Rachel Antonoff details her love for food, fashion and their inextricable connection

When I think of my favorite food memories, my mind goes a million different directions at once. There’s the green Shrek-themed ketchup that my sister begged my dad to buy on one of our family shopping trips. I was maybe 9, she was maybe 6 and whenever we were at his house for the week, he’d let us pick out one junk food item each. It was thrilling to say the least. (My sister ate that ketchup exactly one time and then it was banished to the back of the fridge for entirely too long.) There’s the unparalleled experience of eating a fresh batch of Fisher’s Popcorn after spending a morning playing in the waves in Rehoboth Beach, Del., fingers pruny and salted from the ocean, mind at ease because summer vacation was in full swing. There’s my grandma’s potato salad that she made whenever we had a crab boil, birthday or other family gathering, forever insisting on Helman’s over Duke’s. There’s the beautifully charred, impossibly flavorful flank steak my mom would grill and serve alongside a too-big salad and plenty of other fixin’s when the weather was nice and she had time to cook dinner after a full day in her catering kitchen. These memories are a blend of low-brow and (occasional) high-brow foods that make up the whole of my gustatory past — a thrilling culinary joy ride, if you will.

Even more thrilling? Discovering that one of your core food memories is shared by an acquaintance, maybe a coworker or a classmate or the guy you met on Tinder six years ago and then ended up marrying (happy anniversary, Nick). Slap those memorable dishes on an article of clothing and you’ve basically got a walking billboard for food nostalgia — that’s Rachel Antonoff‘s latest line of edible-themed garments in a nutshell. Rachel founded her eponymous fashion brand in 2008, releasing her first line a year later. Over the decade plus since the brand has been around, there have been a few constants: inclusive sizing, ethical production, garments that are actually comfortable to wear and irreverent prints that either perplex or delight (or both) and often feature food. From an internet-breaking pasta puffer to a key lime pie print created from Rachel’s latest baking obsession, I sat down with the designer to talk all things food, fashion and inspiring trips to Florida.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MADISON TRAPKIN: Can you describe your ideal lunch date? Where are you going? What are you eating and what are you wearing?

RACHEL ANTONOFF: Can I be anywhere? And can I be a bummer?

MT: Yes and yes.

RA: So, there are a few versions. My mind immediately goes to Paris because it’s just my favorite place to eat. I’d probably be having roast chicken with French fries with a lot of mustard to dip both in. I don’t know exactly where, but I feel like that’s one of the things about chicken in Paris — you can sit down almost anywhere and it’s going to be great. The bummer is, I was thinking the first person I’d want to have lunch with would be my sister. She’s dead, but it would be really fun to see her. I’m so sorry.

MT: Don’t apologize! I think that’s really beautiful.

RA: Actually, I want to revise that because I feel like it would be so great to see her that it would be too distracting. I guess then the next person would be my brother because we both love food and there’s zero pressure to maintain a conversation. My friend Fred is my current favorite eating buddy. We were actually just in Paris at the same time and so I know for a fact that he’s just a perfect eating friend.

MT: And he’s down to eat a chicken with you anywhere.

RA: He’s down to eat anything anywhere. With Fred, we’d be in Long Beach Island, New Jersey at the Holiday Snack Bar. It’s a single, circular counter in this very small house. They have burgers and grilled cheese and then right in the middle of the counter is this table filled with the most beautiful cakes you’ve ever seen. Not even fancy beautiful, just like a chocolate cake with white icing, a vanilla cake with chocolate icing. Like a Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda situation.

MT: Basically the most picture-perfect chocolate cake you’ve ever seen in your life. What are you wearing to this lunch date?

RA: Well, I can tell you what I’m not wearing, which is anything with an even remotely fitted waist. I can’t stand discomfort in general. Eating is so fun and important to me. It’s not just something that I do for sustenance, although that is a wonderful byproduct, it’s a hobby. And so I always want to make sure when I’m going to dinner — and we really take this into account when we’re designing — is like, are you going to be able to really go for it in this outfit? And if not, I don’t want to wear it and I don’t really want to put it out there either.

MT: It’s important to be prepared for all things, especially eating.

RA: So, what am I wearing? I’m wearing a loose, tent-y dress, one that hovers around you but almost never even touches you and a slide of some sort that took no effort to put on.

MT: And you can take a post-meal nap very easily.

RA: Exactly.

MT: Have you always known that food would find its way into your designs?

RA: I always wished it would. We’ve had a strange journey as a company because we spent a really, really long time dealing with the stuff that we wanted to design versus the stuff that we were being told people wanted from us. The collections used to be heavily divided between what we would call press pieces and sales pieces and the press pieces were the s*** that we were actually excited to make. We figured that no one would actually buy the press pieces and the sales pieces were basically what we thought department stores wanted to buy. Then the pandemic happened and we were fully prepared to go out of business. But that’s when something just changed, there was a major attitude shift happening with regard to dressing. People started buying the press pieces, so we pushed the line further and further with things like our seafood tower dress. That was one that we were like, this is going to be very insider baseball, this is just for us. Now it’s a best-seller.

MT: It is! I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the extended sizing to drop because that dress is my most coveted item.

RA: It’s coming soon!

MT: I agree that there’s been a shift in the way we dress in the past few years, more of a mentality of dressing however the f*** you want. I’m really curious to know where the ideas come from for the various food items, like your key lime pie dress. Can you tell me about your process?

RA: Well, I’m a truly heinous cook, but a prolific baker. My brother described my cooking perfectly, which is that the best thing I made is something that you would still at least consider sending back at a restaurant.

MT: Hell yeah, so nice of him.

RA: That’s what it is though! So I don’t even really bother cooking, but I love to bake. It’s a true hobby and it brings me joy. A lot of our design ideas come from whatever I’m baking at the time, but the key lime pie print was the first print where we actually took pictures of a bunch of my pies and used those photos to make the print. I feel really proud because those are actual pies on the dress.

MT: What an incredible transformation! The pie goes from being a physical thing to a photo on a screen and then back into a physical thing that someone can wear. It’s pretty special.

RA: And then you can eat a pie in it!

MT: Pie-ception!

RA: My key lime pie obsession has been going on for over a year, so there aren’t really that many new things to take from my baking because . . . we’re still on pie.

MT: That’s kind of a good problem, right?

RA: Actually, my friends and family are legitimately annoyed. I’ve told them they can say no, that they don’t have to taste the pie anymore, but my immediate family still tastes it. My mom’s cholesterol is bad now, which she’s credited to the baking.

MT: What inspired the key lime, specifically?

RA: My friend and I went to Florida to visit his parents, which is where I discovered and fell in love with key lime pie. I mean, I always liked it, but I started making them a year ago when we did that. Now that I’ve started making them for myself — this is hideous to say — but I actually think I like mine better.

MT: I think that means you’re a pastry chef now?

RA: I’ll be quoting you on that.

MT: Speaking of pastry chefs, I feel like you have so many special connections with people in food. How do you relate to the food industry as a whole?

RA: I think the best parts of fashion are the bits that overlap with everything good about food, which is silliness and fun and sharing and community. Whenever I meet someone who actually works in food, it’s so cool and exciting to me, I’m just such a fan. Like one of my friends, this guy Alex Hong. He has a restaurant in San Francisco called Sorrel and they just got a Michelin star. It’s the sort of food where I don’t even understand the sum of whatever the parts were that came to make it, his cooking is so wildly impressive. Otherwise, I’m just a fan of food people, like Caroline Schiff and Nicole Rucker, I’m in awe of their abilities. And yeah, it does inspire me in terms of design. Caroline and I have been talking about doing a baked Alaska piece of some sort.

MT: A Baked Alaska collab with Caroline would be so perfect.

RA: She also had this great idea of hosting a Seder dinner together.

MT: That would be so beautiful! How do cultural traditions like those influence your designs?

RA: I think another thing clothes and food have in common is a deep connection to nostalgia. I’ve noticed that with the stuff we make, there are certain niche foods that are sort of zeitgeisty because they’re so nostalgic. Like, we all like French fries, we all like pizza. But there’s something about a rainbow cookie that feels like your grandmother’s house or a comforting shiva.

MT: It’s a specificity of time place with foods like the rainbow cookie, while pizza and French fries are really anywhere and everywhere.

RA: Exactly. And yeah, we’ve all come together and decided we like French fries. We know. We get it. But no one’s making French fries their personality, whereas I feel like it is very comforting in a lonely world to find that connection point of like, “Oh, I too love that specific food that is maybe specific to both of our cultures.”

MT: Yeah, absolutely. I think the boom of your wackiest, ultra-specific food designs during COVID, a time when we were all searching for that sort of connectivity, makes so much sense. If we could wear those designs at the same time even though we couldn’t physically be together, it was almost like we were still in community with each other in that way. Do you think you’ll keep designing food-centric pieces?

RA: Definitely, I think those are here to stay for us. I feel like I never know how to predict trends, but I do think that food and animals (as they relate to fashion) are probably never really going anywhere. They’re both shared identity things that I think we love to be able to identify in another person, like I’m a cat person or you’re a dog person. That connects us.

MT: It’s almost like you know so much about a person from their favorite food immediately. Like, you love seafood towers? I know exactly what it would be like to hang out with you. What’s your favorite food? And you can’t say key lime pie.

RA: I couldn’t possibly not break it down into categories. I really love a great pancake and I love to push for pancakes for the table, especially when I know that not everyone’s going to really want them.

MT: You’ll eat them mostly.

RA: Yeah, I’m absolutely doing that, but if that’s not a thing, I will just order the pancakes. It’s so fun to be able to go back and forth with different bites of different dishes.

MT: To have both the sweet and the savory!

RA: Exactly. I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older and continue to be single and therefore often exploring this world on my own, I really refuse to not taste all the dishes I want just because I’m eating alone. Granted, this is a very privileged approach, but I got a reservation at Lilia a few weeks ago where it’s impossible to even get in the first place, so I wasn’t going to go in order and just order one pasta.

MT: No, you have to order a lot of things and you will probably take them home and enjoy the leftovers for a long time.

RA: That’s exactly what I did. I had leftovers for days and it was thrilling. Expensive? Yes. But I don’t want to just have the pancakes, metaphorically and literally.

Private planes and luxury yachts aren’t just toys for the ultrawealthy. They’re also huge tax breaks

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

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

Flying to Ireland to inhale the seaside air as you drive a golf ball into the scenic distance. Crossing the country to reach your enormous yacht, which is ready for your Hudson River pleasure cruise. Hosting a governor’s wife on your very own aircraft. These are only a few of the joys that the richest Americans have experienced in recent years through their private jets. And what made them all the sweeter is that they came with a tax write-off.

Over the past two years, ProPublica has documented the many ways that the ultrawealthy avoid taxes. The biggest or most daring maneuvers scale in the billions of dollars, and while the tax deductibility of private jets isn’t the most important feature of U.S. tax law, the fact that billionaires’ luxury rides come with millions in tax savings says a lot about how the system really works.

There are dozens of examples of wealthy Americans taking these sorts of deductions, which are premised on the notion that the planes are used mainly for business, in the massive trove of tax records that have formed the basis for ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series. The ultrawealthy, however, can easily blur business and pleasure. And when they purport to make their planes available for leasing, to fulfill one definition of using the planes for business, they tend to be more adept at generating tax deductions than revenue.

Tony Alvarez and Bryan Marsal built a successful consulting firm specializing in restructuring — advising struggling or bankrupt companies on what to sell and whom to lay off. It can be a grim business: Marsal has been known to announce to prone firms that they were now a “community of pain.” But the partners, who are also close friends, own another enterprise, the Hogs Head Golf Club (“Built by Friends, for Friends, for Fun”), on the southwest coast of Ireland. It boasts views of the nearby mountains and bay.

In 2016, before opening their new course, the pair teamed up, via an LLC they named after their golf club, to buy a 2001 Gulfstream IV jet. The next year, President Donald Trump signed his big tax cut into law. It made buying a plane even more attractive: The full price of the plane could be deducted in the first year, a perk called “bonus depreciation.” Before, depreciation was typically only partially front-loaded, with the full balance spread over five years. The law also for the first time made pre-owned planes eligible for this treatment.

As a result, when Alvarez and Marsal sprang for their second plane in 2018, this one a Gulfstream V, the entire cost was deductible. That year, the pair’s two planes netted them a tax deduction of $14 million.

Last August, their Gulfstream V took off from Westchester County Airport in New York state for Ireland. About an hour later, their Gulfstream IV left for the same destination, a small airport in County Kerry near their club. Both planes can comfortably seat over a dozen passengers, but flight records don’t show who was on board. Over the coming month and a half, the two planes crisscrossed the Atlantic several times.

Were these business trips? Possibly, yes. (ProPublica’s records do not indicate whether specific trips were taken as deductions.) If so, operating expenses — including crew, fuel and other costs — from the partners’ trips to oversee the course would be fully deductible. These deductions would come in addition to depreciation.

Michael Kosnitzky, co-chair of the private client and family office group at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop, said his wealthy clients often own a business, such as an art gallery, in the same area where they own a vacation home. If the main purpose of a flight there is to attend to that business, jet owners must take care to make that as clear as possible. “I advise my clients to go to their secondary business location first” upon landing, he said, as a way to help build the case.

Accounting for how a jet is used can get complicated. If nonbusiness guests, such as family, ride along on a business flight, it’s treated as a fringe benefit, which is taxable. (The benefit is typically attributed to the jet owner, experts said.) But that wrinkle isn’t too bad: The IRS formula used to calculate the benefit drastically undervalues the cost of riding on a private jet and is closer to the price of a first-class commercial ticket.

Last Christmas, flight records show the two Gulfstreams again leaving together, this time to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. While Alvarez and Marsal’s consulting firm boasts an office in the Cayman Islands, there isn’t one on these particular islands (which are about 1,400 miles from the Caymans), making it appear this was a family trip. Operating costs from “entertainment” flights like these are not deductible under tax law. But indulging in some pleasure doesn’t necessarily imperil the key tax prize of bonus depreciation: As long as, over the course of a year, the jet is used over 50% of the time for business, the owner gets to keep that perk.

A spokesperson for Alvarez and Marsal’s firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Mori Hosseini made his fortune as a Florida homebuilder and has owned a plane since at least 2006. When Trump’s tax bill began to gain momentum in Congress in the fall of 2017, he decided it was time for a new jet.

The $19.5 million he paid for his nine-seat Bombardier Challenger 350 appeared as a deduction on his 2017 taxes, leading to almost $8 million in tax savings right off the bat. But there were more deductions to come. Even the interest on the loan he’d taken out to buy the plane was deductible, and his 2018 taxes show a $600,000 expense.

Soon, Hosseini, a longtime Republican donor and close adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was helping the governor and his family travel in style. In 2019, DeSantis’ wife, Casey, flew on the jet from Tallahassee to Jacksonville to attend a fundraiser held by a defense contractor. It was just one of several times that the DeSantises or the campaign have used the jet over the past few years, according to campaign finance records. Such flights are generally allowed under Florida law as long as they are disclosed as in-kind contributions. Hosseini did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

On his taxes, Hosseini says the LLC that holds his plane is in the business of “aircraft leasing.” It’s a very common move among jet owners. When they are not using the plane, they rent out the plane for charter flights, usually via an independent leasing company. Not only does this defray the costs of ownership, but it has tax benefits, too. It helps them establish that they bought the aircraft for a business purpose, the business of chartering.

In theory, taxpayers aren’t allowed to deduct losses from something that has no hope of being a profitable business. In practice, though, some billionaire-owned operations that look like expensive hobbies, such as racing horses in the Kentucky Derby, rack up business deductions by the tens of millions of dollars.

ProPublica examined the tax records of over 30 wealthy Americans who owned planes, and one thing was very clear: Profits in the airplane chartering business for this set, judging from their taxes, were extremely rare. Hosseini’s records show two years of profit over an eleven-year period.

Or take George Argyros, a California billionaire real estate developer who once owned the Seattle Mariners. A major GOP donor, he also was the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 2001 to 2004. Argyros, 86, has leased out his aircraft through his own chartering company for decades. From 2002 through 2019, his tax records show, his company pulled a profit just twice. Overall, he deducted over $50 million in net losses over the years.

In June 2021, Argyros’ Gulfstream landed at the small airport near Newburgh in New York’s Hudson Valley, having flown cross-country from California. Nearby, his $83 million, 248-foot yacht the Huntress awaited. Over the coming weeks, the ship would be seen cruising up and down the Hudson River, astounding locals who gawked at its six decks, helipad and hot tub.

A representative for Argyros declined to comment.

Yachts are dealt with differently from airplanes in tax law. They are considered entertainment facilities, so you can’t claim deductions on the premise that you used it for business travel.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no tax savings to be had. Mike Fernandez is a capable businessman, having made a fortune starting and investing in health care companies. But the Florida-based investor seems to have abysmal luck with one of his businesses: leasing out his 180-foot yacht, the Lady Michelle, when he’s not using it. On his 2017 and 2018 tax returns, he claimed a total of $11.3 million in expenses connected with the Lady Michelle from depreciation, repairs, wages and other costs. Meanwhile, his revenue over the two years totaled $178,000. Fernandez did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Should the IRS audit one of these businesses — itself unlikely over the past decade, due to the gutting of the agency’s budget — the IRS faces a high hurdle: proving that not only was the business not profitable, but that the business owner was not really trying to profit. The case of personal jets adds an additional difficulty for an auditor. The ultrawealthy can often argue that, even if chartering did not result in profits, they also used the plane to help conduct their main business.

Robert Bigelow made his fortune in real estate and owns Budget Suites of America, an extended-stay apartment chain. His passions, however, reach to the skies and beyond. For decades, he’s poured resources into investigating UFO sightings and paranormal phenomena. Two years ago, he announced $1 million in grants from his Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for research “into contact and communication with post-mortem or discarnate consciousness.”

His main focus, however, has been space. He founded Bigelow Aerospace, a company focused on building expandable space habitats. The company has had some successes, winning a contract from NASA for a module for use on the International Space Station. But what it has not had is profits. Bigelow put more than $350 million into the company, “my own real black hole,” as he’s put it.

In the two decades prior to 2018, even as Forbes and The Wall Street Journal variously estimated his net worth as $700 million and $900 million, Bigelow posted negative incomes on his taxes most years, as large losses from his aerospace company wiped out his other income. His personal jet, held by Cosmos Air LLC, also played a role. From 2005 to 2018, he deducted a total of $51 million related to use of his plane. ProPublica could not find evidence that Bigelow charters his aircraft, nor did Bigelow respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Of course, the deductions could also be justified on the basis that the aircraft is necessary to tend to Bigelow’s various businesses. The plane is a luxury expense, in other words, essential to help him run up millions more in tax deductions — one black hole orbiting another.

“This is the worst I’ve seen”: TV networks bail on Trump’s “tired” and “recycled” post-arrest speech

Hours after becoming the first former president to be indicted in U.S. history, Donald Trump gave a rambling speech at Mar-a-Lago, presenting himself as a victim of the political establishment and airing grievances about his perceived enemies in what appeared to be an attempt to rally his followers for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump has been indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to his hush money payments to three individuals — an adult film actress, a former Playboy model, and a former Trump Tower doorman in New York, all of whom the president allegedly paid to keep silent about his extramarital affairs before the 2016 election.

Trump spent much of his 25-minute speech on Tuesday evening peddling claims that had nothing to do with his indictment, including false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. He also alleged that his 2016 campaign was spied on by the Obama administration.

“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” Trump said at the start of his speech. “The only crime I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”

When Trump did discuss the indictment, he repeatedly attacked the integrity of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, describing him as a “Soros-backed” prosecutor — an oft-used antisemitic trope — and accusing him of attempting to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump claimed his political opponents were behind his indictments, telling his audience that they had “stepped up their efforts” by charging “the 45th president of the United States” with crimes related to the hush money payments. (Trump has denied having extramarital affairs, but has admitted to making payments to at least one of the people he allegedly had an affair with.)

The former president also brought up other investigations into his alleged wrongdoings.

Trump called special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading two Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations into his actions — one regarding his role in the January 6 attack, and one regarding his improper transfer of White House documents to Mar-a-Lago — a “lunatic bomb thrower.” He described Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who is considering charging Trump with crimes relating to his attempts to overturn the state’s presidential election, a “racist.” And he derided a civil lawsuit from New York state Attorney General Letitia James, mocking her for campaigning on holding him accountable.

Trump called Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing his Manhattan-based indictments, a “Trump-hating judge,” and questioned his ability to be impartial because his daughter once worked for Vice President Kamala Harris. Legal experts have said that such claims are unwarranted; judicial author Steven Lubert, for instance, told Politico that Trump hasn’t presented any reasonable or legitimate “grounds for [Merchan’s] disqualification.”

At Trump’s arraignment today, Merchan called on Trump’s lawyers to remind him to “please refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest, or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals.”

Trump concluded his speech by promising to “make America great again” in 2024.

Numerous networks opted to stop broadcasting the former president’s speech once it became clear that he was using his airtime to push unfounded conspiracy theories rather than to address the charges he received on Tuesday.

“Trump Tuesday night was seething and tired and meandering, cycling through an already recycled greatest-hits list of perceived slights and grievances,” Washington Post senior national political correspondent Ashley Parker said on Twitter.

“Trump is like a worn out professional wrestler at ringside insulting and threatening his opponents with the same old script, seeking the applause of his audience who’ve seen this same tired performance hundreds of times,” former law professor Christopher Moore said in response to the speech.

Bill Burton, a former White House deputy press secretary who served in the Obama administration, gave Trump bad grades on both substance and performance.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen Trump,” he said.

“Adnan’s going to be hanging in balance for years”: Freed “Serial” subject’s case is not over

Glowing pictures of Adnan Syed, his family and defense team leaving the courthouse in Baltimore filled the internet in September. For the past 23 years, Syed had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, his classmate and ex-girlfriend. It felt like a storybook ending to the case that millions followed since the first season of the “Serial” podcast took the world by storm in 2014. It was a story that was most importantly, over.

Since judge Melissa M. Phinn of the Baltimore City Circuit Court vacated the charges against Syed based on “lost confidence in the integrity of his convictions” (due to new DNA testing that concluded the potential involvement of “two alternative suspects”), Syed started working at Georgetown University, reconnected with his loved ones and was on the road to reentry.

That is why it was so surprising to hear that on March 28, the Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that the lower court violated the rights of Young Lee, Lee’s brother, by not giving him enough time to appear in person for the hearing to vacate Syed’s charges. It was especially confusing because Lee had not appeared in person at other hearings and would not be able to speak or change the outcome.

Attorney Rabia Chaudry, one of Syed’s most vocal advocates and an attorney appearing on the “Serial” podcast, explained to me on “Salon Talks” why this peculiar new ruling leaves Syed’s freedom hanging in balance and why it sets a dangerous precedent for innocence work.

Chaudry released the 2019 HBO docuseries “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” which further proclaimed his innocence by exposing that DNA tests did not reveal anyone else’s DNA on Lee’s body or her belongings. Continuous advocacy work and the international popularity “Serial” brought to the case led to the case being reviewed.

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Rabia Chaudry here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to learn more about the new developments in Syed’s case, how a failed system can fail again and what concerned citizens and podcast listeners can do to help.

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

Rabia, welcome. Please let us know what’s going on with Adnan.

Thanks so much for having me. When you’re at the point where the state’s attorney drops charges and there no longer are any charges pursuant to which you can reinstate a conviction, nobody could expect something like this to happen.

Just to explain to folks what happened on Sept. 19, 2022. There was a hearing held in the circuit court in Baltimore on a motion to vacate his conviction. [Former state’s attorney for Baltimore] Marilyn Mosby, her office, the prosecutor brought a motion to the court and said, “We are here to move to vacate the conviction.” At that hearing, the victim’s family, the brother, was represented by an attorney, and they filed their own motion, and the motion was to postpone the hearing and say, “We need more time because we should have had enough notice to be able to be present for the hearing.”

They had been told about the motion about a week prior, and the family lives in California. They did not appear for it. They were communicated with the entire week before the hearing, and they again told the state’s attorney that they would be appearing via Zoom. They would not be appearing in person. But the day of the hearing, they said, “No, we want to appear in person.” They filed this motion. The judge did not grant the motion, but what she said was, “We’re going to recess the hearing and we’re going to wait to give you enough time.” The victim’s brother was at work. “To give you enough enough time to get home and get on a Zoom call.”

We waited that day in court for Lee Young, the brother, to get home, get on a Zoom call. He spent about 40 minutes giving his statement, and after that, the court ruled on the motion that the state’s attorney brought and vacated a non-

“I am just scratching my head because that means they can undo the executive action of any state official period.”

conviction and released him. Now, the motion that the family filed to postpone the hearing, because it was denied, they decided to appeal that denial to the intermediate appellate court in Maryland. And that’s the court that just ruled that they’re going to grant the motion and they’re going to send the case back down to the circuit court to do the hearing all over again and give the family enough notice to come and be there in person. The problem is, they said, “We’re going to reinstate the conviction.”

That’s why we’re confused.

That’s the confusing part and that’s the part that I literally haven’t slept in two days thinking about. What they did was not only reinstate the conviction and say the hearing’s got to be done over. They didn’t touch the merits to the hearing. They didn’t say that the judge made a wrong decision by granting the conviction to be vacated or there was anything wrong with the state’s attorneys. They said, “This is just a pure technicality. The family has a right to be present.” But here’s what’s interesting. They also said the family has a right to be present, but they don’t have the right to be heard.

So you get to come to the hearing, just to be there to watch.

If I represented the family or victim’s interests in any case in Maryland, I would be concerned by this ruling because I would say, “I want to protect the right for a family to be heard at a hearing like this versus a family to be physically present.” That’s a really problematic part of this. The bigger problem to me is the fact that they said, “Well, there aren’t any charges because Marilyn Mosby dropped the charges.” So what we’re going to do is we’re going to say, “That was a nullity, it never happened, we are nullifying her actions and . . .”

“No other exoneree in this country has gotten this kind of treatment.”

How can they do that? How can they make a decision on the actions of a state executive on an issue that’s not even before the court? This is completely outside of their authority. I don’t think there’s any legal authority for them to do this. I am just scratching my head because that means they can undo the executive action of any state official, period.

Just say, “It never happened.” Now, these kinds of things, for example, people have asked, “Well, you’ve had the U.S. Supreme Court and other, and federal courts decide on whether or not, for example, the action of the Biden government or the Trump government was legal?” None of this is in regulation, it’s not part of statutes. There’s no regulation around it.

It is such a deeply troubling ruling for anybody doing post-conviction work or innocence work because you can work for decades, not just get a conviction overturned and get somebody released. Get the charges dropped, and a court can arbitrarily say, “No, we’re just going to reinstate everything.” It undoes everything the circuit court did. It undoes the investigation the state’s attorney’s office did for a year.

How much do you think the popularity of Adnan’s case plays into what’s happening right now?

I think it’s played a big role in it, and it’s one of those double-edged swords that we couldn’t get movement on the case without all this attention. But all this attention has brought out everybody’s egos. All the legal players in this case, the prosecutors, the judges, everybody’s got this invested interest. Maryland is not a huge place. It’s like everybody’s got connections, they’ve got animosities.

“They wanted him to die in prison.”

Marilyn Mosby has had vendettas against her by people for years now. People are out to get and undo what Mosby’s done just because it’s Mosby. That’s not fair to the defendant in the case. He’s not the only person she’s exonerated. Since then, Ivan Bates has been in office. Nobody else is getting this treatment. No other exoneree in this country has gotten this kind of treatment.

The trial-by-Netflix age: “Making a Murderer,” “Serial” and the mixed blessings of media justice

What people don’t really understand on a greater level is that Adnan is also a victim. This man spent a huge chunk of his life incarcerated when he shouldn’t have been.

Most of his life.

Most of his life in the place where he shouldn’t have been, and still forced to deal with the trauma of all of this. The healing he had to go through when it comes to what actually happened — losing a friend and everything else that goes with that.

His family has been victimized. It’s not just Hae Min Lee’s family. Adnan’s family has been victimized, his parents were so sick, the whole family fell apart. Adnan was 17 at the time and he spent 23 years in prison. He spent more time in prison than he did outside. And now that he’s gotten out – a juvenile life sentence shouldn’t be beyond 25 years anyways. They wanted him to die in prison. Even if you think he’s guilty. What’s mind-boggling to me is in September, the Baltimore Police has DNA evidence that they need to make an arrest in this case. Why isn’t that investigation moving forward? I want to know what’s happening on that front because I feel like with this case, that’s what it’s going to take to finally end the ordeal for Adnan, is that the actual killer has to be caught.

I have missed one hearing in 23 years in Adnan’s case, one. And that was actually the hearing on this issue that took place in front of appeals. This is the only time I did not go to a hearing, and that’s because my father just passed away and I’ve just really been just kind of struggling to keep it together myself. And in 23 years, I never missed a hearing, and the victim’s family has never attended a hearing. That is the truth. Even if they’re given a month’s notice, I don’t believe they’re going to appear, I don’t believe they’re going to exercise the right that the court has just granted them. Why would they come in from California? So they can’t even speak. That doesn’t make any sense.

It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Now our options are we do the hearing over just like the court says, or we appeal it to the next Appellate Court in Maryland. That’s the court that reinstated his conviction in 2019. I don’t think they care about the issues. If you read this opinion the first, it’s like 87 pages. I feel like the first 60 pages are a recital of facts from the trial in ’99 that are trying to convince anybody reading it that he’s actually guilty.That’s what it’s about.

Anything that Marilyn Mosby raised in September advocating for his innocence, the court said, “Allegedly.” They used that language over and over: allegedly. “Allegedly, there’s a Brady violation, allegedly his constitutional right was violated.” But not that they accept it as fact. We could appeal it, it could go up to the Maryland Court of Appeals, it could go up to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in the end, Adnan’s going to be hanging in the balance for years as we go up the appellate chain. What’s easier, is just to do the hearing over. But what that means is that this ruling is precedent. We have set this really dangerous precedent.

Dangerous?

Yeah. That can not only be used in Maryland, but can be used across the country by other courts to say, “Well, OK, you exonerated this guy, we’re going to reconvict him.” It’s insane.

“It is such a deeply troubling ruling for anybody doing post-conviction work or innocence work.”

Marilyn Mosby is not the state’s attorney anymore. If she was still the state’s attorney, would this be going on?

I think so. But although what she could do is say, “OK, well if you said that me dropping the charges were a nullity, I’m just going to drop them again.” Ivan Bates can do that, he could be like, “Well, I’m going to just drop them all over again.” I don’t know if he would make a move that . . . because his office has to deal with these courts and judges. Is he going to make a move that aggressive? Or is he going to be like, “Let’s just do the hearing over and we’re going to end up with the same result probably anyways, and just move on,”? I don’t know.

What are the big next steps going to be? For you, for Adnan, for his entire legal team to combat this?

Adnan is so well represented. He has an incredible attorney, Erica Suter. She has been his counsel for the last four years, and she became the executive director of the Innocence Project in that duration. He’s literally represented by Innocence Project right now. He has a great support team. We have great investigators. All the pieces are in place for him.

I told Adnan on the day the ruling came out, I said, “Keep living your life, don’t worry about this. All the people that we need to take care of business are in place.” He went to work the next day. He’s fasting; it’s Ramadan. He’s just doing his thing, and he is sending me pictures. He’s like, “I’m living my life like you said.” And I said, “Good, live your life.” And that’s what he should do. We don’t anticipate at all that Ivan Bates would make a move to actually re-arrest him and re-incarcerate him. The ruling also doesn’t become a mandate for 60 days.

I think his team is going to make a final decision about whether we’re going to appeal this or we’re going to do the hearing over. I’m inclined to want to just get this over with and do the hearing over, but I do worry about the precedent and I don’t know if there’d be another opportunity to challenge it. It would just kind of hang out there because I don’t think this will ever happen again to another defendant. Can people just leave this poor man alone? He’s in his 40s now. Give him the years he has left. Just leave him alone already.

How can supporters help?

I think people are outraged by this. I don’t know if it would be helpful, but I think it could be helpful to contact the state’s attorney’s office and say, “Listen, this is outrageous, this is travesty, and we really hope to see that your office continues to support the exoneration of this man.”

about Adnan Syed

How my dad’s sugary East Baltimore spaghetti made me want to abolish the pasta shape

I thought long and hard before penning this article, mainly because I have bravely shared my stance on spaghetti noodles with loved ones for years only to be met with middle fingers, people recommending that I seek help, and occasionally being told, “Get the hell out of my house!”

So, I can only imagine how dark and cold the internet will be after the statements I’m choosing to make, but still, I cannot hold this in any longer, and if you read this with a clear mind, then you would probably agree that spaghetti is by far the worst noodle. Doesn’t matter if you buy it from that fancy Whole Foods in the gentrified neighborhood or from the cheap bodega. It doesn’t matter if you stumble into a small back street in Venice — catching an Italian grandpa who wakes up at 5:00 a.m. to make a fresh batch of pasta from scratch — or if God took a vacation from heaven to hand deliver you a fresh batch. They suck. Spaghetti noodles suck.

Initially, I hated the dish as well.

Everything you need to know about cascatelli, the new “perfect” pasta shape that’s a viral hit

I loved Italian food before I knew Italian food was Italian food. My Aunt Trudy made the best lasagna anyone has ever tasted in their lives. It had like six layers, and we were from the block. No one on any block like ours did six layers back in the day. She was truly ahead of her time. On days I knew she was baking it, I would be sure to skip breakfast and lunch just to have enough space to return for seconds and thirds. We lived across the street from Trudy, so if her side dominated the hood in the lasagna department, then my dad was king of spaghetti.

“Yo, your father makes the best spaghetti in the world!” My friends would say. “I could eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert.”

I would respond smugly with a shrug, like “You can have it.”

And this is not to say that the taste wasn’t good; it’s just that I knew when my dad made spaghetti that he was going to try to feed it to us for about four to five days in a row. The idea of eating it so much used to make me nauseous.

I should also say this isn’t the kind of spaghetti I would eat now–– this is the East Baltimore version.

My dad would boil some of those godawful spaghetti noodles while frying ground beef, mixed with peppers and onions before placing them to the side. He’d then fry some of those fat, brown spicy turkey sausages that were supposed to taste like pork (however, we didn’t eat pork, which explains the turkey). Then he’d dump a couple of Ragu jars into a huge pot, mixing the meat as the sauce boiled. Some of this sounds normal to the people who choose to eat this dish, but this is where East Baltimore comes in.

Dad would drain the noodles and mix them with the meat and sauce, creating one big batch that he covered with enough sugar to rot and fracture every tooth in our zip code. We all love sweet and savory, but dad was sweet and spicy. There were no sides, salads, or warm pieces of garlic bread–– just sweet-ass spaghetti, which could double as some type of sick and twisted dessert.

And I don’t want to be too hard on dad because it was solid on the first day, but always fell off by day two. Remember, we were small children, and we probably should not have been using the microwave to heat up leftovers, but we did, and his sweet, spicy specialty always reheated hot as hell on top and freezing cold in the middle. I’m no scientist, but I’d bet my last dollar that those terrible noodles may have had something to do with that because my canned Chef Boyardee ravioli always came out fine. (Side note: I grew out of Chef Boyardee and basically everything that came out of a can by 7th grade)

While we are on ravioli, even if they are stuffed with thumbtacks and rusty pennies, they are better than spaghetti. Cavatappi, rotini, rigatoni, conchiglie, farfalle or bow tie, penne, tagliatelle and angel hair — all better than spaghetti. My daughter’s princess-shaped pasta is better than spaghetti. It could be the shape, texture, my dark past with the actual dish — or a combination of it all — but I still can’t bring myself around to eating it.

By high school, I was fortunate enough to discover the many excellent restaurants in Baltimore’s Little Italy. There I learned that fresh noodles must be laid on a plate with the meat sauce gently placed atop, not mixed together , thrown into a Kool-Aid pitcher and shaken like a martini. Even though I rarely ordered the dish, that new way of having spaghetti became a bit more acceptable.

But one day, I was having dinner at Sabatino’s and spaghetti was on special. I was in high school and not used to spending a ton of money on food, so when the waiter popped out saying that spaghetti was under ten bucks, I was in.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said, scratching my head. “Is it still on special if I switched the noodle?”

“Young man, you can have whatever type of noodle you want,” the energetic waiter answered, running off a list of all the options I had to choose from. “But why would you want to change the noodle?”

I told him that I like a bowtie, and he brought it out, and it totally changed the idea of “spaghetti” — or the idea of pasta with red sauce — for me. It tastes like something completely different, and from then on, I knew that spaghetti noodle should be abolished. If you are used to using the spaghetti when you make the dish, I challenge you to try bowtie, and guarantee you will have a better dining experience.

Some

pasta recipes we love

Mazel Tov! Pick up these 6 Passover foods from Trader Joe’s for a super convenient seder

This Wednesday marks the first day of Passover — or Pesach — which is the annual Jewish festivity that celebrates the Israelites escape from slavery in ancient Egypt. The holiday will be observed for eight days, starting April 5 to April 13.

On the first and second nights of Passover, families and friends traditionally enjoy a ceremonial dinner called seder, which means “order.” The meal itself is conducted in a specific order that retells the story of liberation from slavery to freedom. There’s also plenty of songs, readings, rituals and, of course, spreads of good food.

18 best Passover desserts to sweeten your seder

A typical seder plate includes six distinct items that have special significance to the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Zeroah, a roasted lamb or goat bone, symbolizes the ancient Passover sacrifice. Beitzah, a roasted egg (usually a hard-boiled egg), symbolizes the festival sacrifice that was offered in the Temple in Jerusalem. Haroset (or charoset), a paste of fruits and nuts, symbolizes the mortar used by Jewish slaves to build the pyramid of the pharaohs. Mar’or, a bitter herb, symbolizes the bitterness and harshness of the slavery. Karpas, a green vegetable (usually parsley or celery) dipped in salt water or vinegar, symbolizes spring. And chazeret, a second bitter herb (usually endive or horseradish), symbolizes fulfillment.

Alongside the plate are three matzos — or unleavened flatbread — that symbolize Jewish resistance and faith. The bread is wrapped in cloth or covered and broken and eaten throughout the evening.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food’s newsletter, The Bite.

Whether you’re attending your very first Passover seder as a guest or hosting your first dinner, seeking out kosher foods can be a daunting task. That’s why Trader Joe’s is here to help with their selection of Passover-ready menu items!

From TJs chicken truffle paté to TJ’s mirepoix, here are six tasty products to grab from the store before seder:

TJ’s All Natural Glatt Kosher Young Turkey

A typical seder meal will include several protein dishes, including gefilte fish (poached fish dumplings) or brisket or roast chicken.

If you’re looking to try a new meat option, look no further than TJ’s All Natural Glatt Kosher Young Turkey. Per TJ’s, their Kosher turkeys are soaked and salted with a kosher-certified method. They’re also priced at just $2.99 per pound!

For Passover, enjoy your turkey with a homemade garlic schmaltz, courtesy of this recipe from Jamie Geller. The schmaltz calls for three heads of roasted garlic (squeezed and mashed), extra virgin olive oil, kosher salt, rendered chicken or turkey fat, sprigs of fresh rosemary, sage leaves, flat leaf parsley and sprigs of thyme.

TJ’s Mirepoix

Recommended by the Kitchn’s Julie Levine, TJ’s mirepoix is a simple mix of onions, carrots and celery that can be used in sauces and marinades. It’s quick. It’s simple. It’s tasty. And, it’s just the thing you need when preparing roast lamb for seder!

Levine suggests using the mirepoix in braised lamb shanks with shelled peas and lettuce. Of course, you can also make your own mirepoix from scratch. Simply mince a cup of raw carrots, a cup of onions (red and white both work) and a cup of celery. Sauté the cut ingredients in olive oil until they soften. Then add garlic and fresh thyme and sauté until fragrant.

TJ’s Truffle Mousse Paté

Also recommended by Levine, TJ’s Truffle Mousse Paté made with chicken is a must-have for Passover appetizers. Priced at $4.99 a pack, the paté is made with chicken liver, sherry wine, mushrooms, 1% truffles and a brandy aspic. The paté pairs especially well with plain matzo or matzo crackers.

If the taste of liver is too strong for you, add a a dollop of “fig jam, stewed cherries or plums,” per Reddit user u/Efficient-Cricket-72.

TJ’s Matzo

No Passover foods list is complete without mentioning matzo. And luckily, TJ’s now has its own brand of the unleavened flatbread, which is made in Israel and certified kosher. As of March 20, the matzo in question hasn’t appeared on TJ’s shelves, according to Forward. But a representative for the store confirmed that it exists and will be available soon.

Whether you like your matzo sweet or savory, there’s plenty of recipes to choose from this Passover. There’s a matzo pizza topped with bagged arugula or romaine lettuce, olive oil and TJ’s Israeli Feta. There’s also matzo toffee, courtesy of this recipe from Food 52’s Emma Laperruque. To make the toffee, combine butter and brown sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and then melt until the mixture is slightly thick, like caramel sauce. Evenly pour the toffee on top of the salted matzos and bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Sprinkle the toffee-coated matzos with chocolate and let cool before enjoying.

TJ’s Garlic Spread Dip

TJ’s certified kosher dip is made from a blend of fresh garlic cloves, canola oil, salt and lemon juice. In the same vein as TJ’s Truffle Mousse Paté, TJ’s Garlic Spread Dip can be slathered on plain matzo and matzo crackers. It can also be basted on roast chicken, turkey, lamb or goat. You can also enjoy it it potato kugel or even matzo ball soup.

The possibilities are endless with this delicious dip!

TJ’s Slightly Coated Dark Chocolate Almonds

An important part of seder is dessert, which can include chocolate-matzo layer cake, flourless chocolate cake, chocolate sorbet and chocolate-covered fruits. There’s also TJ’s Slightly Coated Dark Chocolate Almonds, which are made from dry-roasted California Almonds, dark chocolate, cocoa powder, nonfat dry milk, sea salt and maple sugar.

Enjoy the almonds on their own or top them on tricolor chocolate mousse, Torta Caprese (chocolate and almond flourless cake) and Passover ice cream (“Roca of Affliction”).

Passover recipes:

Wisconsin Supreme Court election loser refuses to concede to winner he deems not “worthy”

Daniel Kelly, the right-wing former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who lost his bid to re-join the high court on Tuesday as liberal circuit court judge Janet Protasiewicz won by a decisive margin, refused to concede to his opponent in a speech that one critic said personified the Republican Party’s approach to electoral politics in recent years.

“It brings me no joy to say this,” Kelly told supporters. “I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent. But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.”

Kelly acknowledged that he l ost the election and said he “respected” the decision made by more than 55% of Wisconsin voters who chose Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County Circuit judge who was outspoken about her support for abortion rights and labor unions, to join the court, giving Democratic-aligned justices a 4-3 majority.

But he denounced Protasiewicz as a “serial liar” and accused her of disregarding judicial ethics and demeaning the judiciary “with her behavior.”

During his concession speech, Dan Kelly who was running for WI Supreme Court said, “This was the most deeply deceitful, dishonorable, despicable campaign I have ever seen run for the courts.” He also said he didn't have a “worthy opponent” in Janet Protasiewicz to concede to. pic.twitter.com/kNzaOsuMki

— James Groh (@JamesGroh_) April 5, 2023

“This is just what Republicans do now,” said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Progressive Chicago-based news outlet Heartland Signal accused Kelly of going “full sour grapes.”

In the two-and-a-half years since former Republican President Donald Trump urged his supporters to attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and refused to acknowledge his loss, a number of losing GOP candidates have demanded recounts, claimed their elections were “rigged,” and spread baseless conspiracy theories about voting irregularities.

“Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this has become mainstream,” Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, told Axios last year. “It’s exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers’ consent.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, Kelly claimed to be nonpartisan during the campaign, but has received funding from vehemently anti-union billionaires and has ruled in the past in the favor of allowing people to carry concealed weapons on public transit. He has also written blog posts in the past saying that people who support abortion rights want “to preserve sexual libertinism” and denouncing marriage equality and people who rely on Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Brandon Johnson defeats school privatizer backed by GOP donors in Chicago mayoral election

Progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson defeated conservative Democrat and school privatizer Paul Vallas in Chicago’s mayoral runoff on Tuesday, a victory he called a “gateway to a new future” for the nation’s third-largest city.

“Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people,” Johnson said in his victory speech, pledging to help usher in “a city that actually respects the workers who keep it running” and one “where public schools have the resources to meet the needs of every child.”

Education policy quickly emerged as a central issue in the contest between Johnson and Vallas, which the progressive won with just over 51% of the vote.

A former public school teacher and longtime union organizer, Johnson vowed to prioritize investments in public education and oppose charter expansions—an agenda that couldn’t have contrasted more sharply with that of Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and an ardent supporter of school privatization.

Vallas, whose campaign was backed by Republican donors and business interests, aggressively pursued school privatization schemes during his tenure as the head of school districts in Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—a record that Johnson’s campaign spotlighted in an ad that aired this week as well as in debates ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

“My opponent talks about school closures,” Johnson said during one debate. “Well, he set up the market for schools to be closed. He got so good at it, he went around the country doing it.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement late Tuesday that the Chicago runoff marks “a win for the history books.”

“Brandon Johnson just defeated a deluge of far-right money and misinformation thanks to people power and his positive vision for a safe and thriving Chicago,” Mitchell added. “Now comes the hard work of building a Chicago for the many, with strong schools, good jobs, and safe communities,” Mitchell added. “We look forward to working with Brandon and the new class of Working Families alder members to reopen mental health clinics, pass universal childcare, and implement a local Green New Deal.”

Tonight, we have shown the world the power of hope, the strength of organizing, and the might of our collective voice.

Tomorrow, the real work begins. We will build a safer, stronger Chicago that reflects the hopes and dreams of every one of us — together. pic.twitter.com/7LX4u2OReY

— Brandon Johnson (@Brandon4Chicago) April 5, 2023

In contrast to Vallas, whose campaign was also backed by a super PAC with close ties to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the bulk of Johnson’s support came from unions such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

“Make no mistake about it,” Johnson said in his victory speech, “Chicago is a union town.”

Stacy Davis Gates, president of the CTU, said in a statement that “today, Chicago has spoken.”

“Chicago has said yes to hope; yes to investment in people; yes to housing the unhoused, and yes to supporting young people with fully-funded schools,” said Gates. “It is a new day in our city.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten called Johnson’s win “a transformational moment” that “sends a message that efforts to exploit anxiety will not work in the face of a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational working-class movement standing together as one.”

Johnson’s upset win Tuesday capped off a remarkable rise for a progressive lawmaker who was polling at just over 3% in December. At that time, according to one survey, Vallas was polling at 19%.

In January, Chicago’s outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, brushed aside the CTU’s endorsement of Johnson, saying: “Brandon Johnson isn’t going to be the mayor of this city.”

During his remarks Tuesday night, Johnson gave a nod toward those who dismissed his chances.

“They said this would never happen,” he told a crowd of supporters. “If they didn’t know, now they know.”

“Huge implications”: Wisconsin voters end right-wing Supreme Court control after 15 years

Wisconsin voters wrested control of the state Supreme Court from conservatives for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday by electing Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz—an outspoken supporter of abortion rights, ballot access, and union protections—to fill an open seat.

Protasiewicz defeated former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly in the high-stakes and expensive contest, which drew close national attention given its implications for voting rights, reproductive freedoms, worker protections, and more in the key battleground state.

“Judge Protasiewitz’s victory is a huge win for protecting Wisconsinites’ fundamental freedoms,” said Sean Eldridge, founder and president of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America. “For more than three decades, Judge Protasiewicz has defended Wisconsinites’ constitutional rights, maintained judicial independence, and earned recognition for her commitment to the community. She will continue that important work on the Supreme Court.”

“Judge Protasiewicz will act as a check on conservative efforts to take away reproductive freedom, disenfranchise voters of color through racial gerrymandering, and overturn election results they don’t like. Her victory helps build a firewall for our democracy and the freedom to vote ahead of 2024,” Eldridge continued. “This election was a sound rejection of MAGA extremism, including their attacks on the freedom to vote and the right to access abortion care. The people of Wisconsin spoke through the ballot box and their message was undeniable: MAGA extremism has no place on our court, and neither does Dan Kelly.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Protasiewicz’s win puts “the state laws most celebrated by conservatives at risk of being overturned—including a 19th Century-era ban on abortions.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit over the 1849 abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, imperiling abortion rights across the nation.

In her victory speech late Tuesday, Protasiewicz said that “our state is taking a step forward to a better and brighter future where our rights will be protected.”

We did it, Wisconsin! pic.twitter.com/PfoDsKaSZK

— Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz (@janetforjustice) April 5, 2023

Protasiewicz, whose Supreme Court bid was backed by labor unions, said during the campaign that she believes Act 10—a Wisconsin law backed by former GOP Gov. Scott Walker that gutted public employees’ collective bargaining rights—is “unconstitutional.”

Kelly’s campaign was notably supported by the GOP billionaire megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have worked to dismantle union rights nationwide.

Dean Warsh, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Wisconsin State Conference, said in a statement late Tuesday that “Wisconsin’s working families made a clear statement today.”

“Our local unions throughout Wisconsin put in the work to turn out every voter possible in this pivotal spring election and we are ready to continue to do what it takes to finally take back our state from the divisive Walker-era politics that have plagued us for far too long,” said Warsh. “On behalf of the over 15,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers here in Wisconsin, I congratulate Judge Janet on her win and look forward to what is next for our state and the labor movement.”

Ari Berman of Mother Jones noted Tuesday that while Protasiewicz’s impact “could be felt quickly” given the abortion rights and gerrymandering cases that are expected to reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the near future, “Republicans will likely do everything they can to maintain their dominance in the legislature and have already floated the idea of impeaching Protasiewicz, which could trigger a constitutional crisis in the state.”

“A new era for the court is beginning,” Berman added, “but the fight over democracy in Wisconsin, with huge implications nationwide, is far from over.”

Radical eco-activists have made it into mainstream fiction. Is reality next?

It’s hard to think of something more wholesome than gardening. But the New Zealand gardening collective at the heart of Birnam Wood, a new political thriller by the Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton, have a rebellious streak. The guerrilla gardeners trespass on unused land to grow carrots, cabbages, strawberries, and other crops. They tap private spigots and snipe the occasional tool from a shed in a wealthy neighborhood, imagining themselves as environmental revolutionaries.

Bookshelves are beginning to teem with radical environmentalists. In the sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a group called the Children of Kali target conspicuous “carbon burners,” knocking jets out of the sky and sinking yachts. A purported ecoterrorist also drives the plot of the mystery Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, sending the main character on a risky mission into the world of wildlife trafficking. Then there’s Stephen Markley’s novel The Deluge, released in January, where a group of climate radicals called 6Degrees tries to avoid detection by the surveillance state as they instigate attacks on oil and gas infrastructure.

That eco-sabotage has captured so many authors’ imaginations seems to reflect a broader frustration with governments’ failure to rein in carbon emissions — a feeling that decades of peaceful protest weren’t enough, and the world is out of options. It has propelled climate fiction, once a niche genre, into the mainstream. Think of The Overstory by Richard Powers, a sweeping novel that follows activists who seek to save trees at all costs, employing human barricades, tree-sitting, and arson. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and generated glowing praise from Bill Gates as well as Barack Obama, who said it “changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.”

History suggests that fictional stories about eco-sabotage, sometimes called “monkeywrenching” after Edward Abbey’s book of the same name, could inspire people to try something similar in the real world.

“The world right now is ripe for radical activism,” said Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. Last week, a report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the risks from climate change — both present and future — were even more severe than previously thought. In the last year alone, heavy rainfall submerged a third of Pakistan with massive floods and China endured a heat wave more intense and longer-lasting than any in recent history. The panel of scientists called for a “substantial reduction” in the use of fossil fuels, with the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declaring that the world needed a “quantum leap in climate action.”

Yet earlier this month, the Biden administration approved the Willow project, a ConocoPhillips oil drilling operation that could release up to 260 million metric tons of carbon over its lifetime. For progressive groups in the United States who spent recent years working with the Biden administration to pass the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest climate package in the country’s history, it felt like a betrayal — one that might lead to a shift in tactics.

“I mean, everybody knows that we are nowhere near where we need to be,” Fisher said. “And so the natural progression is you’re going to see folks, particularly young people, rise up.”

Apocalyptic storylines have long dominated environmental fiction — including Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — a frame that’s tailor-made to ramp up concern about planetary crises. “I think that a lot of climate fiction has been perhaps stuck in this mold of cautionary tales, of bad climate futures,” said Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an English professor at Colby College in Maine.

Now reality is doing the work that fiction once did. With a quorum of Americans sufficiently frightened about the world’s trajectory — a full quarter of the population is now “alarmed” about climate change — writers are branching out. Authors are modeling for readers a transition from “apathetic awareness” to “meaningful action” by showing different kinds of political engagement, Schneider-Mayerson said.

That might explain the variety of unconventional activism in recent novels, such as the guerrilla gardeners of Birnam Wood and the utopian commune in Allegra Hyde’s Eleutheria (2022). Hyde’s novel follows a woman who joins a camp of eco-warriors in the Bahamas, after she read a guide to fighting climate change called Living the Solution. “I felt like a lot of climate fiction that I was encountering was purely apocalyptic,” Hyde told Grist. “But I wrote this because I wanted to use fiction as a space to imagine other possibilities, imagine utopian possibilities, and maybe open up that imaginative space for people.”

Eleutheria was inspired in part by The Great Derangement, a nonfiction book by the Indian author Amitav Ghosh published in 2016 that bemoaned the lack of serious literature about climate change, especially outside of science fiction, at the time. “I think it is a real call to arms to fiction writers to recognize how storytelling can and does shape how we live our lives in the real world,” Hyde said.

Another inflection point for climate fiction was the widespread popularity of The Overstory, the 512-page novel that brought attention to the ways trees communicate and wound up as a global bestseller. “It wasn’t hived off into the usual silos of climate change or speculative fiction, but was treated as a mainstream novel,” Ghosh told the Guardian in 2020, noting that he’s seen an “outpouring of work in this area” since the book’s publication.

Monkeywrenching is also spilling over into film. The movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, coming out next month, is inspired by the Swedish writer Andreas Malm’s book of the same name, a manifesto that encourages sabotage and critiques the pacifism of the climate movement. The film adaption takes that idea and turns it into a work of fiction, following a group of disillusioned young people on a heist to sabotage an oil pipeline. The trailer shows them making bombs and features dramatic background music punctuated by klaxons. “They will defame us and claim this was violence or vandalism,” one activist says. “But this was justified.”

Previous films have tended to “pathologize” activists who destroy property, psychoanalyzing them to figure out what was wrong with them, Schneider-Mayerson said. “I think maybe there’s a sense that, like, you can kind of touch these topics, but you can never endorse it.” On the other hand, How to Blow Up a Pipeline ends with “a wink and a nudge,” according to an early review of the film. “You can almost hear the movie say that the sabotage doesn’t need to stop when the credits roll,” Edward Ongweso Jr wrote in Vice.

The idea that people might take a cue from the movie isn’t far-fetched, experts say. “I can just say for sure that there are a whole bunch of dissatisfied young people around the country,” said Fisher, the sociologist. “And if they start watching movies about blowing up pipelines, what will that do?”

Fiction has inspired radical activism before. In 1975, the novelist Edward Abbey published The Monkey Wrench Gang (the origin of the term “monkeywrenching”). The book’s eco-warriors destroy property in an effort to save the wilderness of the Southwest, pouring sand in the gas tanks of bulldozers and plotting to destroy dams. Abbey divined that his book might generate some copycats. “This book, though fictional in form, is based strictly on historical fact,” he wrote in its epigraph. “Everything in it is real or actually happened. And it all began just one year from today.”

It took a little longer than Abbey had predicted, but in 1979, a group of hardcore conservationists founded Earth First!, inspired by The Monkey Wrench Gang. The group became infamous for direct action to stop logging and dams, and for its guerrilla-style stunts that verged on theater. In the spring of 1981, Earth First! activists unrolled a huge black plastic tarp down the side of the Glen Canyon Dam, inspired by a similar action from the book, as Abbey looked on.

There’s been a resurgence of interest in the radical tactics of the 1980s and ’90s. The podcast Timber Wars follows forest protests in the Pacific Northwest, and another called Burn Wild documents the story of the Earth Liberation Front — a group of monkeywrenchers that came to top the FBI’s list of “domestic terror” threats. “How far is too far to stop the planet burning?” asks the podcast’s host, Leah Sottile, drawing parallels to the modern climate movement.

Today, protesting a pipeline can come with a lengthy prison sentence. States have passed laws with harsh penalties for blocking pipelines and other “critical” infrastructure, with Utah recently becoming the 19th state to do so. The wave of state laws proliferated after the Dakota Access pipeline protests at Standing Rock in 2016.

While climate activists currently engage almost exclusively in peaceful civil disobedience and direct action, when law enforcement agencies mount a “repressive response,” the situation can turn violent, Fisher said. For example, the protests at Standing Rock were generally peaceful, only turning violent after security guards began threatening demonstrators with dogs and police began using water bombs and tear gas.

To be sure, disruptive activism also runs the risk of distracting from the issues at hand, Schneider-Mayerson said. Last fall, protesters with the group Just Stop Oil threw a can of Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting, which was protected by glass, to draw attention to the climate crisis. Instead, the conversation mostly revolved around whether the activists were helping or hurting the cause.

Still, these new novels, by casting radical activists in a sympathetic light, might alter what people think of as an appropriate response to global warming. “I wanted to comment on the fact that the way we talk about the environment and activism has changed because activists are seen as the enemy by governments,” VanderMeer, the author of Hummingbird Salamander, said in an interview when the book came out in 2021.

By showing what kinds of action are possible, storytellers “can shift the Overton window a bit in terms of which tactics are considered legitimate and acceptable,” Schneider-Mayerson said. With scientists calling for massive disruptions to the status quo to minimize the destruction of climate change, he argues that “radical” environmentalism isn’t so radical anymore.

“We’re all kind of locked in the hold of this ship, this fossil-fueled civilization that’s carrying us to a really terrible and unjust place,” Schneider-Mayerson said. “It’s pretty hard to blame people for trying to break out and make some noise.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/radical-environmentalist-novels-sabotage-activism-birnam-wood/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

“Thuggish behavior”: Experts warn Trump “tempting fate” by attacking judge’s daughter after warning

Former President Donald Trump attacked the family of the judge overseeing his Manhattan prosecution just hours after he was admonished in court for his rhetoric.

Trump, who pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsification of business records on Tuesday, has repeatedly attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, most recently targeting Merchan’s daughter over reports that she worked on Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign.

Prosecutors in court cited Trump’s repeated attacks and asked Merchan to issue an order banning the former president from discussing the case.

“His public statements have, among other things, threatened potential death and destruction…and world war three,” prosecutor Christopher Conroy told the judge, according to a transcript. “We have significant concern about the potential danger this kind of rhetoric poses to our city, to potential jurors and witnesses, and to the judicial process,” he added.

Merchan said the court would not issue a “gag order” against Trump, citing his First Amendment rights as a candidate for president, but urged “counsel on both sides” to speak to their clients and witnesses to tone down the rhetoric.

“Please refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest, or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals,” he said. “Also, please do not engage in words or conduct which jeopardizes the rule of law, particularly as it applies to these proceedings in this courtroom.”

Merchan added that this was a request and not an order.

“But now that I have made the request, if I were to be handed something like this again in the future, I have to take a closer look at it,” Merchan said.

The case against Trump: A porn star, a conspiracy, a payoff, a cover-up

It didn’t take long before Trump was back on the attack, lashing out at Bragg and his family and Merchan and his family during a rambling speech at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night following his arraignment.

“I have a Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family, whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign and a lot of it,” Trump declared.

MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang warned that Trump was “tempting fate” by making the comments after the judge’s admonishment.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, called Trump’s comments “appalling.”

“You do not have this behavior from a mob boss. There is a rule in organized crime. You do not do this with respect to prosecutors. You don’t do this with respect to the judge. You certainly don’t go after their families. It’s bad business to do that,” he told MSNBC, adding that it is “really just so despicable to think that you would do that. There’s no level to which he is not stooping.”

Andrew Weissmann on Trump going after the New York judge's family: "This is appalling … you do not have this behavior from a mob moss. There is a rule in organized crime." pic.twitter.com/SAOny3xZxK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2023

Trump also called Merchan’s court a “kangaroo court” over his daughter’s previous job in a rant on Truth Social. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. shared an article from Breitbart showing a photo of Merchan’s daughter to claim that the judge had a conflict in the case.

“That’s not a conflict for the judge & exposing his family to risk by posting photos like this, completely unacceptable,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance shot back.

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

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti called the attack a “new low.”

“Tweeting a picture of the daughter of the judge in your father’s trial to fire up your rabid followers serves one purpose and one purpose only: intimidation,” warned watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “If Don Jr. thinks what he puts on Truth Social isn’t going to make its way to the judge, well, he may want to consult with an attorney.”

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina denied that Trump attacked the judge.

“It is not an attack on the judge or certainly his family,” he told NBC News. “No one is suggesting anything should happen to the judge or his family.”

But former assistant Manhattan District Attorney Dan Horowitz said the transcript made it evident that the judge “was waiting for the prosecutors to bring up the defendant’s thuggish behavior.”

“There are judges, including Judge Juan Merchan, who’s been a judge for a very long time. And we’re talking Manhattan here, right?” he told MSNBC. “They’ve seen it all. It’s criminal court, just like the television program, crazy stuff happens in Manhattan. So they have seen when the occasional defendant acts out. Those defendants learn what will happen. There could be gag orders. There could be — I’m not saying this is going to happen here — but defendants who act out physically, they can be restrained physically. And ultimately, they can be barred from the courtroom that’s extraordinary, but they can be barred from participating in their trial.”

about the case against Trump

Trump’s indictment is no sad day for America: Let’s celebrate our justice system working

Yesterday, former president Donald Trump was charged with 34 felonies related to his payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Contrary to earlier speculation, he didn’t speak to the press at the courthouse and left the city immediately after his arraignment to fly back to the safe confines of his club in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump looked sullen and angry in the brief glimpses the cameras caught of him throughout the day, particularly as he sat at the defense table in the courtroom. Of the millions of images that exist of Donald Trump this will be one of the most iconic:

The judge admonished both sides to be careful what they say outside the courtroom:

Please refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest, or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals. Also, please do not engage in words or conduct which jeopardizes the rule of law, particularly as it applies to these proceedings in this courtroom.

The prosecution had pointed out that Trump has been posting incendiary remarks on his social media platform and circulating what could be construed as threats against the prosecutors, the judge and their families. Later in the day, Donald Trump Jr. posted an article and picture of the judge’s daughter, validating the concern.

Alvin Bragg proves skeptics wrong: Trump’s 34-count felony indictment is serious business

Throughout the day, commentators on right-wing media were strongly suggesting that Trump give a serious, staid response to these events and then use the opportunity to pivot to his vision for the future as the next president of the United States in the speech he had scheduled at Mar-a-Lago later that evening. It was anticipated that the cable networks would all cover it and perhaps that the networks might even interrupt their programming to feature it.

Trump wasn’t having it, however. His speech began with this litany of complaints:

“From the beginning the Democrats spied on my campaign and they attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigation. Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment hoax No.1. Impeachment hoax No. 2. The illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago. Lying to the FISA courts. The FBI and DOJ relentlessly pursuing Republicans. Unconstitutional changes to election laws by not getting approval from state legislators. The millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes—and all caught on government cameras. And just recently, the FBI and DOJ and collusion with Twitter and Facebook in order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from hell.”

He was angry and his fury was barely contained. He abruptly ended the speech after just 20 minutes, a record for him. The networks did not interrupt regular programming, MSNBC declined to show it while Fox and CNN carried the speech in full. It was not a good day for Donald Trump.

Maddow: So far he is just giving his normal list of grievances. We don’t consider that necessarily newsworthy and there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things pic.twitter.com/1x9E5NxqPb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 5, 2023

All through the endless, tiresome shots of Trump’s plane and motorcade and breathless, repetitive pontificating on cable news about the historic events we were all witnessing, everyone agreed that this was a very sad day for America.

But it wasn’t sad at all. It was a fairly rare example of the justice system holding a wealthy, powerful white man who has spent a lifetime skirting the law, to account for his misdeeds. It may have been sad for him but it was good for America.

What indicting Donald Trump can — and can’t — achieve

Trump’s line about all this is that “if they can do this to me they can do it to you” and he’s right. But they do it to regular average citizens a hell of a lot more often than they do it to people like Trump. Making him account for his tawdry, corrupt behavior, whether it’s for these hush money payments, stealing classified information, assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room, defrauding banks, attempting a coup, inciting an insurrection— all of which are the subject of current investigations and litigation — shows the nation that even an important powerful politician and businessman like Donald Trump is not above the law. At least, he’s not above the legal system trying to hold him accountable.

Up until now, every attempt to do that has been a failure. The man’s naivete and ignorance about world affairs led to being duped (at best) by the Russian government during the 2016 election but his obstruction of the investigations was criminal and never charged. He was impeached twice for egregious misconduct as president but saved by his political cronies. As president, he was protected by the Justice Department policy and he believed that his position as the leading candidate for the presidency today would have protected him from prosecution as well, if only because of the political optics. It turns out that isn’t true.

He’s managed to convince tens of millions of his followers that every last one of these accusations is false, that he’s being persecuted because of the politics they share, and with the help of the right-wing propaganda machine they believe him. But it’s another lie. He’s being prosecuted because he’s committed criminal acts that he blatantly flaunts in public, daring the justice system to make something of it.

The truth is that they don’t like prosecuting wealthy, powerful, white men. Men like Trump have the resources to pay for lawyers and appeal judges’ rulings and drag out cases for years. He managed to evade criminal charges for years by greasing the New York political machines that can make and break careers in the city. And, frankly, as an ex-president who loaded the courts with right-wing judges, even the Supreme Court, he’s not a particularly good bet for conviction. There is no other defendant in America with such unique advantages.

Citizen Trump

All the Trump cases that are percolating are very politically risky. They could lose and make Trump even stronger. They could win and make Trump even stronger. But his flamboyantly illegal behavior was so egregious that if the justice system didn’t step in and at least attempt to demonstrate to the public at large that there is such a thing as equality under the law, we were headed down the path of autocracy at warp speed.

Gerald Ford shouldn’t have pardoned Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush should not have pardoned the Iran-Contra criminals. It has led to a culture of impunity around presidents that led to Donald Trump and his accomplices flouting the rule of law as if they were born into royalty. The big January 6 and Georgia cases get to the worst of what they did — trying to overthrow an election. The civil case in New York may show that Trump’s business has been fraudulent for many years. And this hush money case may prove that just like you and me, even a rich guy running for president isn’t allowed to dummy up his books and cheat on taxes to cover up his indiscretions. That sort of thing is illegal and regular people are prosecuted for it every day.

Trump’s pithy little aphorism, “If they can do it to me they can do it to you” has it backward. It should be, “If they can do it to you, they can do it to me.” And that’s exactly how it should be.

The tiny island nation of Vanuatu just scored a big climate win

Youth activists and a tiny South Pacific nation have won a climate victory that could spell big trouble for the world’s leading polluting nations.

The United Nations passed a pioneering resolution Wednesday put forth by the nation of Vanuatu asking the world’s highest court to weigh in on the role national governments must play in stemming emissions and fighting climate change.

The advisory opinion, which might not come for two years, could impact thousands of lawsuits filed worldwide against governments for their inaction in addressing the crisis. It could even lead to penalties for the biggest polluters. Any opinion issued by the International Court of Justice would be non-binding but could shape pending litigation and influence the adoption of climate pacts that might follow the 2015 Paris Accords.

Vanuatu, a nation of more than 80 islands, spearheaded the campaign to pass the resolution because it is disproportionately impacted by climate change. People in Vanuatu faced twin cyclones this month alone.

“For us Pacific islanders, there is no place to hide from the climate crisis, no denying the reality we are facing,” Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau Ma’aukoro, the nation’s prime minister, said in an op-ed in Time.

The push to pass the U.N. resolution came about from youth activists from throughout the Pacific Islands who were looking for concrete ways to tackle the crisis. They launched Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change in 2019 with the singular goal of seeking an advisory opinion on the issue from the international court. It worked with the Republic of Vanuatu to put forth the resolution, which more than 120 member states have since signed on to.

“This resolution was adopted by consensus, which means the entire global community is standing together, asking the question of the International Court of Justice, because together is the only way that we will solve this problem,” Christopher Bartlett, head of climate diplomacy for Vanuatu, told Grist.

The effort to get the advisory opinion started in 2011, when representatives from the Marshall Islands and Palau attempted to pass a similar resolution — which the United States opposed. Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, was involved in the 2011 effort and credits a political shift on climate for leading to this victory.

“The gravity of the climate crisis has become more apparent with the cascade of studies, and even more importantly, climate of weather catastrophes in different parts of the world. Additionally, one of the major reasons why the 2011 effort failed was the opposition of the United States,” Gerrard told Grist. “This was under the Obama administration and the United States actively opposed it–– this time they didn’t.”

Though the International Court of Justice is the most prominent court in the world, other international courts are also hearing cases related to climate change and human rights. The same day that the U.N. issued its resolution, the European Court of Humans Rights heard a case, brought by a group of elderly women in Switzerland, arguing that climate change is a human rights violation. Additionally, Chile and Colombia are making a similar claim and have requested an advisory opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. These concurrent cases could impact the ICJ’s ruling if either of them comes first.

The ICJ could take up to two years to issue its decision, and there is no indication where it will land, according to John Knox, a professor of law at Wake Forest University and the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment.

“I think we can hope that it’s going to be a great decision, and one that really moves the ball forward,” Knox told Grist. “At the same time, the ICJ is a body of judges appointed by governments, many of whom are among the largest emitters of carbon gasses. I don’t think we should necessarily assume that the decision is going to be the strongest statement yet by any court that governments have obligations [to address climate change].”

*Correction: This story originally misspelled the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/climate/small-island-nation-vanatu-un-address-climate-justice/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Alvin Bragg proves skeptics wrong: Trump’s 34-count felony indictment is serious business

To the surprise of absolutely no one, from the moment Donald Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — really, long before that moment — Republican politicians were declaring Trump is innocent. The emptiness of the posturing was built in. It’s not just that Republicans don’t believe their talking points — no one does.

Trump’s selling point to the GOP base has long been his criminality. The MAGA base was compelled by the idea that only a true villain could get them what they want because he would flout all rules and laws in his pursuit of their authoritarian goals. So to claim Trump is “innocent” is not to deny that he committed a crime, so much as it is to assert that he should be above the law.

jd vance simply expressing the common conservative view that whether something counts as crime depends on who you are https://t.co/6l9CC0rYYh

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 30, 2023

What has been disappointing is how many in the mainstream media took this unapologetic bad faith seriously. Without seeing what was actually in the charging documents, supposedly serious people went along with the idea that this was a minor case not worth prosecuting.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

“Yet of the long list of alleged violations, the likely charges on which a grand jury in New York state voted to indict him are perhaps the least compelling,” harumphed the editorial board at the Washington Post.

“How could something so big — the first criminal indictment of an American president — seem so small?” griped former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori, in a New York Times editorial that also ended up strongly implying that former presidents should simply be above the law.

This line of argument isn’t just ill-informed, but really should be illegitimate. “I’ve done worse” is not an excuse to get away with crimes, which is why the law will usually charge someone who kidnaps and murders someone with both crimes. But these takes are especially embarrassing in light of the unsealed indictment. Once detailed, the seriousness of the charges feels more obvious, especially when reminded that Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, already did a stint in prison for this.

“I’ve done worse” is not an excuse to get away with crimes.

As expected, the focus is on how Trump falsified business documents, but as the indictment repeatedly states, “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime.” The charging document also destroys another pro-Trump talking point, that this relates to time “before” he was president. Every single alleged crime happened after Trump took office. The statement of facts also indicates there are tax fraud considerations. The extent of the payoff scheme is only starting to come into focus, and it’s looking like it will be extensive:

Per @MSNBC: indictment includes $30,000 payment to silence a doorman at one of Trump's buildings who allegedly had information about a child that Trump fathered.

— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 4, 2023

Calm down, everybody! Trump is not going to be helped by his indictments

“We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct,” Bragg told reporters on Tuesday, noting that Trump made “thirty-four false statements made to cover up other crimes.”

So, no, this isn’t a “minor” matter at all. It’s not just that it’s serious. It’s that, as this case plays out slowly in the public eye, it’s likely Bragg will be revealing all manner of deeply weird and wild details that will repeatedly remind the press and voters of the depths of Trump’s corruption.

Conspiracy count grounds bigger story than Stormy– from agreement (the gist of a conspiracy) with National Enquirer all the way to White House, where as President he signs the final checks to Michael Cohen

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 4, 2023

Ultimately, however, these arguments minimizing the severity of the Manhattan case aren’t really about the law at all, but about politics. It’s about an understandable frustration that Trump’s attempted coup, which culminated in a violent insurrection that upended — and in some cases ended — the lives of multiple people, has not yet been prosecuted. I share that frustration! But it’s important to understand that there is nothing minor about this case. On the contrary, the crimes committed in the Stormy Daniels case were a harbinger that showed exactly who Trump is: A person who will break any law and ruin any life, just so long as he gets his way.

The phrase “hush money to a porn star” is titillating, but underplays how ugly this situation is. As I wrote about yesterday, Trump didn’t just have sex with Daniels. He reportedly bullied her into bed, which is gross on its own but especially alarming in light of his long history of sexual assault. He then allegedly sent goons to harass her. This isn’t about sex, but about Trump’s long history of criminal abuse of women, which only a sexist media would treat as a small matter. It’s also important to remember that Cohen arranged the hush money payment after a tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault came out in October 2016, showing that the reason for the payment was to avoid adding more evidence of Trump’s sexual predations to the public record.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

But Daniels isn’t the only person Trump stomped all over in his quest to cheat in the 2016 election. Cohen ended up playing the role of the fall guy, serving time in prison for his role in helping Trump commit these crimes. Trump’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, is currently serving time because of his long history of committing financial crimes for Trump. He was also allegedly part of the scheme to pay off Daniels. Taken as a whole, this case illustrates how Trump will screw over anyone, no matter how loyally they’ve served him.

This case illustrates how Trump will screw over anyone, no matter how loyally they’ve served him.

The mainstream media keeps treating this case as somehow separate from the ones related to Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election. These indictments show, it’s all the same story: Trump will step on anyone or break any law to gain power and status. Just as he shamelessly fed Cohen and Weisselberg to the justice system, he was only too happy to throw his supporters under the bus after they stormed the Capitol on January 6. Just as he was willing to break campaign finance laws in 2016, he was willing to break any law that got in his way as he tried to steal the 2020 election.

“The evidence will show he did so to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election,” Bragg said, tying this set of crimes to Trump’s larger pattern of trying to cheat his way to victory in ways ranging from hush money payments to, eventually, an insurrection.

Women started the anti-Trump resistance — and it’s women who are the first to hold him accountable

His first impeachment, as well, is part of this pattern of Trump’s relentless focus on lying, cheating and stealing his way into power — regardless of who gets hurt. As a reminder, Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, unless Zelenskyy agreed to falsify evidence for a conspiracy theory Trump and his henchman Rudy Giuliani had generated about then-candidate, now-president Joe Biden. As multiple witnesses at the impeachment hearings explained, Ukraine needed that aid in order to hold off Russian aggression. Certainly the invasion that’s since happened should erase all doubt that this is a serious situation. Trump was directly threatening the lives of ordinary Ukrainians with this exhortion scheme.

Trump does not care who he hurts or who he gets killed. His behavior in recent weeks has been a reminder of that. He keeps unsubtly begging his supporters to risk getting arrested — or shot — in what would be a fruitless effort to prevent this indictment. He keep singling out the judge in the case, the prosecutor, and even the prosecutor’s wife, which should all be read as threats meant to scare these people into backing down.

Trump’s worldview is purely sociopathic, where other people are disposable instruments for his use. He’s also a coward who gets other people to do his dirty work — and to suffer what should be his consequences for it. These crimes he’s been charged for aren’t separate from this pattern, but deeply woven into it. Now that we have the actual indictments unsealed, the media should stop propping up false narrative that Bragg’s is a “minor” case. Instead, it’s time to place these crimes into the larger narrative of how Trump uses people and throws them away, in his relentless pursuit of illegitimate power.

Treating Trump like Jesus: Indictment proves MAGA is a cult

The book “When Prophecy Fails” is a classic work of social psychology that examines a UFO doomsday cult waiting for the end of the world. Of course, the special day arrives, and the world does not end. How do the cult members respond to this failure? By becoming more convinced that the prophecy is correct.

Donald Trump is at the center of a similar pseudo-religious cult prophecy as well. His most loyal followers truly believe him to be a type of divine, messianic, and all-powerful leader. In reality, there is nothing divine or messianic about Donald Trump. He is a mere mortal who has been credibly accused of many serious crimes. Nevertheless, right-wing Christian evangelicals and Christofascists (to the degree those two groups are distinct and separate from one another) have rationalized their support of Donald Trump (and Trumpism) through the biblical myth of Cyrus. The belief is that God uses a wicked man as a tool of divine destiny and will.

Donald Trump is not a practicing Christian; moreover, he looks very uncomfortable in church and at other religious gatherings. In reality, Donald Trump is a pathological malignant narcissist and compulsive liar who is the God of his own personal religion and self-contained universe. Trump views right-wing Christians in a transactional way. They are a tool to help him get and keep more power.

Still, white right-wing Christian evangelicals’ faith in Trump the prophetic figure was rewarded grandly. While president, Trump enacted a range of policies that furthered the creation of a white Christofascist theocracy in America. The white right views him as a revolutionary leader, a force of destiny and history, a Destructor who will force a new age where diversity, pluralism and globalism are destroyed and replaced by a White Christian empire where white men rule unopposed over all things. The QAnon conspiracy cult with its apocalyptic obsession over Trump’s retributive act of destruction known as “the Storm” is one example.

What indicting Donald Trump can — and can’t — achieve

The inherent nature of cults, prophecies and divine (paranormal) predictions is that they do not obey the rules of rationality, empiricism, or reason. As such, these prophecies and other such acts of magical thinking can be twisted to fit any scenario or desired outcome.

To that point, at his recent 2024 presidential campaign rally in Waco (which was attended by more than 10,000 followers), Trump spoke of being a victim of a conspiracy, and a man who is being persecuted as part of a witch hunt. Trump of course, channeling Hitler or some other great tyrant, promised to be a force of retribution and revenge who will engage in a “final battle” against his and the MAGA movement’s so-called enemies.

The BBC described Trump’s Waco rally in the following way: “Thousands of the former president’s supporters wandered through Trump merchandise tents, where they bought t-shirts emblazoned with “God, guns and Trump” and “Trump won.”

Through this logic, any attempt to hold Trump accountable under the rule of law is translated into being an attack on the members of his MAGA movement and personality cult.

The timing and choice of Waco to hold Trump’s first major 2024 presidential campaign rally was not a mistake or coincidence: that city is a type of holy ground for the white right and larger American antigovernment movement because of its connection to the tragic 1993 raid by law enforcement on the Branch Davidian compound that resulted in the deaths of more than 80 people. By hosting his rally in Waco, Trump presented himself as a type of cult leader and martyr figure who is willing to die and kill for his followers.

In a story at the Daily Mail, members of the Branch Davidian cult, including its current pastor, explained how they view Trump as a type of prophet and “God’s battering ram” for their cause:

The Branch Davidians are said to consider the former president as ‘the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.’

The FBI’s raid on the group’s compound, Mount Carmel, which the Branch Davidians view as a government overstep, is similar to what they claim happened to Trump.

The former president, 76, is set to hold a rally in Waco this afternoon, coinciding with 30th anniversary of the FBI raid on Branch Davidians formerly led by David Koresh.

Trump’s holding of a rally in Waco is ‘a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him,’ Koresh’s successor, Pastor Charles Pace, told the New York Times.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump peacefully surrendered to law enforcement authorities and was arraigned in a Manhattan courthouse for alleged crimes connected to hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is now the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges in the country’s history.

Trump’s followers – at his encouragement – have taken his indictment (and now arrest) as “proof” that he is being “persecuted” like Jesus Christ or some other type of divine mythological figure.

In a recent feature at Vice, reporter Tess Owen provides these details:

The former president has long played a key role in the imaginations of Christian nationalists, who believe America is an inherently Christian nation, should have Christian laws, and that Trump is their savior. Christian nationalist language has seeped into MAGA-world rhetoric, but Trump’s imminent arrest has taken it to new heights.

Lawyer Joseph McBride, who is representing a handful of Jan. 6 defendants, thinks that the timing of Trump’s likely arrest is notable.

“President Trump will be arrested during lent—a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” McBride wrote on Twitter. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will @realdonaldtrump.”

When he faced some pushback on comparing Trump’s plight to Jesus Christ’s hours-long torture, McBride doubled down. “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP,” McBride tweeted. “DEAL WITH IT.”

Other Trump supporters see eerie similarities between the Manhattan DA and the Romans who crucified Jesus.

“Rome tried to silence a peaceful leader via political persecution, and ended up creating the most pervasive & permanent religious figure in all of world history,” MAGA-world influencer Reanna Dilley wrote on Twitter. “Good fucking luck, New York.”

Owen continues, “On Monday night, a Christian nationalist group called Pastors for Trump held a National Prayer Call on his behalf. Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn joined the call, hosted by Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer.

“Father, right now, I thank you for President Donald J. Trump and God I thank you for all that you’ve done to him and through him and for him over the last eight years,” Lahmeyer said. “We ask that every single person that refuses to submit to your will in Washington D.C., you would uproot them and you would remove them and replace them with men and women who will submit to the will of God.””

On Tuesday afternoon, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene held a poorly attended rally in support of Trump outside of the Manhattan courthouse where the disgraced former president was being arraigned. During an interview before the event – which Greene retreated from after being heckled by a much larger group of counter-protesters – she also elevated Trump to the level of Jesus Christ.

“Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today. Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government.”

Rolling Stone reports how the disgraced former president wanted a high-profile surrender for purposes of propaganda and political theater, during which he would show the world how he is a “Jesus Christ”-like figure:

The Secret Service had argued in favor of holding the proceedings outside of court business hours, at night with minimal cameras and less risk. But Trump, a source close to his legal team says, wants to create the type of scene that he believes will galvanize his supporters.

“It’s kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He is saying, ‘I’m absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere so you don’t have to,’ ” says the source. Describing the message Trump hopes to send his supporters, the source says: ” ‘If they can do this to me they can do this to you,’ and that’s a powerful message.”

The elevation of Donald Trump to the level of god or prophet or some other tool of destiny by his followers and enablers represents a much larger trend among the American right-wing, “conservative movement” and other neofascists and malign actors. Today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement have abandoned any pretense of normal politics and instead have fully committed themselves to anti-rationality, anti-intellectualism, a rejection of learned real expertise, religious fundamentalism, conspiracism, “alternative facts” and the “Big Lie.” This is a type of religious politics that is antithetical to real democracy.

Trump’s indictment and arrest may not result in massive and immediate violence by his followers, but the danger should not be minimized.

Public opinion and other research show that millions of Trump followers are radicalized and support (and a not insignificant number of which are willing to participate in) acts of violence on Donald Trump’s behalf in the name of a MAGA holy war if he were to issue such a declaration. As seen on Jan. 6 and beyond, such people are capable of doing anything to get and keep corrupt power. Why? Because they are engaged in a holy war by their “God.”

about this topic

Lawsuit brought by two Christian businessmen may lead to thousands more HIV cases, experts fear

The passage of Obamacare — formally, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) — in 2010 meant that that most private insurance plans were required to cover recommended preventive care services without making patients bear some of the cost. Since then, the ACA, or parts of it, have been legally challenged nearly 2,000 times.

Public health experts predict that the ruling will, if upheld, lead to more than 2,000 preventable cases of HIV a year.

In the most recent litigation, Braidwood Management v. Becerra, the plaintiffs allege that requiring insurance companies to pay for the HIV prevention medicine preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) violates their religious beliefs. The judge in the case ruled on March 30 in favor of the plaintiffs’ argument, thus striking down that part of the ACA that required no-cost coverage of preventive services like PrEP. In short, the judge found that the requirement to cover PrEP medications for HIV prevention violated the rights of the plaintiffs, who had religious objections to the medicine.

The latest ruling was based on the precedent set by the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, where the judge ruled that providing contraceptive coverage for employees was an infringement on the religious freedoms of employers. Last week’s Braidwood Management v. Becerra order now blocks the requirement nationwide.

The right’s new culture war: HIV treatment

While the federal government is appealing the most recent decision, public health experts predict that the ruling will, if upheld, lead to more than 2,000 preventable cases of HIV a year.

“It’s all a question of whether the ruling is upheld — nothing’s going to happen right away because insurance will probably stay the same until open enrollment period,” A. David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Salon in an interview. “But if insurers are no longer required to cover these things completely, no cost sharing, no deductibles, no copays, many of them are going to scale back — and if they do, access will be curtailed.”

Taking PrEP lowers a person’s chances of getting HIV from sex by up to 99 percent. Users can take it one of three ways: as a daily pill, a bimonthly shot, or “on demand” 2 to 24 hours before having sex. Most insurance plans cover PrEP — including Medicaid, according to Planned Parenthood. Public health research has concluded that the drug has decreased new HIV infections by a “statistically significant” margin.

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Braidwood Management, is a for-profit company owned by a trust. The sole trustee is Dr. Steven F. Hotze, who identifies as a religious Christian. The second plaintiff, Kelley Orthodontics, is a Christian “professional association” owned by a man named John Kelley. As reported by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, the plaintiffs are “asserting both economic harm for having to pay more money for a health plan that includes services they do not want or need, and religious harm for having to include services they object to.”

Writing in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Paltiel tried to estimate how the possible outcome of the case could affect men who have sex with men, who often request PrEP prescriptions. Paltiel has done previous modeling on how well PrEP works and how many people use it.

“For every 1 percent decline in [PrEP] coverage in this country, there are going to be about 114 cases of HIV infection, entirely preventable among men who have sex with men, in the coming year alone,” Paltiel said.

Based on estimates that 28 percent of men who have sex with men are eligible for PrEP, Paltiel said he and his colleagues estimated that nearly 2,000 new HIV cases could come from restricted insurance coverage. “Not to mention all the other risk groups, like transgender women, injection drug users and all sorts of other people, but just among men who have sex with men, just in the coming year — 2,000 new infections that could be completely attributed to this decision.”

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

“If people adhere to it the way as instructed it is virtually 100% protective,” Paltiel said. “It’s like a chemical vaccine, it’s just unbelievable — now, getting people to adhere to it as assiduously as they ought to, is a challenge.”

Paltiel said for people who take it as instructed, it’s been “revolutionary.”

“Ignorance, stupidity, defiance and fascism are no more in the interests of public health for HIV than they were for COVID,” Mass said.

“It’s not a cure for HIV infection, but it’s as close to, let’s call it a chemical vaccine,” Paltiel said. “And it’s incredibly cost effective, too.”

In an email, Dr. Lawrence Mass, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said this will result in the preventable spread of disease.

“Ignorance, stupidity, defiance and fascism are no more in the interests of public health for HIV than they were for COVID,” Mass said. “Already, I think it’s not hyperbole to say that we’re headed where Nazi Germany was headed. By and large, organized medicine in Nazi Germany passively accepted and abetted the worst atrocities in the history of the human race. Is this where we’re headed?”

Physicians across the country are fearful of what the interpretation of Braidwood Management v. Becerra could mean for various forms of preventable healthcare.

“Our physicians are on the frontlines of care, and we fear this decision will strip millions of patients of their access to important screenings for cancer, heart disease, counseling services, and preventive medications, including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications for the prevention of HIV. Invalidating these coverage requirements will make access to evidence-based preventive care financially unattainable for many patients,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a statement. The organization advocated for the decision to be appealed and overturned. “The health and well-being of millions of Americans is at stake,” they added.

about the right’s war on HIV care

Minnesota GOP lawmaker decries popular vote — says democracy “not a good thing”

During debate on an omnibus spending bill in the Minnesota state legislature, a Republican lawmaker said that expanding democracy in the United States is “not a good thing.”

The comment was made by Rep. Matt Bliss (R), who opposed elements of the bill during debate within the Minnesota State House Elections Finance and Policy Committee on Friday.

The bill deals primarily with funding for state and local elections, but also includes a number of election reforms — among them, granting 17-year-olds the ability to register to vote in upcoming elections if they will be 18 by Election Day, as well as instituting an automatic voter registration system.

Another aspect of the bill that Republicans objected to was signing Minnesota on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement by many U.S. states to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote, no matter the outcome of their own jurisdictions.

The compact is seen as a legal pathway for the popular vote system to be enacted for presidential elections without the need for an amendment to the Constitution, which could take years to complete and would be difficult to pass.

The U.S. Constitution affords states the right to determine how to award electoral votes for selecting the president. Every state in the country currently does so through a popular vote among its own residents, but that wasn’t always the case, particularly in the country’s early years.

Advocates of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would use that provision in the Constitution to award a majority of Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead. Fifteen states plus Washington, D.C. are currently signed on to the agreement, which can only be enforced once the states that are signed on represent a majority of the Electoral College — 270 votes. If Minnesota agrees to join the compact, the states would still only represent 205 votes, meaning that the compact wouldn’t be enforced.

“If the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote governs the appointment of presidential electors, the State Canvassing Board shall declare duly elected the candidates for presidential electors and alternates identified in accordance with the provisions of that agreement,” the proposal in the omnibus bill reads.

The bill, including parts dealing with the compact, advanced on a partisan vote, with eight Democrats in the committee backing the measure and three Republicans in opposition.

“I keep hearing in this committee that we’re a democracy, we need to support the democracy,” Bliss argued before the vote, according to a report from blogger Chris Liebenthal. “We’re not a democracy. We’re a constitutional republic.”

Bliss’s claim that the U.S. is not a democracy is often used by conservatives to dismiss policies that most Americans support. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) recently used the argument to denounce the wishes of a majority of Americans to create new gun laws, for example, as did Republicans in Arizona last fall in an attempt to pass legislation to restrict access to voting.

“The national popular vote, I know some people say it strengthens each individual vote, but this brings us closer to a democracy, which, you know, that’s not a good thing,” Bliss continued.

Bliss falsely asserted that voters in large states like California would overrule Minnesota voters if the bill passed, and said that no candidate for president would ever again originate from Minnesota — a nonsensical assertion that is not based on the compact’s wording whatsoever.

Indeed, because Minnesota is a swing state, close to half of all voters’ wishes go ignored each presidential election year; those voters’ opinions would have more impact under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact than without it.

Bliss also dismissed the fact that a popular vote system is favored by a majority of voters in the country. “I don’t understand the reasoning behind it. It’s not popular,” he said.

Despite Bliss’s claim, however, polling from Pew Research Center last fall shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) support a model that would select the president based on the popular vote. And while most Republicans are opposed to changing the current system, a sizable portion (42 percent) support abolishing the Electoral College.

Republicans’ opposition to ending the Electoral College may have less to do with their supposed concerns about states’ rights and more with the fact that they rarely win presidential elections through the popular vote. Since 1992, Republicans have won just three presidential races: in 2000, 2004 and 2016. In two of those races, the election was decided through the Electoral College, with the winner losing the popular vote.

“Nothing short of medically negligent”: Texas GOP votes to cut off “lifesaving care” for trans kids

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

Republican Texas senators on Monday reversed themselves and voted against allowing transgender kids currently being treated with puberty blockers and hormone therapy to continue receiving such care.

[What transition-related health care is available to transgender kids in Texas? Here’s what you should know.]

That reversal essentially expanded Senate Bill 14‘s proposed ban on transition-related care to include all transgender children — as outlined in the legislation’s original version. The chamber voted 19-11 along party lines to preliminarily approve the broader version of the bill, which is priority legislation for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Monday’s vote to expand the restrictions and advance the legislation came days after the GOP-controlled Senate agreed to allow kids already on puberty blockers and hormone therapy by early June to keep their access to those treatments. Major medical groups approve of such care and say it lessens higher rates of depression and suicide for trans youth.

Republican Sen. Donna Campbell of New Braunfels, SB 14’s author, said Monday that she wanted to remove the exceptions because they weren’t discussed in a committee hearing before reaching the full Senate.

“There were so many questions that have been brought up since the amendment was put on that out of respect for the body, we’re going to ask that it be taken down,” she said.

[Texas Republicans have filed dozens of bills affecting LGBTQ people. Here’s what they’d do.]

Campbell also successfully introduced an amendment to move the bill’s effective date from Dec. 1 to Sept. 1, 2023.

Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, pushed back against removing the exceptions, which would have allowed more transgender kids to receive care that many medical groups say is vital to their mental health. During committee debates for both SB 14 and its companion House bill, the Texas Medical Association has also called for lawmakers to allow trans youth who are already receiving transition-related medical treatments such as puberty blockers or hormone therapy to continue receiving them.

“There’s extensive data showing that hormone therapy withdrawal symptoms can be and are very difficult to cope with,” Menéndez said. “I’m not sure after the hearing where we — Senator Campbell and I — sat through, why we would want to pull the rug out from under people.”

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, also blasted the reversal as “nothing short of medically negligent” in a tweet following the meeting. “TX claims to be ‘prolife’ and ‘pro-family,’ yet – cuts off lifesaving care to current pediatric patients,” she added in another tweet.

SB 14 requires another Senate vote before it can advance to the House.

Andrea Segovia, senior field and policy adviser for the Transgender Education Network of Texas, told The Texas Tribune that the Monday decision was disappointing. She’d seen the move to scale down the bill’s proposed restrictions last week as a sign that lawmakers were listening to the overwhelming public opposition to the legislation.

Ricardo Martinez, CEO of LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Texas, shared Segovia’s sentiment.

“Last week we saw a small glimmer of compassion when Senators were willing to accommodate trans kids who are already receiving medical care by allowing them to continue with their treatment plans. Today, the Senate deleted its last hint of kindness from the record,” he said in a statement to the Tribune.

Now, LGBTQ advocates will continue to fight in order to shut down these efforts in the lower chamber.

“A parent told me yesterday, ‘I just feel like I’m in constant whiplash from the state, like I’m constantly getting into a wreck with people who are trying to create laws for my kid — and I just feel so beat up physically and mentally,'” Segovia said. “That’s what we’re doing to people.”

Campbell has previously painted doctors providing transition-related care as opportunists capitalizing on a “social contagion” with treatments that lack sufficient scientific data that could determine whether the care is safe and effective.

But in an hourslong Senate committee hearing about the bill, medical groups testified about the wealth of scientific evidence backing mental health benefits of transition-related care for transgender youth. Trans youth who take puberty blockers are significantly less likely to experience lifetime suicidal ideation than those who want the care and don’t get it, according to recent studies.

Over the objections of hundreds of doctors, medical groups and LGBTQ Texans, Republican lawmakers have said the legislation is needed to protect children and that medical studies don’t support the benefits of such care.

“This is not science-based practice,” Campbell said last week.

Campbell’s fellow Senate Republicans passed the exception for kids already receiving such care last week, but that move quickly came under fire from the Republican Party of Texas and its far-right leader, Matt Rinaldi.

“With this amendment, Texas is abandoning every child currently being abused,” Rinaldi tweeted.

Before Rinaldi weighed in, the House author of the proposal, Rep. Tom Oliverson, had defended the change in a March 30 statement. He said it was “factually inaccurate and misleading” to claim they had weakened the legislation.

Patrick Svitek contributed to this story.

Disclosure: Equality Texas and Texas Medical Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

We can’t wait to welcome you Sept. 21-23 to the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, our multiday celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day’s news — all taking place just steps away from the Texas Capitol. When tickets go on sale in May, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/03/texas-senate-transgender-children-puberty-blockers-hormone-therapy/.

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

The case against Trump: A porn star, a conspiracy, a payoff, a cover-up

Donald Trump feared that porn star Stormy Daniels could damage his presidential candidacy in 2016 by discussing their alleged sexual encounter some years earlier. So he conspired to illegally influence the 2016 election by falsifying business records of the hush-money payments made to Daniels by way of attorney Michael Cohen. Or at least that’s the theory that New York prosecutors laid out Tuesday in charging the former president with 34 counts of felony fraud. Those charges, originally filed last Thursday by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg under sealed indictment, have sparked a frenzy of speculation and conflicting opinions among legal experts — as did the more telling statement of facts Bragg filed. (Trump, for the record, has pleaded not guilty.)

At a press conference following Trump’s arraignment, Bragg’s allegations against Trump went beyond the well-known details of the Daniels payoff. They included a similar $150,000 hush-money payment to another woman, and $30,000 paid to a Trump Tower doorman who supposedly knew about an alleged illegitimate child of Trump’s. (Bragg’s allegations do not rest on whether or not any of these salacious rumors have any merit.) Bragg further alleged that Trump engaged in a “catch and kill” agreement with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, under which Pecker would pay for the rights to potentially damaging stories about Trump but never publish them.

Because Trump used his business records to conceal those payments, Bragg alleges, the case amounts to conspiracy, tax fraud and violations of state campaign finance laws. But those specific charges do not appear in the indictment. Rather, the Manhattan grand jury was convinced by the evidence it heard to elevate the charges to felonies. Normally, falsifying business records would be a misdemeanor charge unless it was part of an attempt to cover up another crime. That makes it a case of Class E felony fraud, which is what Bragg is alleging. Class E felonies carry a potential five-year prison sentence in New York, and Donald J. Trump faces 34 of them. (In the real world, the likelihood of significant prison time for low-level nonviolent felony offenses is very small.)

America now a “3rd world dictatorship”: GOP mirrors Trump tactics — deny, reverse, attack

More information about the charges is expected to emerge in coming days. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has given Bragg 15 days to hand over his office’s evidence. Prosecutors are reportedly worried, however, that Trump will post discovery evidence online before that time, perhaps in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.

Trump’s defense team tried to put those worries to rest Tuesday, as captured by the Washington Post’s J.M. Rieger.

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina previously said he did not expect the judge to impose a gag order on Trump, and told Savannah Guthrie of “Today” that if the case actually goes to trial Trump will not accept a plea deal. Tacopina continued to command much of the spotlight Tuesday in televised appearances and impromptu press conferences, but the Trump team may be divided about him.

“I know Joe has certain potential conflict issues given his prior contact with Stormy Daniels,” Trump attorney Tim Parlatore told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

In any event, Trump’s defense team now has 45 days to file preliminary motions — such as an apparent request to move the proceedings to another jurisdiction, such as Republican-friendly Staten Island.

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

Legal analysts on the right, unsurprisingly, have largely denounced Bragg’s charges. But others have expressed caution as well; these charges rest on an untested legal theory that will rely heavily on Merchan’s discretion.

“I think it will be difficult to prevail on the felonies,” Cornell Law professor Randy Zelin told CBS News on Tuesday. “The falsifying of entries misdemeanor — that’s a slam dunk.”

The Nation’s Elie Mystal has repeatedly raised the question of whether the statute of limitations has expired for some of these alleged crimes, even while expressing confidence that Bragg’s case “is strong, and, it would appear, is backed up by ample documentary evidence.”

“As class E felonies, all the counts in the indictment must be brought within five years of the act. Bragg largely describes criminal bookkeeping that took place in 2017, but the statement of facts details all of the measures Trump took in 2018 to delay and obstruct an investigation into those false records, including ordering his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie about it,” Mystal wrote in a Tuesday analysis.

“Remember this: Al Capone dodged a lot of crimes, but he couldn’t dodge tax crimes. And he served eight years for it.”

“That delay could convince a judge that the statute of limitations was tolled (which means paused) while Trump was obstructing the investigation. Another wrinkle is that Governor Andrew Cuomo paused the statute of limitations in New York for 228 days during the Covid pandemic. It’s possible that under this theory, Bragg has just enough time to bring 2023 charges six years after 2017 crimes.”

In an interview with USA Today, however, seasoned tax prosecutor and 30-year Justice Department lawyer Gene Rossi read between the lines of the indictment and said he believed Bragg’s case was stronger than it seemed on its surface.

“When you have documents that are blatantly false, and apparently you have that here, and you have witnesses that corroborate each other, that combination is very powerful for a jury,” Rossi said.

“That’s a bold allegation. And if it’s proven, it has a lot of jury appeal,” he added. “Because remember this: Al Capone dodged a lot of crimes, but he couldn’t dodge tax crimes. And he served eight years for it.”

Given the amount of legal theory resting on Merchan’s gavel, it’s clearly relevant that this isn’t his first Trump rodeo. Merchan has presided over two previous cases where the CEO and CFO of Trump’s real estate company were found guilty of criminal tax fraud.

Trump, meanwhile, has taken to attacking Merchan online, which any respectable defense attorney would view as unwise.

“The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME,” Trump claimed in recent Truth Social posts.

In another, he went on to call Merchan a “Trump Hating Judge, hand selected by the Soros backed D.A.”

Trump’s team, and many of his Republican political allies in office, have unleashed a torrent of social media backlash against Bragg, accusing him of blatant overreach and political persecution.

But in fact Trump enjoyed privileges not typically afforded to other felony defendants in New York. He was escorted to and from the arraignment in a presidential-style motorcade supervised by Secret Service agents, was not handcuffed and got to skip the otherwise mandatory mugshot.

“Republicans want you to believe our legal system is targeting Trump,” Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted Tuesday. “But at every step of this process, we’re reminded that the rich and powerful are treated better than the Black & brown communities who are actually targeted by the criminal legal system.”

Trump’s next expected court date in this case won’t be until December, and it’s not clear whether he will have to appear in person.

about the criminal indictment of Donald J. Trump

America now a “3rd world dictatorship”: GOP mirrors Trump tactics — deny, reverse, attack

Former President Donald Trump was charged with 34 counts of felony fraud Tuesday in Manhattan, over the alleged falsification of business records relating to his 2016 hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels (as well as other attempts to suppress news about possible scandals). Trump pleaded not guilty, becoming the first former president to be charged with a crime.

Almost as soon as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg‘s office published the indictment on Tuesday afternoons, Republicans in the House and Senate began releasing statements in lockstep sentiment. Most followed near-identical language, giving the public a blueprint for the GOP’s public relations strategy: Deny, attack and reverse.

Bragg alleges that Trump attempted to interfere in an election by using hush money to keep the public from finding out potentially damaging facts about him during his campaign. Republicans are seeking to reverse that charge, accusing Bragg of interfering with the upcoming presidential election by “politically targeting” Trump.

It really happened: Here are the criminal charges against Donald Trump

After that, GOP counterattacks move to accuse Bragg of jurisdictional overreach, threatening the Manhattan D.A.’s office with congressional investigation, although there is little federal legislators can do against state or county prosecutors.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., was the first out of the gate with a statement on Trump’s indictment.

“It’s clear that this is a politically-motivated prosecution against President Trump. The DOJ previously looked at the facts and decided there was no case to pursue,” Tillis said in his statement.

In fact, Bragg clearly stated in his Tuesday press conference that he now has “additional evidence that was not in the office’s possession prior to my time here.” That includes new witness statements.

Tillis further suggested that members of Congress should use their authority to target Bragg.

“Congress has every right to demand answers and accountability from the Manhattan D.A.’s office, especially as this directly relates to federal law,” he said in the statement.

That suggestion was clearly in step with signals from the overwhelmingly pro-Trump House GOP. In a notable moment of irony, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., accused Bragg of attempting to manipulate the outcome of an election.

“Bragg’s weaponization of the federal justice process will be held accountable by Congress,” McCarthy tweeted Tuesday, a pointed reference to the House’s new Government Weaponization Committee.

“Alvin Bragg is attempting to interfere in our democratic process by invoking federal law to bring politicized charges against President Trump, admittedly using federal funds, while at the same time arguing that the peoples’ representatives in Congress lack jurisdiction to investigate this farce,” McCarthy said.

Given a deadlocked Congress, with Democrats holding a narrow Senate majority, and the chaotic and ineffective nature of the House under McCarthy, the lower chamber’s investigation committees are unlikely to threaten to Bragg’s ability to prosecute the case. Republicans nonetheless lined up metaphorically to issue roll-call statements, attacking Bragg.

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

Punchbowl News’ Max Cohen nabbed quotes from at least three GOP members in a series of tweets from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., who all used near-identical language to accuse Bragg of staging a political prosecution. Malliotakis, who represents portions of Brooklyn and Staten Island — where Trump hopes his trial can he held — called for Bragg’s firing.

It took a few hours, but the GOP’s official Twitter account finally caught up with the newly issued strategy and aped the language, decrying “political prosecution.” Shortly after that, more Republican members began parroting the phrase in their respective online squawk boxes, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee and Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois (who last year praised the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as a “victory for white life“).

Some, like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — once upon a time a 2016 primary rival of Trump’s — brought the talking points to life in a video monologue.

“People see this for what it is. It’s political,” Rubio said in a tweeted speech.

Few tweets had quite the manic fervor of the one posted by Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, who was the subject of numerous allegations of misconduct and mismanagement in his previous career as White House physician. While Jackson didn’t echo the major GOP talking points, his tweets reached a level of hysteria suggestive of the former president.

“America is very rapidly turning into a 3rd world dictatorship,” Jackson wrote. “Democrats want to arrest & imprison ANYONE who opposes their corrupt regime. It’s not just Trump they’re after.

“THEY’RE AFTER YOU!!”

America is very rapidly turning into a 3rd world dictatorship. Democrats want to arrest & imprison ANYONE who opposes their corrupt regime. It’s not just Trump they’re after – THEY’RE AFTER YOU!!

— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) April 4, 2023

Another response that requires a bit of decoding is the tweet from Mercedes Schlapp, a former Trump adviser whose husband, Matt Schlapp, the head of CPAC and chair of the American Conservative Union, was recently accused of sexual assault by a former strategist for Herschel Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign. Mercedes Schlapp called the Trump indictment “a wake up call for many Republicans,” suggesting that GOP voters on the fence about Trump in 2024 “are realizing the left has gone too far.”

This indictment is a wake up call for many Republicans.

Republicans who were on the fence about voting for Trump in 2024 are realizing the left has gone too far by weaponizing our justice system.

Now, this is just a media circus that’s only going to help President Trump pic.twitter.com/zjbQTYoe7U

— Mercedes Schlapp (@mercedesschlapp) April 4, 2023

about the actual, for-real indictment of Donald J. Trump

“That was an epic moment”: “John Wick 4” martial artist on that traffic battle, honoring Bruce Lee

Marko Zaror is currently appearing on screens across the country playing Chidi, a henchman for the Marquis (Bill Skårskgard) in “John Wick: Chapter 4.” (He will be remembered most for his scene with a dog.) But the Chilean martial artist also stars (in a double role), produced, and did the fight choreography for “Fist of the Condor,” opening April 4 in select theaters.

The new film, which was produced by Zaror’s company, is a throwback to his idol Bruce Lee‘s films. Guerrero (Zaror) is hoping to recover a sacred book that may be in the hands of his twin brother, Gemelo (Zaror). To keep the manual safe, Guerrero must first defeat Gemelo’s colleague, Kalari (Eyal Meyer). Flashbacks show how Guerrero trained with the maestros Wook (Man Soo Yoon) and Condor Woman (Gina Aguad) before the ultimate battle.

“He gave me freedom to experiment with my techniques and create the rhythm of the fight.

“Fist of the Condor” showcases Zaror and his powerful body in ways that are quite different from “John Wick: Chapter 4.” But both films showcase the benefits of passion, patience and persistence, along with physical and mental exercises. In “Wick” Zaror’s Chidi proves to be a relentless killing machine who believes he should be the one to take out John Wick. In “Fist,” Zaror undergoes training where he must walk on his hands and even jump over a bar while his legs are bound together as preparation to fight his rivals.

“John Wick 4” is both stunning and exhausting in its aesthetic action excess

The action scenes, are, of course, the main reason to see both films, and Zaror is poetry in slow motion in “Fist of the Condor,” especially during a fight scene on a beach where he is seen in some breathtaking balletic moves. This is in stark contrast to his scenes in “Wick” where he has a series of intense action scenes fighting John Wick in the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe and on the steps of Sacre Coeur.

The actor/martial artist spoke with Salon about his two new films.

You had some amazing fight sequences in “John Wick: Chapter 4.” How do you adapt your martial arts style to the film, and did you get to choreograph any of your fights? (Check out Zaror going mano a mano with Reeves around the 1:41 mark below.)

As a character, you want to always bring your own way of movement to the role. Jeremy Marinas, the fight coordinator [for “John Wick”], let me play and incorporate them. When I proposed, “I’d rather do it this way . . .” he gave me freedom to experiment with my techniques and create the rhythm of the fight. In the traffic scene, you are collaborating with the stunt drivers, and it is very precise; you have to be sure to hit your mark, so a car won’t run over you. There is a lot of focus and concentration. We kind of co-created, because there was a big plan and a direction that they want to go with each scene; so as long as I don’t interfere with that final objective, I can play and add my flavor to it.

Chidi varies his engagement based on each fight he is in. Can you talk about how you recalibrated his technique in each sequence?

“With ‘Wick’ you feel that pressure — this is the big leagues now, and you have to deliver at your max.”

We tried to create an arc for the character. In Osaka, Chidi is least [engaged], he was evading. “I’m not going to bother with these people.” Then, when he gets a chance to fight John Wick, there is an anxiety and excitement. It was Chidi’s moment to prove to the Marquis that he was better than Donnie Yen, who was hired to kill John. That was my character’s struggle through the movie, and that level of adrenaline and anxiety is matched in his very dynamic and explosive movements.

You have a swagger that is appealing in “John Wick,” and your character is frustrated by his inability to kill John. What are your thoughts on playing this kind of villain?

I like this type of bad guy. In his world, he’s the hero, and he is superior. He doesn’t believe in codes of honor and “star assassins.” He represents The Table, and he thinks he is the best assassin. Chidi’s boss [the Marquis] is just there to enforce the rules. Chidi is the expert killing machine. For me, I’m the cool guy here. I love how you start hating this cool guy. I’m not trying to be likable. People cheer when the dog gets me and pees on my face. When Chad [Stahelski, the director] told me he was creating this dynamic with the dog, that for me was an epic moment.

The scale of “John Wick” gives you great exposure, but “Fist of the Condor” gives you more control. What is it like going from one extreme to the other?

Both are beautiful in different ways. Of course, “Fist of the Condor” is so personal, and it comes from my life journey as a martial artist. I gave all my notes to the director on nutrition, training, philosophy, fears in life and then created something — that really allowed me to express myself honestly in a film. I wanted people who love martial arts to know my journey. It is a lot of responsibility [making “Fist”]. You get the problems of a production — needing money and having to change things — there are a lot of challenges. When you are in a monster production like “John Wick,” where everyone on set is the best at what they do, you sit and learn and enjoy. As a producer, I tried to absorb everything and see how Chad communicates with his crew and how he engages with Keanu and what my role is. I was more of a student. In “Fist,” I’m the boss and need to ensure s**t happens. On “John Wick,” I just smiled 24/7 and had the best time of my life. This is the moment I’ve been working for my whole life; it puts me in front of millions. “Fist,” hopefully people will see it, but with “Wick” you feel that pressure — this is the big leagues now, and you have to deliver at your max. I like that adrenaline and challenge.

“When I first saw Bruce Lee’s body, I thought ‘This guy is from another planet! His body is on another level!'”

Marko Zaror in “Fist of the Condor” (Well Go USA)

There are not many Latin martial arts films. How popular is this culture in South America?

In Asian culture, you don’t need to have a backstory to explain why a character in a film knows martial arts. [People think] we don’t have a culture of martial arts in Latin America, but it does exist. There are a lot of martial arts people who live in Latin America and love this [genre]. That was my case. I am a Latino martial artist who grew up in Chile and was inspired by Bruce Lee. “Fist” is how I take the genre and make it my own with my culture — the scenario, the music, the characters and the styles of fighting. The film is an homage to Bruce Lee and a way of saying thanks.

Can you talk about creating the fight scenes in “Fist of the Condor”?

The first challenge, Guerrero doesn’t want to fight. He wants to protect the sacred manual. That gives room to create a different type of choreography. He is not the attacker; the other guy wants to win so you need to create a different dynamic. My character needs to respond to his attack — I want to hurt him right away. I’m a superior fighter, so how much can I play with him? When you have an opponent who is more of a threat, you can’t play anymore. You have to take him down or things will go south. It’s a totally different choreography. When you throw in the emotional aspect of the choreography, there is margin of error and frustration. That allows you to create different techniques than if you are fighting with confidence. You see the confidence with the first fight and then the guy pulls a mirror on Guerrero [to exploit his weakness] and things change. That allows for a change in choreography and different techniques.

Your body is spectacular. Can you talk about developing it?

“To have a better life and be a better human. That is what martial arts does for people.”

That’s what happened to me when I saw Bruce Lee, and that’s why physicality is such an important thing. I will not allow myself to be in front of a camera unless I look like a superhero. It is such an impactful thing. When I first saw Bruce Lee’s body, I thought “This guy is from another planet! His body is on another level!” You believe that he can beat 100 people at the same time. I worked on my diet and nutrition to get to that shape — I try to maintain it for a whole year so when a film project comes, you just tweak some things and get ready. I am constantly experimenting with nutrition.

Condor Woman tells Guerrero to get rid of his ego. How do you keep your ego in check? If “Fist” succeeds or fails, it’s on you, whereas the box office take of “John Wick” does not rest entirely on you.

I’m just trying to be the best version of myself. Martial arts taught me that lesson. What people think about me — that I’m good or bad — is not going to change my reality. If the film is successful or not, it is not going make me a better person. It’s just a moment, and your journey continues. Just keep walking. If you fall down, stand up and just keep walking. You are not walking for just one goal. You walk because you love to walk and be totally honest with the journey you take. My life hasn’t changed no matter what stage I am in in my career. My priorities are to be kind and treat others the way I want to be treated myself, to take care of my body, train and get better every day. Failure and success don’t matter.

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

I appreciate your philosophy. Is that what you want fans to get from these genre films?

We make movies to connect with people and inspire someone to discover their path. To have a better life and be a better human. That is what martial arts does for people. You learn discipline and you want to achieve and improve, so you need to be consistent and focused. Sometimes you need to work for something and that requires discipline. If you want a plant to grow, more water does not make it grow faster. You need to be consistent and water it every day and then it will grow, and you have to care for it every day and it will turn into a bigger tree. We are co-creators of our reality by decisions we make and the actions we take. When you make a decision and take actions because of fear and jealousy, things may go in a direction you don’t like. When you follow your instinct and discover your passion and love, and listen to that, you open doors. But that is hard to do.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is in theaters now.

“Fist of the Condor” opens April 4 in select theatres prior to its debut as a Hi-YAH! Original April 7.

about this topic

Is Twitter all a joke to Elon Musk?

Do not adjust your screen. If you’re a user of Twitter desktop, you may have noticed the top left corner of your feed has transformed into a tiny dog’s head giving you a side eye. It’s a Shiba Inu and it’s also the symbol for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. What is it doing on Twitter?

What are a lot of things doing on Twitter these days? What is Elon Musk, proud owner of the social media site since October of 2022, doing on and with Twitter? From confusion about blue checks, to ever-conflicting payment schemes, to the crypto dog (which indicates a personal vendetta), Musk is staging Twitter, a site with an estimated 450 million monthly users, as a revenge battleground.

Not everyone has the luxury to leave Twitter

On Monday, after the Twitter takeover, Dogecoin saw its price jump by about 30%, as NPR and others reported. “Shortly after 11 p.m. Monday, the coin was valued at about 1 cent,” NPR wrote, citing the unsuccessful attempt to raise the value to $1 per coin. Musk has a dog — a Shiba Inu, if you will — in the fight; currently accused of a pyramid scheme due to his promotion of Dogecoin, he’s staring down a $258 billion class-action lawsuit in federal court. (Meanwhile, the cute dog who inspired the cryptocurrency image is battling leukemia and liver disease.)

When it comes to Twitter: If it’s broke, don’t fix it — break it differently.

What else is happening with the man nicknamed, because of his support of the canine crypto, “The Dogefather”? He’s decided when it comes to Twitter: If it’s broke, don’t fix it — break it differently. Some users are randomly seeing Tweets from accounts they don’t follow in their “Following” timeline. Musk Tweeted that starting this month the “For You” feed of Twitter will suggest only paid accounts, aka those who pay for the Twitter Blue and its verified check marks. Vox characterizes this abrupt shift as “just one of several seemingly random changes Musk has been making to Twitter’s core user experience without explanation.”

The blue checks specifically have emerged as a critical and confusing battleground in Musk’s war against . . . something (himself? The press? Democracy? Grimes?). Twitter under Musk first threatened a crackdown on, as CNN wrote, “blue checks granted under its old verification system — which emphasized protecting high-profile users at risk of impersonation.” If you or your company wanted to keep your blue check going forward, you needed to pay $8 monthly. Otherwise, they’d be removed.

That was supposed to happen on April 1. “Instead, Twitter appeared to target a single account from a major publication Musk dislikes and changed the language on its site in a way that obscures why users are verified,” CNN reported. Now when a person clicks on a blue check, it’s unclear if the account is notable because a user is who they say they are (a public figure like a journalist, for example, or politician), or because they’ve paid for verification. Maybe it was all a big and unwieldly April Fools’ joke, one without a punchline?

Twitter, for better or worse, gave us insight to the thoughts of public figures in real-time.

Or maybe it was simply at the expense of one Twitter user. The main account for the New York Times was the only account to lose its checkmark in the night of a thousand blue checks. The Times said earlier they wouldn’t pay Musk’s price. But so did multiple organizations, none of whom have been stripped of the blue badge yet.

Musk has it out for the Times, which he described as “unreadable,” writing — in a Tweet, of course – “The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting.” Musk recently fell from the top of Forbes’ “World’s Billionaire’s List,” as he’s worth $39 billion less than last year. Perhaps Forbes is next on the blue check chopping block?

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

We learned early on that Twitter, for better or worse, gave us insight to the thoughts of public figures in real time. Now with Musk in charge, everyone who uses Twitter is being given instantaneous insight into the whims, grievances and grudges of the world’s second-richest billionaire.

about Twitter

Food forests are bringing shade and sustenance to US cities, one parcel of land at a time

More than half of all people on Earth live in cities and that share could reach 70% by 2050. But except for public parks, there aren’t many models for nature conservation that focus on caring for nature in urban areas.

One new idea that’s gaining attention is the concept of food forests — essentially, edible parks. These projects, often sited on vacant lots, grow large and small trees, vines, shrubs and plants that produce fruits, nuts and other edible products.

Atlanta’s Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is the nation’s largest such project, covering more than 7 acres.

Unlike community gardens or urban farms, food forests are designed to mimic ecosystems found in nature, with many vertical layers. They shade and cool the land, protecting soil from erosion and providing habitat for insects, animals, birds and bees. Many community gardens and urban farms have limited membership, but most food forests are open to the community from sunup to sundown.

As scholars who focus on conservation, social justice and sustainable food systems, we see food forests as an exciting new way to protect nature without displacing people. Food forests don’t just conserve biodiversity — they also promote community well-being and offer deep insights about fostering urban nature in the Anthropocene, as environmentally destructive forms of economic development and consumption alter Earth’s climate and ecosystems.

Community stewards planting a tree at Boston’s Edgewater Food Forest at River Street, July 2021. Boston Food Forest Coalition/Hope Kelley, CC BY-ND

Protecting nature without pushing people away

Many scientists and world leaders agree that to slow climate change and reduce losses of wild species, it’s critical to protect a large share of Earth’s lands and waters for nature. Under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, 188 nations have agreed on a target of conserving at least 30% of land and sea areas globally by 2030 — an agenda known popularly as 30×30.

But there’s fierce debate over how to achieve that goal. In many cases, creating protected areas has displaced Indigenous peoples from their homelands. What’s more, protected areas are disproportionately located in countries with high levels of economic inequality and poorly functioning political institutions that don’t effectively protect the rights of poor and marginalized citizens in most cases.

In contrast, food forests promote civic engagement. At Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, volunteers worked with professional landscape architects and organized public meetings to seek community input on the project’s design and development. The city of Atlanta’s Urban Agriculture Team partners with neighborhood residents, volunteers, community groups and nonprofit partners to manage the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill.

Block by block in Boston

Boston is famous for its parks and green spaces, including some designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. But it also has a history of systemic racism and segregation that created drastic inequities in access to green spaces.

And those gaps still exist. In 2021, the city reported that communities of color that had been subjected to redlining in the past had 16% less parkland and 7% less tree cover than the citywide median. These neighborhoods were 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 degrees Celsius) hotter during the day and 1.9 F (1 C) hotter at night, making residents more vulnerable to urban heat waves that are becoming increasingly common with climate change.

Encouragingly, Boston has been at the forefront of the national expansion of food forests. The unique approach here places ownership of these parcels in a community trust. Neighborhood stewards manage the sites’ routine care and maintenance.

The nonprofit Boston Food Forest Coalition, which launched in 2015, is working to develop 30 community-driven food forests by 2030. The existing nine projects are helping to conserve over 60,000 square feet (5,600 square meters) of formerly vacant urban land — an area slightly larger than a football field.

Neighborhood volunteers choose what to grow, plan events and share harvested crops with food banks, nonprofit and faith-based meal programs and neighbors. Local collective action is central to repurposing open spaces, including lawns, yards and vacant lots, into food forests that are linked together into a citywide network. The coalition, a community land trust that partners with the city government, holds Boston food forests as permanently protected lands.

Aerial view of the Ellington Community Food Forest in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Boston Food Forest Coalition, CC BY-ND

Boston’s food forests are small in size: They average 7,000 square feet (650 square meters) of reclaimed land, about 50% larger than an NBA basketball court. But they produce a wide range of vegetables, fruit and herbs, including Roxbury Russet apples, native blueberries and pawpaws, a nutritious fruit native to North America. The forests also serve as gathering spaces, contribute to rainwater harvesting and help beautify neighborhoods.

The Boston Food Forest Coalition provides technical assistance and fundraising support. It also hires experts for tasks such as soil remediation, removing invasive plants and installing accessible pathways, benches and fences.

Hundreds of volunteers take part in community work days and educational workshops on topics such as pruning fruit trees in winter. Gardening classes and cultural events connect neighbors across urban divides of class, race, language and culture.

Boston residents explain what the city’s food forests mean to them.

A growing movement

According to a crowd-sourced repository, the U.S. has more than 85 community food forests in public spaces from the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South. Currently, most of these sites are in larger cities. In a 2021 survey, mayors from 176 small cities (with populations under 25,000) reported that long-term maintenance was the biggest challenge of sustaining food forests in their communities.

From our experience observing Boston’s approach close up, we believe its model of community-driven food forests is promising. The city sold land to the Boston Food Forest Coalition’s community land trust for $100 per parcel in 2015 and also funded initial construction and planting operations. Since then, the city has made food forests an important part of the city’s open spaces program as it continues to sell parcels to the community land trust at the same price.

Smaller cities with much lower tax bases may not be able to make the same sort of investments. But Boston’s community-driven model offers a viable approach for maintaining these projects without burdening city governments. The city has adopted innovative zoning and permitting ordinances to support small-scale urban agriculture.

Building a food forest brings together neighbors, neighborhood associations, community-based organizations and city agencies. It represents a grassroots response to the interconnected crises of climate change, environmental degradation and social and racial inequity. We believe food forests show how to build a just and sustainable future, one person, seedling and neighborhood at a time.

Orion Kriegman, the founding executive director of the Boston Food Forest Coalition, contributed to this article.

Karen A. Spiller, Thomas W. Haas Professor in Sustainable Food Systems, University of New Hampshire and Prakash Kashwan, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Brandeis University

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

“There is a myriad of federal crimes”: Experts predict Trump criminal charges will “keep coming”

Former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 charges related to the falsification of business records in Manhattan — but legal experts say his legal woes are just getting started.

Investigators found evidence of potential obstruction by former president Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation, potentially making it a far more dangerous threat to his freedom than the indictment he faces in New York.

Justice Department and FBI investigators obtained emails and texts from a former Trump White House aide, whose messages provided “a detailed understanding of the day-to-day activity at Mar-a-Lago at critical moments,” according to The Washington Post.

“Feels obstruction-y”: Experts say it may be “game over” after Trump aide gives DOJ key evidence

Investigators are examining what happened after Trump’s advisers received a subpoena in May demanding the return of all classified documents and whether Trump may have obstructed government efforts to collect and return all sensitive materials that he took home to Mar-a-Lago.

“There’s a potential for a number of federal offenses here from [the] dissemination of classified information to obstruction of justice, to potential false statements as well,” William “Widge” Devaney, former assistant U.S. attorney in the District of New Jersey, told Salon.

Federal investigators gathered new evidence Trump rummaged through documents in some of the boxes after receiving the subpoena, “apparently out of a desire to keep certain things in his possession”, people familiar with the investigation told The Post.

While looking through the boxes wouldn’t count as obstruction of justice, Trump’s efforts to hide or conceal materials that were subpoenaed by the grand jury and refusing to turn them over would, Devaney said.

He added that the former president could also face potential prosecution for instructing his lawyers to make false statements, like misrepresenting that all the documents had been turned over.

While Trump’s team handed over some documents, the FBI later discovered more than 100 additional classified items during an August search of Mar-a-Lago.

“I think the significance of his review of the evidence after receiving the subpoena is his knowledge that his response to DOJ was false when he said he had nothing more than what he was returning,” said former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “This is important evidence of a corrupt intent to obstruct justice by lying to DOJ.”

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

Multiple advisers warned Trump that trying to keep the documents could get him into legal trouble, but even still, investigators suspect that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served based on witness statements, security footage and documentary evidence, the sources said.

“In any obstruction case, the issue likely boils down to the specific conduct and the person’s intent,” said John Kaley, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. “There must be criminal intent.”

Prosecutors tend to rely on circumstantial or surrounding evidence to establish intent, Devaney pointed out. Evidence that reveals Trump intentionally held on to documents, like pulling material out of boxes would count as obstruction.

“We know that those materials then were not produced in response to the grand jury subpoena,” Devaney said. “Trump through his lawyers said we have searched and we’ve produced everything. Trump led them to say that, knowing that he had held documents back.”

Another significant development in the case is Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran being forced to testify before the grand jury under the crime-fraud exception, Devaney added. Corcoran drafted a document falsely stating that Trump had returned all classified documents before the FBI search.

“Before a lawyer can be forced to give up his client’s attorney-client privilege, a court needs to find that there is a likelihood that a crime was committed and that lawyer was used, either wittingly or unwittingly in furtherance of that crime,” Devaney said. “So that’s actually pretty significant from Trump’s standpoint not only because of what that lawyer might say, but it’s significant that there has been a judicial finding that yes, there’s been a crime. I think we can safely assume that the crime they’re talking about is obstruction.”

Trump could also face potential prosecution if he shared classified information with others. Investigators have asked witnesses if he showed maps to political donors, people familiar with those conversations told The Post.

“If Trump is showing classified information to people who aren’t entitled to see it, then there is a myriad of federal crimes, involving dissemination of classified information and that’s a federal offense,” Devaney said.

As prosecutors move forward with the legal process, one of the hurdles they may encounter could be dealing with “the world of public opinion,” he added, referring to a separate Justice Department probe into a smaller number of classified documents ending up in an insecure office of President Biden’s, as well as his Delaware home.

“I think it could be hard for the public to sort out ‘why is Trump getting prosecuted for this when it’s not a big deal when other presidents have done it,'” Devaney said

However, there’s a “cavernous” difference between the two examples, one of which “equates to criminal activity,” he noted. Unlike Trump, Biden notified authorities and immediately authorized searches, which was “indicative of a mistake”.

Trump, who is the leading contender seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces four separate criminal probes.

Trump has been indicted by a New York grand jury related to hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. He is also being investigated by the DOJ and a state prosecutor in Georgia over efforts to block Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which could indict Trump on a whole different slate of charges including “conspiring to end the lawful transfer of presidential power”, according to MSNBC.

“If the criminal charges keep coming, I think eventually the weight of those charges will really damage him,” Devaney said. “I can only imagine, and I think we’ve seen in some polling, that he’s being damaged among independent voters already. So while this might not hurt him, perhaps even help him in the primaries, I can only think that this is going to ultimately hurt him in terms of the general election.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe