Its protagonist, Japhet Colbones, is depicted as a lovable eccentric who comes from a long line of charming weirdos. In Japhet’s case, she was born in a male body and secretly harbors the knowledge that she is a woman, a fact that is hinted throughout and officially revealed to the readers at the story’s end.

The author refers to Japhet as “odd,” a term used with as much endearment for the main character as for her other relatives, who had such relatively harmless quirks as obsessively collecting books, following unorthodox diets or being generally reclusive. Japhet is depicted as a loving husband and father of two daughters who, despite possessing great intelligence, prefers to live a simple farm life. In many ways, Japhet is as quintessentially American as apple pie and fireworks: Physically strong, fiercely independent, a successful provider and a fundamentally decent soul.

The only conspicuous consequence of Japhet’s “oddity” is that she steals the clothes of the women around her so she can secretly wear them. Although Japhet’s thefts are eventually traced back to her, her loved ones do not let her know to protect her dignity. This decision proves tragic in the end, when Japhet commits suicide in her best female attire. She departs with this poignant note:

“I think I am a woman. I have been seven years making me a perfect suit of garments appropriate for my sex. As I have passed so long, falsely, for a man, I am ashamed to show myself in my true colors; therefore, I hang myself. The property all to go to the woman I have called my wife. It is now twelve o’clock. I have prepared every thing for the funeral, and desire that I may be laid out in the clothes I have on.”

Professor Elizabeth Reis — a historian and professor of gender and medical ethics at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York — wrote a paper about this short story in 2014 for the academic journal Early American Studies. Speaking with Salon by email, Reis explained how the story can be educational for modern readers, dispelling two common misperceptions about transgender identity before the 20th century.

“The first misconception is that there was no such thing as transgender identity before our current moment,” Reis explained. “Even though this is just a short story, we can see that in the mid-1850s, the author conceived of a character who might have identified as transgender, if that word had existed back then.”

Reis observed that Japhet’s “odd” personality is described with that term in a context “that means singular more than it meant anything negative.” Importantly, Japhet’s story is depicted as “poignant and sad, and it might resonate with readers who are unable to be themselves even today, for one reason or another. And even though it’s ‘just’ a short story, it must have resonated with readers because it appeared in one of the most popular magazines of the day.”

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“People have been trans-ing gender for centuries; they have been making and remaking gender in creative and innovative ways throughout recorded history.”

The story of transgender identities traces well before 1857. For centuries Mexico’s indigenous Zapotec people have recognized a third sex known as “muxes,” a third gender that includes both masculine and feminine traits. The Mayan religion also included gods that were both male and female.

But Mexico is not alone among civilizations with a long history of bucking gender binaries. In Samoa, the culture has long recognized people who are neither strictly male nor strictly female with the terms “fa’afafine” and “fa’afatama.” In India, a third gender known as hijras have been documented as far back as the Middle Ages and are recognized as an official third gender in Indian countries throughout the subcontinent. The Navajo referred to transgender individuals as two-spirits, and the so-called Ihamanas were held in such high regard that a berdache (man living as a woman) named We’wha was asked to meet President Grover Cleveland, who was said to have been utterly charmed.

“The most common misconception from anti-trans folks is that trans people are a new phenomenon,” explains Dr. Emily Skidmore, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of History at Texas Tech University and author of the book “True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” “People have been trans-ing gender for centuries; they have been making and remaking gender in creative and innovative ways throughout recorded history. Historians and other scholars have found records of individuals who understood their gender as distinct from the cultural norms attached to the gender assigned to them at birth across centuries. Trans people have always existed.”

In fact, as Skidmore learned when writing “True Sex,” trans people often pop up in places where you do not expect them. For instance, despite the popular assumption that trans people would prefer to live in cosmopolitan (and therefore presumably more accepting) environments, the opposite quite often has proved to be true.

“One thing that surprised me in doing the research for that book is that so many — over half of the 65 people I found from 1876-1936 — chose to live in small towns and rural outposts, as opposed to the cities we more commonly associate with queer life,” Skidmore wrote to Salon. She identified the story of a person from the early 20th century named “Willie Ray” as one of her favorites; Ray had been assigned as a female at birth but lived as a man.

“He was probably born in Tennessee, and he moved in his early 20s to Booneville, Mississippi. He got in trouble for flirting with another man’s wife, and there was actually a court case about it 1903. Willie Ray revealed his gender assigned at birth on the stand as a means of escaping persecution, at which point the case ground to a halt.” Although Ray was supposedly going to be forced to wear skirts from that point on, no state law existed to enforce that edict, and Ray “went on living in Booneville, and in 1910, he shows up on the federal census as living in the same household as Fannie Gatlin—the woman he had been flirting with in 1903.”

Skidmore concluded, “I love this story because it forces us to think about the queer possibilities in rural America — a past which can be hard for us to imagine in the contemporary moment of anti-trans legislation.”

Reis also contemplated how people in the past have sometimes been more open-minded than their contemporary counterparts.

“The other common misperception about the pre-20th century is the assumption that we’ve become more tolerant over time,” Reis wrote to salon. “Certainly, LGBTQ people are able to live openly in ways that they couldn’t have conceived in the mid-19th century, but it’s also true that we can’t just assume that people had only negative ideas about people crossing the gender line.” She added that although living as a different gender was neither widely celebrated or condoned, common attitudes were complicated “as we can see from how Japhet is presented in this short story: as a competent provider, a good husband, and all the rest of it that the story describes.”

about transgender rights

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fear is fake

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a very tedious person. Even writing her name drains one’s energy; she’s like a fascist black hole.

So what is the best way to respond to someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene? Should we ignore her, and those of her ilk, and hope that she will magically disappear? Are those of us with a public platform elevating Marjorie Taylor Greene by giving her too much attention and therefore giving her more power and influence than she merits?

The answer is no.

Marjorie Taylor Greeene is a very dangerous person, a leading member of the Republican Party and larger neofascist movement. Proving that to be true once again, last week Marjorie Taylor Greene summoned up the country’s unique history of white on Black spectacular lynchings and other white supremacist violence in an attempt to gain political leverage, attention and more power.

MTG claims that calling her a “white supremacist” is the same as calling a Black person the “N-word”

On Wednesday, Greene and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., were involved in what was by all reasonable accounts an animated and somewhat heated, albeit playful, conversation on the steps of the Capitol after a procedural vote on expelling indicted felon Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from office.

On Thursday, Marjorie Taylor Greene held a press conference where she told bald-faced lies about Bowman’s behavior and her interactions with him the previous day and in the past, as Salon’s Tatyana Tandanpolie summarized:

Greene at a Thursday news conference said that she is “very concerned” about the “history of aggression” she claimed Bowman has toward her and other members of Congress. She described her perspective of the altercation, saying that Bowman approached her “yelling, shouting, raising his voice,” which led to the argument.

“He has aggressive — his physical mannerisms are aggressive,” she said, adding, “I think there’s a lot of concern about Jamaal Bowman, and I am concerned about it. I feel threatened by him.”

Greene claimed on Thursday that Bowman accosted her with a “mob” when she traveled to New York to protest Trump’s indictment on felony charges of falsifying business records. She said that Bowman cursed at her, “shouted at the top of his lungs” and called her a “white supremacist,” a remark that deeply offended her….

Greene added that she felt “swarmed” and feared for her life.

Greene’s statements are not true. Her life was not threatened or in any way endangered by Rep. Bowman either on Wednesday or during her publicity stunt in New York in support of the traitor and now indicted and arrested former president and alleged felon Donald Trump.

If Greene felt “threatened” by Bowman that is a manifestation of her own white racist paranoiac thinking for which she should seek counseling or other mental health assistance. Bowman was not physically aggressive towards Greene on Wednesday or on other occasions. Bowman has not been the subject of any reasonably reported concerns or complaints by other members of Congress about his “history of aggression.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is some type of idiot savant in white supremacy and racism.

In total, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threatening lies about Rep. Bowman are an example of some of the worst aspects of America’s long history of white supremacist violence against Black men (and Black and brown people more generally) – and white women’s role in instigating (and profiting from) it. Greene’s comments about Bowman were literally as though she was reciting a script from post-civil war Jim and Jane Crow America, with the almost identical words and lies that caused thousands of Black men (and women and children) to be lynched and otherwise terrorized by white people.

Moreover, it would not have been at all surprising if Greene did not summon up some tears on Wednesday outside of the Capitol or during her press conference the next day as she started to howl about how Bowman was a “giant negro” and “predator” who desired her and had violated her “honor.” White women’s tears were and remain some of the most powerful white supremacist weapons of terror and violence against Black and brown people.

If the movies “Birth of a Nation” or “Rosewood” were ever remade, Greene should be cast as one of the main characters. On the call sheet and in the credits her character should be listed as “white woman who lies and gets Black man lynched.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene shows off her Confederate beer cooler in a new workout video

White supremacy and racism are learned behaviors and a type of cultural script that consists of stories, “common sense”, emotional training, and other tools for making sense of the world. No one may have sat down with Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was a child or young adult and explicitly told her that “these are words and performance that you as a white woman can use to get a Black person arrested or hurt or worse” (and/or also get yourself out of trouble and get attention and pity by making yourself into a fake victim) but she learned the lessons anyway. The many ways that these lessons are taught and learned, intentionally and intentionally, consciously and subconsciously, on both sides of the color line, is why experts describe America as being a racist culture.

And in an example of the increasingly surreal and absurd ways that white supremacy operates in post-civil rights “colorblind” America and the Age of Trump — an era where even the Ku Klux Klan claims that it is no longer a racist organization — Marjorie Taylor Greene went so far as to say the following during her press conference on Thursday:

Jamaal Bowman [was] shouting at the top of his lungs, cursing, calling me a horrible … calling me a white supremacist which I take great offense to that….

It’s like calling a person of color the N-word which should never happen. Calling me a white supremacist is equal to that. That is wrong.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s words constitute a nonsense claim and a nonsensical riddle that only make sense as processed through white racial logic and how white supremacy distorts a person’s cognition, perception of reality, morality and ethics. The “n-word” was invented by white people as a way of dehumanizing and demeaning Black people in order to justify slavery, land theft, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, theft, murder, rape, and other acts of oppression and crimes against humanity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has repeatedly shown herself through her actions and words to be a white supremacist.

To accurately describe a person as being a white supremacist (or being part of a political project that does the work of white supremacy, which is functionally the same thing) is in no way equivalent to attacking a Black person with the “n-word.”

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As seen with the rise of the Age of Trump and the Republican Fascist Party, many tens of millions of white people agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene and her fantasies, fictions, and lies about “reverse racism” and how white people are somehow the “real victims” of racism in American or that white people are somehow being “replaced” or “oppressed” in “their own countries” by non-whites.

Parsing such white racial “logic” is draining. Toni Morrison’s wisdom remains all too true that, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being….” It is no surprise then that racial battle fatigue is literally killing Black and brown people here in America from the day-to-day stress of living in a white racist society.

In his essential book, “Trouble in Mind Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow”, historian Leon Litwack offers the following insights, which merit being quoted at length, on America’s lynching culture and white racial terrorism against Black Americans:

White fears were based on the assumption that most lynchings stemmed from sexual assault. But in many cases, reports of sexual assault proved entirely baseless, or upon closer examination revealed only that a black male had broken the rules of racial etiquette, had behaved in a manner construed as racial insult, or had violated the bar on consensual interracial sex….

Rape and sexual indiscretion, in actuality, proved to be a relatively minor cause of mob violence….

The offenses that precipitated mob violence related less to sex crimes (as sensationalized in the press) than to physical assault and murder (the most common charge) theft, arson, violations of the racial code, economic competition, and disputes over crop settlements. Many of the transgressions by blacks would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites and were not grounds anywhere else for capital punishment: using disrespectful, insulting, slanderous, boastful, threatening or “incendiary” language; insubordination, impertinence, impudence or improper demeanor (a sarcastic grin, laughing, laughing at the wrong time, a prolonged silence), refusing to take off one’s hat to a white person or to give the right of way (to step aside) when encountering a white on the sidewalk; resisting assault by whites; “being troublesome generally”; disorderly conduct, petty theft, or drunkenness; writing an improper (“insulting”) letter to a white person; paying undue or improper attention to a white female; accusing a white man of writing love letters to a black woman, or living or keeping company with a white woman; turning or refusing to turn state’s evidence, testifying or bringing suit against a white person, or being related to a person accused of a crime and already lynched; political activities union organizing, conjuring or discussing a lynching; gambling or operating a “house of ill fame”; a personal debt, refusing to accept an employment offer; “jumping” a labor contract; vagrancy; refusing to give up one’s farm; conspicuously displaying one’s wealth or property; and (in the eyes of whites) trying to act like a white man.

Litwack continues:

Victims of lynch mobs, more often than not, had challenged or unintentionally violated the prevailing norms of white supremacy. And these range from serious offenses (in the eyes of whites) to the trivial….

All too often, black southerners, innocent of any crime or offense, were victims of lynchings or burnings because they were black and in the wrong place at the wrong time….

Investigators frequently found no easily ascertainable reason for a lynching, except perhaps white emotional and recreational starvation. For some “nigger killing” had simply become a sport, like any other amusement or diversion, and its popularity prompted a Black newspaper in 1911 to call it “The National Pastime”….

Although seldom cited as the reason for mob violence, the assumption persisted that an occasional lynching, for whatever reason, served a useful purpose, that periodically it became necessary to remind a new generation of blacks of their place in southern society.

It would strain all credulity to believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene has read Litwack’s book (or any other serious works of American history). Yet, she is offering a perfect 21st-century reenactment of his descriptions of America’s lynching culture. In that way, perhaps Greene is some type of idiot savant in white supremacy and racism.

History is a moving train.

The America of today is not the same country as it was during Jim and Jane Crow (although the Trumpists and Republican fascists and the larger White Right and MAGAites are desperately trying to recreate it). There has been too much blood spilled, sacrifices made, and progress earned along the color line to suggest that the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement and its hope warriors of all colors did not win many victories to improve America and its democracy and larger society for all people.

However, America’s foundation and its culture are still rotting away from racism and white supremacy and the many forms of social inequality that it nurtures and spreads. In the end, white supremacy, be it in the form of Trumpism or some of other form of neofascism and white racial authoritarianism, will bring the ultimate destruction of American democracy and society.

History is a moving train and at the same time, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Stand your ground set the stage: How we let fascism creep in

In that way, it is “progress” that after Marjorie Taylor Greene summoned up her racist threats and lies that Rep. Bowman was not chased down and murdered by a white lynching party after they tortured him. It is another type of progress as well, that Rep. Bowman, a Black man, is even a member of Congress. He knows that history and stands on the shoulders of those 16 Black men who served as Representatives during Reconstruction and the hundreds of others who held office in local and state governments across the former Confederacy. A white supremacist backlash ended the great experiment in multiracial democracy that was Reconstruction, and those Black men were forced from office not just in Congress but across the South and other parts of the country.

On Jan. 6, the descendants of the Confederacy and Jim and Jane Crow White America, besieged and overran Congress with the goal of keeping Trump in power indefinitely. The Trump terrorists waved Confederate flags, erected a gallows across the street from the Capitol, carried a White Christian Cross like the Klan, and had many neo-Nazis, Kluxers, and other white supremacist thugs among their mob. The Trump terrorists hurled racial invective at the Black police officers who valiantly defended the Capitol – and American democracy – with their lives. It is no coincidence that Marjorie Taylor Greene supported – and still does – Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6 and his attempt to end multiracial pluralistic democracy.

Most of the Black people who were victims of America’s lynching culture and its Jim and Jane Crow terror regime were denied, literally, the opportunity to speak back to their killers and other assailants. (The white on Black spectacular lynching was a type of ritual; as part of that ritual, one of the common tortures consisted of cutting off the victim’s tongue as well as other body parts and selling them as souvenirs). To honor those ancestors, I am ending this essay with Rep. Bowman’s own words about his encounter with Marjorie Taylor Greene:

So for her the next morning to say what she said, I mean, is a complete 180, number one. It’s no longer comical now because now you are using historical racist tropes toward Black men — ‘menacing,’ ‘his mannerisms,’ ‘I’m afraid.’ That’s the stuff that got Trayvon Martin killed, Tamir Rice killed, Michael Brown….This is another reason why we need to teach the accurate history of America in our schools and make sure African American history is a part of that because [of] her rhetoric and her behavior in Congress outside of me….

This is dangerous territory we’re walking in here, and we have to be clear about that…And we need her to say on the record — one, she should apologize to me on record. Two, ask her directly, ‘Do you want physical violence to be inflicted on Congressman Bowman?'”

At the end of her statement it was, ‘We need to watch him.’ That’s almost like Donald Trump’s ‘Stand by and stand back’ to the Proud Boys at that debate a couple years ago. ‘We need to watch him’ — What are you saying?”…

She’s not even using a dog whistle. She’s using a bullhorn to put a target on my back….Throughout history, Black men have continually been characterized as aggressive because, one, of our skin color, but two, because we happen to be outspoken and passionate about certain issues

about this topic

Stand your ground set the stage: How we let fascism creep in

“Who Killed Jordan Neely?”

Of course, everyone knows he was killed by the chokehold applied by an ex-marine who throttled him on a New York subway train; it’s on video. The real question is what killed Neely, and I can answer that.

Stand your ground killed Jordan Neely.

The stand your ground principle, as written into law, means if you’re doing something I don’t like I get to kill you.

If you’re trying to understand why the man in Texas killed his neighbors when they asked him to stop shooting his gun in his yard near midnight so their baby could sleep, the answer is stand your ground. If you want to understand why the man shot the Black child who came to the wrong house to pick up his young siblings, the answer is stand your ground. The girl who pulled into a driveway to turn around, the girls who approached the wrong car, the child whose basketball rolled into the wrong yard.

The Florida school district that banned the book on segregation? Stand your ground. “I don’t like it so I get to kill it.”

Greg Abbott demonized the victims of the Texas shooting. It says a lot about why the GOP loves guns

This is stand your ground culture. And stand your ground is stupid on its best days; most days it’s wicked. “Get off my lawn” is infantile, but at least it’s based in reality: it is after all your lawn and you get to say who gets to stand on it, even if you’re kind of a boob. And once the offending party gets off your lawn, tempers cool. But what if you decide the whole world is your lawn? Like Hitler did, like Stalin did, like Mussolini did, like George Zimmerman did?

The Reichstag Fire was a stand your ground event: a good excuse for the Nazis to feel threatened and do whatever they wanted to defend themselves.

So let’s go back to the outset: Kid with a hoodie walking through your neighborhood? The 911 operator tells you to leave him alone? You can chase him down and start a fight, and the minute he fights back you get to kill him because you feel threatened. That of course was Trayvon Martin, but if you think just ignoring the police and chasing someone down to kill him is as far as stand your ground goes, think back to Kyle Rittenhouse, who stood his ground by bringing a gun to a chaotic protest and killing two unarmed people when — naturally — Rittenhouse felt threatened. That’s a lot of ground to stand, but Rittenhouse was willing to drive across state lines to stand it.

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For a long time it was fun to note that the motto of conservatives and gun nuts was “Death before discomfort,” because they’re willing to engage in total political war over anything in any way less than exactly what they want. School library has a book you don’t like? Don’t tell your kid not to read it: demand that the entire school system remove the book from the library. Don’t like birth control? It’s not enough not to use it; you need to make sure nobody else can. Don’t like gay marriage? It’s not enough to not marry someone gay; you need to make sure nobody you don’t approve of can get married.

Stand your ground has been the principle of people who want to control other people forever. The Reichstag Fire was a stand your ground event: a good excuse for the Nazis to feel threatened and do whatever they wanted to defend themselves. Whether they were ever actually threatened, of course, is beside the point. They decided they felt threatened, and they took action they felt their nervousness justified. Stand your ground has been around even longer. The Nazis came to the American South to learn how to dehumanize a group they wanted to oppress, because the American South is the champion of stand your ground. It started, and for closing in on two centuries has defended, a stand your ground war. The southern states decided they were no longer going to play by the rules of the Constitution they had ratified, so they started firing cannonballs at Fort Sumter, a military installation of the United States. When the United States military had the temerity to fire back — to stand its ground — the southern states, of course, felt threatened, and to this day you hear Southerners of a certain cast describe “the war of northern aggression.”

Texas mall mass shooter: A familiar tale of the misogyny-to-fascism pipeline

We used to say that my right to swing my fist ended at your nose. Under stand your ground, noses have lost their standing, and if your nose makes my fist feel threatened, your nose should have known better than to start up with my fist. Or at least if your nose planned to be standing where I might conceivably swing my fist, well then it got what was coming to it. What was Charlottesville in 2017, after all, other than a stand-your-ground rally: we’ll choose a place, stage an offensive protest that guarantees a counterprotest, and then we’ll kill one of the counterprotesters because we feel threatened.

And here’s where I’m supposed to suggest a course of action. Regrettably I cannot.

Stand your ground makes the standard fascist claim: everyone agrees except you, and we’re all defending ourselves against you. Once a group starts making that claim, it’s not going to end well for whoever their current “you” turns out to be. They’ve decided all the ground is theirs, and the rest of us standing anywhere makes them feel threatened. Since all the ground is theirs, we have no way to get off it. And since they feel threatened, we know what’s coming.

I suggest we prepare to stand our ground.

Now U.S. national security experts call for peace talks in Ukraine: Is Biden listening?

On May 16, The New York Times published a full-page advertisement signed by 15 U.S. national security experts about the war in Ukraine. It was headed “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World,” and was drafted by the Eisenhower Media Network.

While condemning Russia’s invasion, the statement provides a more objective account of the crisis in Ukraine than the U.S. government or the New York Times has previously presented to the public, including the disastrous U.S. role in NATO expansion, the warnings ignored by successive U.S. administrations and the escalating tensions that ultimately led to war.

The statement calls the war an “unmitigated disaster,” and urges President Biden and Congress “to end the war speedily through diplomacy, especially given the dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.”

This call for diplomacy by wise, experienced former insiders — U.S. diplomats, military officers and civilian officials — would have been a welcome intervention on any one of the past 442 days of this war. Yet their appeal now comes at an especially critical moment in the war.

What’s the deal in Ukraine after a year of war? Let Leon Trotsky explain

On May 10, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he would delay Ukraine’s long-awaited “spring offensive” to avoid “unacceptable” losses to Ukrainian forces. Western policy has repeatedly put Zelenskyy in near-impossible positions, caught between the need to show signs of progress on the battlefield to justify further Western support and arms deliveries and, on the other hand, the shocking human cost of continued war represented by the fresh graveyards where tens of thousands of Ukrainians now lie buried.

It is not clear how a delay in the planned Ukrainian counterattack would prevent it leading to unacceptable Ukrainian losses when it finally occurs, unless the delay in fact leads to scaling back and calling off many of the operations that have been planned. Zelenskyy appears to be reaching a limit in terms of how many more of his people he is willing to sacrifice to satisfy Western demands for signs of military progress to hold together the Western alliance and maintain the flow of weapons and money to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s predicament is certainly the fault of Russia’s invasion, but also of his April 2022 deal with the devil in the shape of then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson promised Zelenskyy that the U.K. and the “collective West” were “in it for the long run” and would back him to recover all of Ukraine’s former territory, just as long as Ukraine stopped negotiating with Russia.

Johnson was never in a position to fulfill that promise and after being forced to resign as prime minister has endorsed a Russian withdrawal only from the territory it invaded since February 2022, not a return to pre-2014 borders. Yet that compromise was exactly what he talked Zelenskyy out of agreeing to in April 2022, when most of the war’s dead were still alive and the framework of a peace agreement was on the table at diplomatic talks in Turkey.

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Zelenskyy has tried desperately to hold his Western backers to Johnson’s overblown promise. But short of direct U.S. and NATO military intervention, it seems that no quantity of Western weapons can decisively break the stalemate in what has degenerated into a brutal war of attrition, fought mainly by artillery and trench and urban warfare.

An American general bragged that the West has supplied Ukraine with 600 different weapons systems, but this itself creates problems. For example, the different 105mm guns sent by the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. all use different shells. And each time heavy losses force Ukraine to re-form survivors into new units, many of them have to be retrained on weapons and equipment they’ve never used before.

Zelenskyy finds himself in a nearly impossible position, torn between the need to show progress on the battlefield and the dreadful human cost. That’s Russia’s fault, of course — but it’s also Boris Johnson’s fault.

Despite U.S. deliveries of at least six types of anti-aircraft missiles — Stinger, NASAMS, Hawk, Rim-7, Avenger and at least one Patriot missile battery — a leaked Pentagon document revealed that Ukraine’s Russian-built S-300 and Buk anti-aircraft systems still make up almost 90 percent of its main air defenses. NATO countries have searched their weapons stockpiles for all the missiles they can provide for those systems, but Ukraine has nearly exhausted those supplies, leaving its forces newly vulnerable to Russian air strikes just as it prepares to launch its new counter-attack.

Since at least June 2022, Biden and other U.S. officials have acknowledged that the war must end in a diplomatic settlement, and have insisted that they are arming Ukraine to put it “in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” Until now, they have claimed that each new weapons system they have sent and each Ukrainian counter-offensive have contributed to that goal and left Ukraine in a stronger position.

But the leaked Pentagon documents and recent statements by U.S. and Ukrainian officials make it clear that Ukraine’s planned spring offensive, already delayed into summer, would lack the previous element of surprise and encounter stronger Russian defenses than the offensives that recovered some of its lost territory last fall.

One leaked Pentagon document warned that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” concluding that it would probably make smaller territorial gains than the fall offensives did.

How can a new offensive with mixed results and higher casualties put Ukraine in a stronger position at a currently nonexistent negotiating table? If the offensive reveals that even huge quantities of Western military aid have failed to give Ukraine military superiority or reduce its casualties to a sustainable level, it could very well leave Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position, not a stronger one.

Meanwhile, offers to mediate peace talks have been pouring in from countries all over the world, from the Vatican to China to Brazil. It has been six months since the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, suggested publicly, after Ukraine’s military gains last fall, that the moment had come to negotiate from a position of strength. “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” he said.

It would be doubly or triply tragic if, on top of the diplomatic failures that led to the war in the first place and the U.S. and U.K. undermining peace negotiations in April 2022, the chance for diplomacy that Milley wanted to seize is lost in the forlorn hope of attaining an even stronger negotiating position that is not really achievable.

If the United States persists in backing the plan for a Ukrainian offensive, instead of encouraging Zelenskyy to seize the moment for diplomacy, it will share considerable responsibility for the appalling and ever-rising human costs of this war.

The experts who signed the New York Times statement recalled that, in 1997, 50 senior U.S. foreign policy experts warned President Bill Clinton that expanding NATO was a “policy error of historic proportions” and that, unfortunately, Clinton chose to ignore the warning. Biden, who is now pursuing his own policy error of historic proportions by prolonging this war, would do well to take the advice of today’s policy experts by helping to forge a diplomatic settlement and making the U.S. a force for peace in the world.

perspectives on the Ukraine war

“Tom Jones” finale highlights all the women he did wrong: “Actions have consequences”

“Silly old bat. She’s well past the age of love.”

In PBS’ adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel “Tom Jones,” this heartless statement is uttered about Lady Bellaston (Hannah Waddingham), a wealthy older woman with whom Tom (Solly McLeod) is having a transactional affair. Tom’s friend Nightingale (Will Fletcher) makes the declaration to rationalize a nasty letter they’re about to send her in which Tom will declare his love and propose marriage.

This is not the romantic gesture it may seem, but rather a salvo to call her bluff. Lady Bellaston has been possessive of Tom’s affections, to the point that he fears she’ll expose their affair to his true love Sophia (Sophie Wilde). Nightingale believes this proposal will disgust Lady Bellaston, since it implies that Tom has only been sleeping with her in order to become her husband, which comes with the rights to control her money.

“You have to make it fun”: “Tom Jones” star on shooting awkward sex scenes with Hannah Waddingham

After receiving the letter, Lady Bellaston is indeed upset and breaks off her relationship with Tom. But it’s not mere disgust, it’s heartbreak.

“I see I have wasted my affection on a heartless joker,” she tells him through tears. “Am I such a fool that I should deliver my entire fortune into your power? To call you husband and bow to your command? I know you now, Mr. Jones, as a worthless villain and I despise you from my soul.”

McLeod broke down that scene for Salon.

“She’s spoiled, rich, nasty, but ultimately still vulnerable to love and disappointment.”

“That’s almost the first point you see Lady Bellaston feel something,” he said. “It kind of seems like she’s been playing him a little bit, and the tables have turned. There’s a vulnerability there, and Hannah does it so well. I didn’t have to do much. I was like, she genuinely loves Tom, and I felt bad for her.”

Clearly, women over a certain age are not past the age of love, much less desire or sex. And this is something that writer Gwyneth Hughes wanted to explore when it came to Lady Bellaston, a character who was treated with much less nuance and depth in the original text.

“Fielding thinks she’s a silly old cow,” Hughes told Salon. “Two things happened to her character in Fielding. One is she just disappeared in the end. There’s no real ending to her story. And the other is that there’s none of the sense of tragedy that I’ve tried to bring to it.

“I was writing a part for an older woman in love with a young man, and a lot of the audience are that age group and don’t want to be told they’re too old for love,” Hughes continued. “So I really wanted to inhabit her properly and attract an actress with a character who is not a grotesque. She’s spoiled, rich, nasty, but ultimately still vulnerable to love and disappointment. My Lady Bellaston, I wouldn’t say she’s a nicer but she’s certainly more human than Fielding’s.”

Landing “Ted Lasso” star Hannah Waddingham was key to conveying this humanity.

“She’s such a goddess,” said Hughes. “I was thrilled when we got her because there are dozen actresses who can play these things but she’s Lady Bellaston. She’s not afraid to be grotesque, but she’s also totally there for the the vulnerability and the and the rage.”

There’s no doubt in Hughes’ mind that Lady Bellaston truly loves Tom, which explains the hurt reaction and her scheme to destroy his chances at happiness with Sophia.

“The thing about Tom is that he’s completely authentic. He’s a real person,” said Hughes. “He’s full of love. He’s full of virtues. He’s just a kind person, and he’s really hot, obviously. She falls for him but she doesn’t expect to do that. I believe that Lady Bellaston is really properly in love with Tom. Everything that she does is motivated by horror and grief and misery, and she behaves really badly, but she does really love him to the extent that she’s capable of love.”

Tom’s two mothers

Felicity Montagu and James Fleet as Bridget and Squire Allworthy in “Tom Jones” (PBS)For Lady Bellaston’s revenge scheme, she holds a gathering at her home and makes a public spectacle of humiliating Sophia by showing her Tom’s marriage proposal letter. In the ensuing chaos, Tom also gets pulled into a duel and impales another man, which sends him to prison. It’s during this confinement that he discovers that Mrs. Waters (Susannah Fielding), the woman whom he slept with while on the road to London, is none other than Jenny Jones, the woman who claimed to have given birth to Tom 20 years ago.

Facing a possible hanging and believing that he has committed incest sends the usually sunny Tom to his nadir.

“He screams. It’s the first time you see him angry and upset,” said McLeod. ” There’s nothing worse than that. It shows Tom’s willpower, in a way, because at that point, he’s gone through all of this. He’s trying to do things right. He keeps getting knocked down, keeps getting back up again. And it’s at this point where you think, Oh, maybe he’s not gonna make it?”

“That’s the payback for being silly and getting in bed with these women back then.”

Fortunately, this is not “Game of Thrones” or “House of the Dragon,” and incest has not occurred. It turns out that Jenny was paid to lie about Tom’s parentage in order to protect Bridget Allworthy (Felicity Montagu). As part of the gentry but unmarried, Bridget would have lost her reputation had the illegitimate birth been known then.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she tells Tom in the finale. “I couldn’t tell anyone, an unmarried lady. What would the world have said?”

In adapting the novel, Hughes always knew she wanted to keep the incest scare intact.

“That’s the payback for being silly and getting in bed with these women back then. In Fielding, it’s very important that that will pay off. Actions have consequences,” said Hughes. “It’s a romantic comedy. I don’t really mind if people laugh because in the end he gets a hug from his mom.”

Speaking of, that hug certainly does not happen in the novel. In fact, Bridget isn’t even around. She dies in the book.

Hughes explained, “My boss just rang me up one day and said, ‘I know you’re going to hate this. But do you think you can just let Bridget live?’ He wanted Tom to have some closure and meet his mom, that the ‘Masterpiece’ audience were going to want him to meet his mom.”

The sexual celebration of mature women in bloom, from “Queen Charlotte” to Martha Stewart

And in the end, while it’s not Tom’s fault, his birth is the catalyst for changing these two women’s lives. Despite – or because of her status – Bridget is forced to give him up. While she is able to dote on him since her brother takes him in, she hadn’t been to acknowledge his parentage, and this secret ultimately creates a toxic dynamic with her second-born son, the legitimate Blifil (James Wilbraham). Overcompensating for Tom’s bastard status, she is overly warm to him and consistently neglects Blifil, which has caused him to grow up jealous and bitter.

“That’s disgusting,” Blifil tells Bridget upon finding out her secret. “Did you think I didn’t know? I see it so clearly. You always loved him more than me. You’re his family.”

Meanwhile, Jenny may have temporarily benefitted for pretending to be his parent, but she was forced to leave home. All of these lives changed irrevocably because of the strict dictates of a patriarchal society that equates legitimacy with worth and morality.

Sophia wins in the end . . . or does she?

Sophie Wilde as Sophia Western in “Tom Jones” (PBS)In a bid to diversify the casting – an effort seen across most Western television – Hughes race-bent the character Sophia to be a young Black woman, the child of Squire Western’s (Alun Amstrong) son and one of his enslaved workers in Jamaica. It’s a similar background to “Sanditon” heiress Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke).

“I did lots of research and found in Jamaica, these white British blokes would get these slave women pregnant and accept the children because they had no other children,” said Hughes. “And there was one guy in particular who had nine children who sent them all back to England to be educated at vast expense, and those children inherited the estate.

“That’s my story. That this this man, Squire Western who we meet had one son, who went to Jamaica to make his fortune, died of a tropical illness had sired this one child. She’s the only heir he has, so he brings her home, raises her, educates her and makes her his heiress. So it works. It’s true. It’s historically plausible, and it did happen.”

From the beginning, Hughes gives the onscreen Sophia a power that she does not have in the novel; she narrates the series. This power was not granted for feminist, modern motives, but rather from a filmmaking, storytelling perspective.

“Obviously it’s called ‘Tom Jones,’ and it’s basically about Tom’s story. In a novel, you can have a character who bumbles about through life and to whom things happen. That’s kind of interesting and jolly,” said Hughes. “In film classically, that’s not the way we do things. It’s clear as day when you read the book. I thought that the person motivating the action, the central character in a moviemaker’s terms, it’s Sophia.

“Tom gets thrown out of his home – a passive throwing out of home – but she leaves hers,” Hughes continued. “She leaves everything she’s ever known. She’s a young woman in great danger. She goes out into the world in pursuit of this unsuitable young man. She’s the active character. I began to see that the driving energy, the driving sexual energy in the book comes from her. She’s 18 years old and a virgin. Her awakening, if you like, sexual adulthood is motoring the entire story.”

Despite not being buffeted around by the winds of fate as much as Tom is, Sophia is nevertheless a young, unmarried woman. That means for that era, virginity is her biggest asset, and that marriage is her ultimate goal.

Sophia’s Aunt Western (Shirley Henderson), who is an independent unmarried woman, may rail about “the tyranny of idiot menfolk,” but even she understands the world they live in. She helps to get Tom back – despite his sleeping with two other women after he had declared his love for Sophia – to marry her niece.

“Welcome to the 18th century,” Hughes said. The writer may have been able to infuse a bit of the 21st century aesthetic to the story through casting and narration. However, the story’s rom-com nature, and the realities of the time period dictated that her heroine take action to avoid two worst fates: spinsterhood or marrying Blifil against her will.

Despite making a half-hearted attempt at making Tom squirm, she gives into his marriage proposal because her grandfather orders her to marry. It’s a shiny, happy ending for all the good folk in Somerset, but at the same time, while Sophia is in love with Tom, it’s not entirely clear if her true desires are actually met or if she knew this was the best option open to her.

Sophie Wilde and Solly McLeod as Sophia Western and Tom Jones in “Tom Jones” (PBS)After all, Tom had declared his everlasting love for her and then shortly afterward slept with two other women – one in the hotel room next door to hers, and one on an ongoing basis for money. Of course, he didn’t need to be faithful after not being able to marry her, and he is only in his 20s, but the double standard is highlighted by his actions. His future is not ruined for these slips, but hers could be if the roles were reversed.

Hughes acknowledges the ways the period drama glosses over the harsher realities. “You should never romanticize the past,” she said. “The past is miserable. Women died constantly in childbirth, and we got the plague and slavery – it was horrible.”

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However, the way that Tom and Sophia meet and have an instant attraction, that’s something that Hughes believes is the true value of the time period and this story.

“One things I find charming about this story is that these young people can meet across a crowded stableyard or fall in love and off they go,” she said. “In [that] age, there’s no swiping, there’s no internet dating. There’s some agony about you don’t want to get pregnant, about class and illness and all the terrible things that went on. But they had the chance of more instant human connection with each other. That human connection I think I really responded to.”

“Tom Jones” is now streaming.

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