Sen. Chris Murphy: Republicans “don’t give a crap” about kids and gun violence

On Dec. 14, 2012, a few weeks after Chris Murphy was first elected as a U.S. senator from Connecticut, he was standing on a train platform with his wife and children, on their way into New York City to see the Christmas decorations. That was when he heard about the horrific shooting in is state, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which 26 people were killed, 20 of them young children. Murphy literally left his family at the station, heading up to the grieving community of Newtown. Ever since that day, Murphy has dedicated himself to preventing other families from enduring that same horror.

I spoke to Murphy, now in his second term in Washington, for “Salon Talks” about his work to reduce gun violence in our nation. He was among the driving forces behind the bipartisan gun reform legislation enacted last year — the first major gun safety bill passed by our oft-paralyzed Congress in 30 years. He told me that this legislation was genuinely consequential, and has had real-world impact: “Lots of people have been denied weapons that absolutely shouldn’t have them.”

Murphy went on to slam Republicans who so often claim to care about children, but block efforts to protect their lives from gun violence, for example by refusing to control the sale of AR-15s and other assault-type weapons. “It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don’t seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence,” he said.

Murphy also wasn’t timid in discussing what’s fueling gun violence: the sheer number of guns in the United States. “Gun purchase rates, starting in the Obama era, but really supercharged during the pandemic, have meant that there are just exponentially more weapons out there today than ever before,” he said. “I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us.” But as he concedes, it’s a problem with no easy answer.

Watch “Salon Talks” with Senator Chris Murphy here, or read an edited transcript of our conversation below, to hear more about why he’s supporting President Biden’s potential re-election campaign, how he works on bipartisan legislation and how he views the current take on the Republican Party: “Sticking up for Jan. 6 protesters and bludgeoning Hunter Biden — that’s about all they can agree on,” he said.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Last June, for the first time in decades, bipartisan gun reform legislation was passed. You were a primary sponsor. How has it helped in reducing gun violence?

It is important to understand how consequential this legislation was. This is the first major gun safety legislation passed by Congress in 30 years. This is a bill that was vehemently, strongly opposed by the NRA and other gun groups, and yet we were able to get significant Republican support, matched with Democratic support, to get it passed.

It had five pretty big changes in gun laws. The most notable was support for state “red flag” laws. These are the laws that states passed to temporarily take guns away from individuals who are in crisis, threatening harm to themselves or others. It closes the boyfriend loophole, so that means that everyone that’s been convicted of a domestic violence crime in this country will have their guns taken away, and can’t buy any new guns.

“Gun purchase rates, starting in the Obama era, but really supercharged during the pandemic, have meant that there are exponentially more weapons out there today than ever before.”

It also has a new background check for under-21 purchasers. Unfortunately, you see these mass shooters tend to be 18-, 19-, 20-year old males. Now there’s a waiting period for every young buyer in this country. You can’t walk out of a gun store with an AR-15 any longer if you’re under 21. There’s a more enhanced, longer background check that’s done before that purchase happens.

Then there’s two other changes: increased penalties for gun trafficking and “straw purchasing” to interrupt the trade of illegal weapons in this country, and then a requirement that more sellers of weapons, if they’re selling online or at gun shows, perform background checks.

On top of that, there’s $15 billion in the bill — I know nobody knows what numbers are big and small any longer when the federal budget is trillions, but $15 billion is a lot of money to spend on mental health and school safety. Maybe the biggest one-time investment in mental health in this country since the Affordable Care Act. That money right now is going to schools, community clinics to try to improve access to mental health and help schools become healthier, safer places. A big deal, more frankly than I thought we could get done. I’m really proud of the fact that Republicans and Democrats joined together.

Has it made a difference? The short answer is it has. A group of us went out to the National Criminal Background Check system a couple of weeks ago, Republicans and Democrats, and got a briefing. Lots of people have been denied weapons that absolutely shouldn’t have them. A lot of young buyers who were in crisis who were going to buy a weapon who no doubt were going to use that weapon to either kill themselves or to kill others have been stopped from getting that weapon because of the law that we passed. That’s just one example of the lives that have undoubtedly been saved already by this legislation.

For decades nothing could pass, even after Sandy Hook. Even after Obama literally cried because he was moved so much by the families who had lost children. We have a Supreme Court that, in the Bruen case, seems to make it difficult if not impossible to enact legislation to save lives from gun violence. Can something withstand the scrutiny of this far-right court?

Well, that’s up for debate. The formal holding of the Bruen decision is fairly narrow about a very specific law in New York, but there’s language attached to that decision very purposefully, very clinically, designed to essentially invite district court judges and appellate court judges to bring their politics into the courtroom.

“The Supreme Court may rule that any prohibition or any regulation of guns that didn’t exist at the founding of this country is unconstitutional. That’s absolutely absurd.”

What the rest of that decision hints at is that the Supreme Court may rule that any prohibition or any regulation of guns that didn’t exist at the founding of this country is unconstitutional. Now, that’s absolutely absurd: Many of the weapons that we are dealing with today did not exist at the time of the founding, and there’s no way that our founding fathers believed that the Constitution didn’t allow you to regulate anything that was invented after the Constitution was passed. But that’s what district court, appellate court judges are beginning to do, to say that if it wasn’t regulated in the 1780s, it can’t be regulated today.

That is a pathway to invalidate almost all of our gun laws because any crime that wasn’t a crime back then, you can’t prohibit people from buying guns if they’ve been convicted of a new crime that didn’t exist in 1780. Assault weapons didn’t exist back then, so you can’t prohibit those. We’re definitely headed towards a very dangerous place, where Congress and state legislatures may be prohibited from passing many of the common sense gun laws that enjoy broad public support today. That’s how radical this court is. Again, I use the word clinical. I mean they are very purposeful in that they put out these rulings that are technically narrow, but invite lower courts to engage in much more sweeping jurisprudence.

You tweeted something really provocative, saying that we have to address the massive explosion of guns in order to deal with gun violence. How do we do that?

I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us. That tweet was accompanied by a chart, and I’d encourage people to look at it. The explosion of guns in this country is a very recent phenomenon, certainly of the last 15 years, but really of the last five years. The gun purchase rates, starting in the Obama era, but really supercharged during the pandemic, have meant that there are exponentially more weapons out there today than ever before.

It was hammered home for me by the mayor of Waterbury, Connecticut, a guy by the name of Neil O’Leary, who used to be a police chief. Before he was a police chief, he used to be a beat cop. He said, “I started out in the 1980s. It was a big deal if we came across an illegal gun. It happened every now and again, but there weren’t a lot of illegal guns out there. Criminals had them, real hardened criminals. Then, about 10, 15 years ago, it started becoming more regular. Every week we would pick up an illegal gun or two as we were stopping people, as we were doing searches.

Then he said, “Today, every day. It’s like water. It’s like rain. We come across illegal guns every day because they’re everywhere.” Detectives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, told me the other day, “Used to be that a group of kids that were involved in risky behaviors, they’d normally have a community gun. They’d all know where the gun was if they needed it. Now every single kid is armed. Every car has a weapon.” So what happens is every dispute turns into a shooting.

“Ted Cruz is looking for confrontations and opportunities to yell at people, and I just would rather not give him those opportunities.”

That same detective in Bridgeport told me, “I don’t respond to fistfights anymore. They just don’t happen. Kids don’t have fistfights in Bridgeport. Every beef turns into shots fired.” That is connected to the ubiquity of weapons —so what do we do about it? It’s really hard. We can do gun buybacks. That has a pretty narrow-scale effect. But this is a problem that we’re just living with right now, and we’re not talking about gun confiscation. So you’re just trying at this point to stop the problem from getting even worse.

We hear people on the right talk about their concern for children. But every day children die by gun violence, and I hear zero concern from them about this. Instead they want to demonize transgender teens or ban books about Black history from school to protect children from feeling uncomfortable. What about protecting kids from being shot in their classroom?

Listen, it’s not just that. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, a neighborhood that’s prone to violence, like the neighborhood I live in — I live in the south end of Hartford. I went to go visit my local K-8 school. I sat down with a group of eighth-grade leaders at this school, and they wanted to talk to me about one thing: Their walk to and from school. They wanted to talk to me about how scared they are every day when they leave their house. That trauma, it changes the brain chemistry of children. So it’s not a coincidence that all the underperforming schools in this country are in the violent neighborhoods. It’s because when you are exposed to violence, when you fear for your life when you’re coming to and from school, how on earth can you learn when you’re in school that day?

So to me, we can’t catalog the epidemic of gun violence merely by how many shootings we’ve had or even how many homicides we’ve had. You have to talk about a generation of kids, specifically in these violence-prone neighborhoods, that we are literally losing because their brains change when they’re exposed to war-like levels of trauma. It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don’t seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence.

You’ve had some battles with Ted Cruz. I don’t know if you’re the Batman and he’s the Joker, and this is how it works out. Can you ever reach someone like Ted Cruz on issues like this?

I don’t know that I have battles with Ted Cruz. I just tend to ignore him. I mean, he comes to the floor and makes these ridiculous requests. I object to them and then leave the floor. And he yells at me for a while once I’m back in my office, but I’m not sure that they’re actual battles. Ted Cruz is looking for confrontations and opportunities to yell at people, and I would rather not give him those opportunities.

Here’s the good news. I mean, you’re never going to get Ted Cruz on a compromise legislation. He’s not in the Senate to compromise. He’s in the Senate to get clicks. But there’s plenty of Republicans in the Senate who want to do deals and who want to compromise. We got that gun bill done last year because Sen, Cruz’s colleague in Texas, who represents the same constituency that Sen. Cruz does, decided that it was better for his state and for our country if we started to work together.

“We can continue to make progress, not with every Republican in the Senate, but there are plenty that are at the point where they think part of their job description is to make the gun laws of this nation make more sense.”

John Cornyn told me, “There’s a whole bunch of things I cannot do, but there’s some things I can. Let’s focus on the things we can do together instead of the things that we argue over.” That’s how we got the gun bill done. We can continue to make progress, not with every Republican in the Senate, but there are plenty that are at the point where they think part of their job description is to make the gun laws of this nation make more sense.

Democrat rips Ted Cruz for offering prayers while fighting gun safety

I cannot recall another president talking as much about the contest between democracy and autocracy, both foreign and domestic, as Joe Biden. We see Donald Trump running again, spewing language that you would expect to see from an autocrat in some other nation, not the United States of America. How concerned are you about our democratic republic?

Listen, I’m very concerned. I mean, you obviously are still living with the aftermath of an insurrection attempt against the federal government. You have a sizable portion of the country that is not really interested in preserving democracy. All they want is their people in power. If democracy doesn’t result in their people being in power, then they’re not really interested in democracy. I think there’s an element of the Republican Party that feels the same thing. There’s a strain of thought in the new right that believes democracy is anachronistic, it’s irrelevant. It can’t keep up with the pace of modern society, so you need a quasi-dictatorship or monarchy instead. There’s a lot of really scary thought that’s happening out there.

But the American people had a chance to weigh in on this. They had a whole bunch of candidates running in 2022 that were intent on overturning democracy. And most of them, not all of them, but most of the highest-profile candidates who fit that category lost. Joe Biden showed extraordinary leadership. People said, “Why is Joe Biden making the closing argument about democracy? I mean, that’s not what’s on people’s mind. He should be talking about wages or should be talking about abortion. He should be talking about something else.”

Well, there’s two kinds of leadership, one in which you let others set the agenda and you just fill in the blanks, or one in which you set the agenda. By Joe Biden elevating the case for democracy and the stakes in 2022 about the future of democracy, I think a lot of voters took cues from the president and came out and voted to preserve democracy. Young people came out in certain states at record numbers, and I think they were coming out in part because they were trying to preserve American democracy. We certainly still have the threat, but I feel better than I maybe expected to feel after last November.

Are you surprised that it’s been more than two years since Jan. 6 and Donald Trump has not faced any charges for his role in an attempted coup and for his role, as the Jan. 6 committee said, in inciting the attack on our Capitol?

I mean, I don’t provide advice to prosecutors in general. I don’t do it when it comes to charges against Connecticut citizens, I don’t do it when it comes to charges against the president of the United States. I don’t profess any surprise or lack of surprise. That’s ultimately a decision that the prosecutorial wing of the federal government will make.

If Donald Trump has clearly violated the laws of this country, he should be held accountable. I have been pretty clear, though, that I think it’s got to be a pretty open-and-shut case. I think you’ve got to be careful about charging former presidents of the United States. I think it’s OK to be careful and to make sure that you’re going to win that case. I don’t provide advice other than that advice, which is to have a pretty high standard when it comes to bringing criminal charges against former presidents of the United States.

Democrats actually gained a seat in the Senate by winning in Pennsylvania. What’s it like, on a practical level, being in the Senate with one more Democratic senator?

“I certainly want to nominate somebody who knows how to win, knows how to beat Donald Trump.”

People don’t see some of the practical differences it makes. We could ultimately prevail on the Senate floor [with a 50-50 split] because the vice president breaks a tie. The vice president doesn’t vote in committees. Every committee in the prior Congress had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. For instance, on the Foreign Relations Committee, when there was an ambassador Republicans had objected to, they couldn’t pass our committee. So we had to go through a special procedure and a lot of extra time to get that nomination to the floor for a vote. Well, now we have a majority in all of our committees.

This week we’ve had a couple close votes, one of which was for a nominee to staff a global women’s health care office. Every Republican voted against her simply because she was pro-choice. That would’ve been a tie vote, not advancing out of committee. Now Democrats won the vote, and we can take an immediate vote on the Senate floor.

In practical ways, that extra vote makes a difference. Now, you’ve still got a couple Democrats in our caucus who are much more conservative and a little bit more resistant to major change, and you’ve got to deal with that to get anything passed. But yes, it’s much better to be at 51 than 50.

Another presidential election is almost here. You’ve been very strongly supportive of President Biden. Why do you think he deserves a second term?

“Sticking up for Jan. 6 protesters and bludgeoning Hunter Biden — that’s about all they can agree on.”

The proof is in the pudding. I mean, look at this president’s record. You’re talking about a 90% reduction in COVID deaths, an economy that is on fire, structurally low unemployment. You have a record of legislative achievement that is unparalleled.

I just don’t think you have any other president in our lifetime that has gotten as much done in the first two years as Joe Biden did when it comes to improving people’s lives, saving lives. The bipartisan Safer Communities Act, lower prescription drug costs. And you’ve got a president who knows how to win. I think Donald Trump is going to be their candidate. Maybe I’m wrong. I certainly want to nominate somebody who knows how to win, and knows how to beat Donald Trump in particular. But I also want to reward President Biden for a first two years that has been pretty damn successful.

The amount of legislation that was passed on issue after issue was great. Now the Republicans have had the House for two months and they’ve passed nothing. They’re having hearings about Twitter.

I mean, the crazy thing is that they can’t even figure out the easy issues for Republicans. Take the border. I thought it was going to be easy for them to do something totally irresponsible and draconian and racist. They can’t even get their act together on the stuff where they don’t need a single Democratic vote: electing a speaker, passing an immigration bill. So that is really terrible news for the republic, but it is an advertisement to the American people of how dysfunctional government is if you give it to Republicans these days.

I just read that the Oversight Committee, because of Marjorie Taylor Greene, si going to visit the Jan. 6 prisoners in jail. They can unify around that. It’s a remarkable time to watch.

Sticking up for Jan. 6 protesters and bludgeoning Hunter Biden — that’s about all they can agree on.

Can you believe the politicization of the Jan. 6 attack, as opposed to how we were united after 9/11? There is now a partisan agenda around Jan. 6. Is that just the times we live in? Should we have expected it?

No, we shouldn’t expect it and we shouldn’t accept it. It just doesn’t have to be like this. When there’s an attack against the United States, whether it comes from foreign terrorists or Americans, we should rise up to defend our nation, period, full stop.

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A country filled with empty tables: How it feels to be hungry

My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

In our South Bronx apartment, given the lack of food, there was no breakfast. It was simply a missing meal, so my sisters, brother, and I never expected it. Lunch was usually a sandwich and sometimes a can of juice, though none of us used the whole can. We knew enough to just put a little juice in our glass and then fill it with water. Dinner, which one of my sisters called the “real food,” would invariably be cheap and starchy servings meant to fill us. There wasn’t any cooked fish, salad, or fresh fruit. Rarely was anything left over. Most of our neighbors faced similar food scarcity and many suffered physical problems at relatively young ages: dizziness, fatigue, loss of strength, and other maladies, including asthma and diabetes.

Why Food Should Be a Basic Right

Food is to health as air is to breathing. One thing I learned from the world I grew up in was that if you get little or no food for long periods of time, medical attention is likely to be needed. Children, in particular, must have enough food to thrive, grow, think, and perform then as well as later in life.

Only recently, we saw how a pandemic of unwellness — thanks to Covid-19 — could overwhelm a hospital system, leaving doctors, nurses, and health services in general overworked and in danger of collapse. Think of hunger as another kind of pandemic that, however little noticed, can also overwhelm a health-care system (or at least that modest part of ours devoted to the neediest among us). Without enough nutritious food, emotional and physical needs only continue to proliferate along with a growing demand for ever more health care.

For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.

Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It’s a problem that, in possibly the world’s richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?

Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since.

Food Inequity in America

In 1969, the Black Panther Party responded to food scarcity in its communities by introducing a breakfast program for children. One aim was simply to fill their stomachs, the other to help them do well in school, since those who are hungry find it difficult to concentrate.

Having visited their Harlem Breakfast Program in New York City, I was moved then by the sense of joy in the room and the healthy food being offered, which most of the children seemed to be eating with delight. At the time, recognizing the deep-seated need for food and finding a way to meet it seemed like a revolutionary act. Unfortunately, when the political winds changed in the early 1970s, the program ended. Many children of color there once more went to school hungry as so many still do in communities across this country.

Decades later, during the Covid pandemic, the Brotherhood Sister Sol organization began providing food to people in Harlem. Once a week, boxes of it were available to anyone who came to pick them up and many did. Recognizing an emergency, that group acted to try to resolve it, something deeply appreciated by the community. Eventually, however, money and contributions ran out and the effort ended. In Harlem today, there is still hunger.

During the pandemic, at a national level, Congress acted in a significant fashion to increase the Supplemental Nutrition (SNAP) benefits to households already receiving food assistance. Effective March 1, 2023, however, depending on family size and income, the monthly allowance of an extra $95 to $200 in food stamps for tens of millions of households, a majority of which have children, ended. The loss of that extra money and so of nutritional upgrades comes at a time when inflation has sent food prices soaring. As if that weren’t bad enough, the federal law passed to provide free school lunches during the pandemic ended last year. (Pre-pandemic free lunches were offered in some schools, but not everywhere.) If the government was able to provide such free meals as well as extra food subsidies in those pandemic years, the question is (or at least should be): Why won’t it continue doing just that? After all, wealthy people ate well before and during the worst of the pandemic and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Available food pantries and food banks gather supplies from farms, shops, and contributions. They then package and deliver them to the needy or provide places where such food can be picked up. Helpful as they are to many, though, they aren’t accessible to so many others in need. Even more important, they, too, represent temporary fixes that rise and fall in relation to the political and economic moment. Sadly, people’s food needs in this country are anything but temporary and should be assured in the same way social security (so far) is for seniors and those unable to work. That drugs like heroin and fentanyl are sometimes easier to come by in poor communities than nutritious, affordable food should be considered deeply shameful.

For a country that projects itself as the richest in the world, hunger remains hidden by design. It’s true that the United States doesn’t have the in-your-face version of malnutrition seen in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan (to name just two of the food-desperate lands in this world). Yet according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, more than 34 million people in this country, including nine million children, were food insecure, including 1,280,000 adults 65 or older who lived alone.

There Is No Medicaid of Food

Having enough food shouldn’t be a matter of charity. Food, like healthcare, should be a basic and necessary human right in a wealthy country like ours, which, of course, lacks a food version of Medicaid. Being able to put enough on the table is treated as anything but a right here. Instead, food is, at best, doled out to the needy in weekly or monthly packages, one at a time, no guarantees for the future and no midnight snacks allowed or the food will be gone before the month is up.

The irony or, better said, the tragedy of our situation is that food insecurity, no less hunger, needn’t occur, especially in a country as wealthy as ours. But to change the situation would involve altering far more than the way food is both distributed and priced. A move to greater economic equality would certainly be a starting point, since the ultimate health of a society depends on the health of its populace and a lack of adequate food on a daily basis will continue to affect all aspects of a social order that only continues to fray.

For a while now, progressive mayors and other government officials have been trying to introduce a guaranteed (or basic) annual income into their communities. At present, these are just pilot programs being tested out in various parts of the United States and Canada. They guarantee perhaps $500 to $1,000 dollars a month annually to low-income individuals and/or families. In some areas, this is run as a lottery, in others not. Individuals or families accepted into such a program receive a prepaid Mastercard once a month that allows them to buy food as needed (as well as other essentials) without going to a food bank.

Los Angeles has created one of the country’s largest basic-income pilot projects. It provides 12 no-strings-attached monthly payments of $1,000, which, unsurprisingly enough, low-income recipients report to be helpful and genuinely reassuring. However — and there always seems to be a however, doesn’t there? — these are just experimental pilot programs and so subject to the political or economic winds of the moment. The word “guaranteed,” even when used, should be considered a misnomer until the temporary becomes permanent, making it a guaranteed right like social security.

For those who presently benefit from such programs, there appears to be no downside, except of course the fear that they will end, as the SNAP program just did, returning so many impoverished Americans to their earlier level of need.

In truth, however, food equity for all should be on everyone’s political agenda, even if it is a goal that won’t be reached without a struggle. This should not be a country filled with empty tables. Unfortunately, short of a loud and continuous hue and cry from the rest of us, hunger will continue apace and only those who experience it will see its effects.

I regularly pass many homeless men and women on the streets of New York City where I live. Recently, I was stopped by a woman who held out her hand and said that she was hungry. I believed her. The homeless are the least hidden example we see of food insecurity.

Texas GOP bill would ban lessons on gender — and give families $8K to send kids to private school

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A sweeping education bill introduced in the Texas Senate late Friday would allow families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools, establish new opportunities for parents to review instruction material and impose new rules on how gender and sexual orientation is taught in all grades.

If signed into law, Senate Bill 8 would give families up to $8,000 in taxpayer money, per student, to pay for private schooling through an educational savings account, cementing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick‘s signature educational proposal into law.

Patrick’s efforts have been rebuffed before. Rural Republican lawmakers have historically opposed similar legislation, arguing that it siphons off money from public schools, often an anchor of their smaller communities. But this year’s bill carves out smaller districts, leaving school districts with fewer than 20,000 students fully funded for the first two years. Texas schools receive a base allotment of $6,160 per student each year.

Larger districts in urban areas with more private schools would stand to lose state funding, which is calculated by the average student daily attendance.

The savings account provisions are part of the legislations’ broader theme of parental rights — something Republicans have seized since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns temporarily closed schools. In the three years since, conservatives have pushed a variety of changes to the way classrooms are run. Texas has already put perimeters on how topics such as race and slavery is taught.

The legislation puts lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation under a new microscope. It echoes a highly controversial law in Florida. The bill’s language released late Friday says schools are prohibited from teaching such lessons to any grade level that are not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Schools must establish so-called parent portals for families to review instructional material. Parents also would have the right to exempt students from instruction about gender and sexual orientation.

And schools may establish reviews of lessons based on state guidelines to ensure teachers are following the law.

School-choice proponents have routinely cited teaching on sexual orientation and gender as a key justification for pulling their kids — and tax dollars — from public schools. The new bill would allow them to do so while also banning such teachings.

Parents also would need to be notified of any changes to their child’s mental, emotional or physical health.

An accompanying piece of legislation, Senate Bill 9, would also give “across the board” pay raises to teachers; increase funding for classrooms; establish and fund mentor and teacher residency programs; and give free pre-K education for the children of classroom teachers in districts where it is provided, according to the news release from the bill’s author.

In a statement, the bills’ author, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, framed the legislation as a compromise between “parents, educators, employers and students.”

“Educating the next generation of Texans is the most fundamental responsibility we have, and I authored Senate Bill 8 to place parents, not government, squarely in the center of the decisions for their children,” he said. “Giving parents the power to determine the best school for their child will encourage competition and innovation, ensuring that each Texas student has the opportunity to succeed.”

On Friday, Creighton also requested an expedited opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on whether his bill, specifically its educational savings accounts provision, would run afoul of the Texas Constitution because it would divert public funds to private religious schools. Citing recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Creighton questioned whether the related Texas constitutional provisions, known as the Blain Amendments, were “likewise unconstitutional.” And, earlier this week, state Sen. Angela Paxton — who is married to the attorney general — filed legislation that would repeal “the constitutional provision that prohibits the appropriation of state money or property for the benefit of any sect, religious society, or theological or religious seminary.”

Catholic leaders said Friday that Creighton’s bill introduced important questions about religious freedom, specifically as related to the Blain Amendments that they said have roots in anti-Catholic bigotry.

“In general, it’s a good bill and a good start,” said Jennifer Allmon, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops. “This is a good way to begin the conversation.”

Public education leaders meanwhile decried the bill: “School vouchers, no matter what they are called, divert scarce public education funds to private schools and vendors which are not required to comply with federal protections for students with disabilities or report and track spending and student performance,” said Michelle Smith, executive director of Raise Your Hand Texas.

Both Patrick, who presides over the state Senate, and Gov. Greg Abbott have made “school choice” a priority this session, with the latter naming it an emergency item for this legislative session and calling on lawmakers to enact education savings accounts, a voucher-like program that would give parents who remove their children from the public education system state money to pay for educational expenses, like private school tuition, online schooling or private tutors.

Abbott has appeared at several private schools across the state advocating for education savings accounts.

“That will give all parents the ability to choose the best education option for their child,” he said during a parental rights event in Corpus Christi last month, where he announced his support for such a program. “The bottom line is this: This is really about freedom.”

Despite Patrick and Abbott supporting taxpayer-funded private school scholarships, portions of the bill’s future are precarious. House Democrats and their rural Republican peers have historically blocked legislation that would siphon any money away from rural schools. It is unclear whether the extra funding for rural schools in the bill would be enough to win support in the lower chamber this year. Under the bill, a school district with fewer than 20,000 students would receive $10,000 each year, for the first two years, for each student that uses education savings accounts.

Pooja Salhotra and Brian Lopez contributed.

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/2023/03/10/gender-sexual-orientation-vouchers-texas-senate-bill/.

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

“Trump was right”: Extremism scholar alarmed by visit to CPAC

In early March 2023, I mixed with the Make America Great Again faithful at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference – a popular meeting, often known as CPAC, for conservative activists and political figures.

I walked, ate and sat with the attendees at the National Harbor in Maryland over the course of four days. Many of them were dressed in MAGA and pro-Trump gear such as sequined hats and shirts that said things like “Trump won” the 2020 election. A few had tattoos of Trump’s face.

Media reports show that CPAC, which did not publicize the number of attendees, had lower-than-normal attendance and fewer high-profile sponsors.

Approximately 62% of CPAC attendees participating in a straw poll said they support Donald Trump for president in 2024.

Understanding CPAC

Many commentators and others have labeled CPAC extremist. The program was loaded with sometimes incendiary figures reviled by the left, including Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, as well as former Trump political advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

I am a scholar of extremism in the United States and went to CPAC for two reasons. First, I wanted to hear firsthand what conservatives, and especially Trump followers, said. At a time of high political polarization, it is important to understand different positions.

Second, almost half of people in the U.S. fear political violence and civil war. I wanted to take the pulse of the conservative right and assess points of division ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting America Now.” Who and what were the perceived threats? And, amid the polarization, was there any common ground shared by conservatives and liberals?

I discovered five frequent demons at the conference: there were China’s Communist Party and border criminals – including Mexican drug cartels and undocumented immigrants. “Radical left Marxists” and the ideologies of “wokism” and “transgenderism” were also frequent targets.

While I also found a few glimmers of hope for political common ground between the left and right, it was apparent that Trumpism – and the election denial, misinformation and scapegoating that come with it – is stronger than some think and, I believe, remains a threat to U.S. democracy.

CPAC attendees visit booths promoting political groups and products for sale. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

China

China was one of the biggest common enemies identified at the conference. Just days after senior U.S. intelligence officials said that China is the United States’ biggest national security threat, speaker after speaker at CPAC harped on this theme.

The first day included panels titled “Caging the Red Dragon” and “No Chinese Balloons Above Tennessee.”

Such language plays to the growing number of Americans who view China as the country’s biggest enemy.

Border criminals

The focus on China connected to another target at the conference – Mexican cartels that engage in human and drug trafficking. This includes groups that bring fentanyl – a drug that is Chinese-manufactured or made from Chinese-produced chemicals – into the U.S.

Many speakers accurately noted the staggering number of fentanyl deaths in the U.S., including over 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021. But they did so in often apocalyptic terms.

They were quick to blame the Biden administration, ignoring that these issues have a long history and also existed under former President Donald Trump.

The crisis, CPAC speakers said, includes large numbers of undocumented migrants crossing the border – who they sometimes derogatorily referred to as “illegal aliens.” Oddly, those crossing the border were depicted both as victims of the violent cartels and as criminal and economic threats to Americans.

American Marxism

CPAC speakers and attendees spotlighted what they saw as equally dire demons lurking within the country.

“Radical leftist Marxists” – a stand-in for all Democrats – stood at the top of the list. These leftist radicals, CPAC speakers suggested, were intent on turning the U.S. into a socialist country like China in which the state controlled bodies and minds and quashed individual rights and freedoms.

The Democratic Party “hates this country,” Fox TV personality Mark Levin claimed on the CPAC stage.

“This American Marxist movement,” he continued, his voice raising, “took off big time during COVID” and then “rode the wave of Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the cop-hating, to advance this racist, Marxist, bigoted, socialist, anti-American agenda – which is everything today the Democrat Party today stands for!”

The crowd responded with loud applause and cheers – ignoring that these often repeated claims have little basis in reality.

Wokism

This anti-American agenda, Levin and other CPAC speakers argued, was illustrated by “wokism.”

Being woke generally means understanding societal issues like racial and social justice. But CPAC speakers, who didn’t define the term, suggested that these efforts were really part of a “radical leftist” plot to control what people think and say – an idea that the right has derided as “political correctness” in the past.

‘Transgenderism’

There was also an emphasis on gender and the perceived threat of transgender people. Some of the anti-transgender sentiment was casual, such as when Rep. Gaetz quipped, “We had to spend four, five days asking the Chinese spy balloon what its pronouns were before we were willing to shoot it down.”

Perhaps the most strident remarks were made by conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, who stated, “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

Despite his inflammatory language and use of “transgenderism,” a derogatory term suggesting that transgender people have “a condition,” Knowles received loud applause.

So, too, did other speakers who disparaged transgender identity – an issue that has become a culture wars flashpoint.

The Anti-Defamation League, among other human rights groups, has shown that the idea transgender people are predatory “groomers” or pedophiles is false and is being circulated by some Republicans only for political gain.

In March 2023, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law that restricts drag performances in the presence of children – a move that likely violates the First Amendment’s free speech protection and, in my view, is based on fear, not facts. Other Republican-led states are considering anti-drag legislation.

Guests listen to former President Donald Trump address the Conservative Political Action Conference as the headline speaker. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The warrior

By the time Trump took the stage, the CPAC crowd was primed. People danced and waved “TRUMP WAS RIGHT!” placards.

Trump offered an apocalyptic vision of the country’s future.

“Sinister forces” are seeking to turn the U.S. into a “lawless open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare,” Trump said.

Trump promised to fight back against these forces. “I am your warrior,” he told the adoring crowd. “I am your justice.”

The rocky ride ahead

I went to CPAC to find areas where the left and right might find common ground. Both sides worry about issues like inflation, fentanyl and crime. And, even as they may disagree on the path to get there, both want a better future for the country.

But politics is another demon lurking in the room. Most of the speakers at CPAC seemed to be there to rile up the crowd, which included many activists.

This was especially true of Trump, whose divisiveness was on clear display at CPAC.

All of this suggests the U.S. faces a rocky ride to the upcoming 2024 election.

Alexander Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University – Newark

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

“Unforgivable”: BBC pulls episode of nature documentary over fears of right-wing backlash

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will not air the last episode of a six-part documentary that focuses on wildlife on the British Isles, reportedly over fears that doing so would have upset conservative interests in the United Kingdom.

David Attenborough’s documentary on British wildlife will air its first five episodes on BBC One during primetime hours. But the final part of the series, which focuses on environmental issues and the decline of nature in the U.K. over the past several decades, will only be available on the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service.

In addition to noting how wildlife has dwindled over the years, the sixth episode will also feature discussions of “rewilding” — a movement to restore and protect natural processes in former wilderness areas — a concept that is controversial within the U.K.’s Conservative Party.

The network made the decision in part because of fears of “lobbying groups that are desperately hanging on to their dinosaurian ways,” one source familiar with the choice told The Guardian. Senior sources from the BBC also told the publication that the decision was made to quell potential critiques from conservative voices in the country.

Laura Howard, a producer of the program, which is entitled “Wild Isles,” suggested that worries over politics in the documentary were unfounded — asserting that the “facts” included in the entire docuseries “speak for themselves” outside of any political ideology.

“It is undeniable, we are incredibly nature-depleted. And I don’t think that that is political,” Howard said. “I think it’s just facts.”

The BBC insists that it is not censoring Attenborough’s documentary. Rather, according to one spokesperson discussing the matter, the sixth episode is considered to be a standalone documentary, unrelated to the first five parts, and thus is being placed elsewhere for viewing.

But critics say the last installment of Attenborough’s work, all of which was commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the World Wildlife Fund, should air on television, the same as the other five parts of the program will do.

“For the BBC to censor [Attenborough], one of the nation’s most informed and trusted voices on the nature and climate emergencies is nothing short of an unforgivable dereliction of its duty to public service broadcasting,” said Caroline Lucas, a Green Party Member of Parliament.

“So the BBC is now effectively censoring the voice of nature David Attenborough on factual and vital content based on the potential reaction from Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers. These are truly dark days,” opined Liam Thorp, the political editor for Liverpool Echo.

“Heads have to roll”: Paul Gosar teases prosecution of Liz Cheney and Jan. 6 investigators

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., called for the prosecution of the members of the House Jan. 6 committee in an interview on Sunday.

A reporter at the far-right Gateway Pundit blog asked Gosar if there is “a chance that you guys could prosecute certain members of Congress or former members of Congress over January 6” like former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., even though Congress has no prosecutorial power.

Gosar, who played a key role in stoking right-wing anger ahead of the Capitol riot, agreed and suggested that it is not just Jan. 6 committee members that he believes should be prosecuted.

“I would not leave it at just that, Gosar said. “I think there’s also military that are involved. And I think that their, you know, heads have to roll. Otherwise, you condone this lawlessness, and that’s what America sees.”

“You f**ked me”: GOPer rages at McCarthy over committee as MAGA extremists score key assignments

Asked if he is looking into launching investigations into Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley or Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Gosar replied, “stay tuned.”

Paul Gosar says he expects there to be criminal referrals coming from the House seeking the prosecution of Liz Cheney, other Members of the J6 Committee, and for some military officers. pic.twitter.com/6s0u41B9Yl

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 12, 2023

Gosar, who was stripped of his committee assignments last Congress after posting an animated video depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., being killed, was seated on the House Oversight Committee earlier this year.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, last week announced a probe into the Jan. 6 investigation.

“We’ve got to get through the documents. We need to do some interviews with people. But at some point, we will have some hearings,” Loudermilk told The Hill.

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The congressman said it’s unclear whether the panel will interview members of the Jan. 6 committee and whether they may face subpoenas.

“I would hope that, you know, they’d just come and talk,” he told the outlet. “This is not going to be a gotcha. This is getting to the truth.”

Cheney on Twitter responded to the probe by telling her former Republican colleagues, “bring it on.”

“Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year,” Cheney wrote. “But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence.”

If @HouseGOP wants new Jan 6 hearings, bring it on. Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 8, 2023

about the House GOP probes

Biden approves Willow oil project in Alaska despite campaign pledge

Since taking office, the Biden administration has faced intense cross-pressure regarding the Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips venture that would open up an immense swath of public land on Alaska’s North Slope to new oil drilling. While Alaska politicians and oil industry figures have vigorously lobbied the administration to approve the project — particularly in the wake of the energy crisis stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — progressives, environmental groups, and some Alaska Native communities have strenuously opposed it.

On Monday, the administration tried to placate both sides. The Bureau of Land Management announced its final approval of the project, clearing the way for ConocoPhillips to start drilling over the next few years. At the same time, the Department of the Interior said that it will restrict future drilling in other parts of Alaska as well as ban offshore oil drilling in a swath of Arctic Ocean waters.

The most recent Bureau of Land Management estimates suggest that Willow could produce some 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years, generating as much as $17 billion in revenue for Alaska and the federal government. Its projected economic impact has helped the project garner nearly universal support from elected officials in Alaska at the state and federal level, as well as the endorsement of some Alaska Native communities. Dan Sullivan, one of the state’s Republican senators, has also claimed that Willow could help counter “the dictator in Moscow” by reducing global reliance on Russian oil.

The project’s potential productivity has triggered the opposite response in environmentalist circles, with the Democrat-aligned think tank the Center for American Progress declaring Willow a “carbon disaster” when it called on the president to reject the project last year. As a candidate, Biden said that if he were elected there would be “no new drilling on federal lands, period.” The approval of the Willow Project marks the first time the president has broken this promise without being forced to by Congress or federal courts.

According to the government’s own estimate, Willow could result in the release of more than 249 million tons of carbon dioxide over three decades, after all the oil is drilled and burned — the equivalent of adding around 2 million cars to the road each year. Furthermore, an investigation published by Grist in October suggested that rapid permafrost thaw in the region could create little-understood safety risks if drilling continues as planned. Already last spring, a monthlong natural gas leak caused by Conoco’s nearby drilling led to hundreds of evacuations and panic in the Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut.

ConocoPhillips has been pursuing Willow since at least 2015, when the company’s engineers made a major oil discovery on leases that the company had owned for more than a decade. The Trump administration tried to force the project through the approval process in late 2020, but a federal court ruling kicked the decision back to the incoming Biden administration the following year. Biden’s Bureau of Land Management pushed forward a scaled-down version of the project last month, suggesting Conoco should be allowed to drill at three of its five proposed well pads on the site.

Meanwhile, the announcement from the Interior Department would protect an enormous swath of Alaska wilderness from future development, creating what one official described to the New York Times as a “firewall” against future drilling projects of Willow’s scale. In a press release on Sunday, Interior said it is drafting a rule that will prohibit oil drilling on more than half of the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, which is the location of the Willow Project and the largest single swath of public land in the U.S. The announcement also promised to protect 3 million acres of offshore waters on the Beaufort Sea.

In a statement, the Department said the rule was intended to “ensure this important habitat for whales, seals, polar bears, as well as for subsistence purposes, will be protected in perpetuity from extractive development.” It also said the new safeguards are “responding to Alaska Native communities who have relied on the land, water, and wildlife to support their way of life.”

Climate groups do not appear appeased by the proposed safeguards, arguing that new protections don’t make up for the damage the Biden administration will cause by approving Willow. Kristin Monsell, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told the New York Times on Sunday that the split decision was “insulting.”

“Protecting one area of the Arctic so you can destroy another doesn’t make sense,” she said, “and it won’t help the people and wildlife who will be upended by the Willow project.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/biden-approves-willow-oil-project-alaska/.

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

Former prosecutor says Fox News faces “financial death penalty”: The damages could be “astronomical”

Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit could result in the “financial death penalty” for Fox News, according to former attorney and MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang.

Phang in an opinion piece published over the weekend warned that the “true cost” of the voting machine company’s could be much higher than the $1.6 billion it is seeking in compensatory damages.

“In the Dominion versus Fox News defamation case, Fox is now trapped in an ever-worsening spiral of lies of its own creation. Time and time again, Fox allegedly trafficked in lies and falsehoods. And the result just might be a financial death penalty for the network,” wrote Phang, who has over 25 years of experience as an ex-prosecutor. “As we’ve seen put forth in the thousands upon thousands of pages of evidence released during the discovery process in this case, people at Fox News allegedly knew the channel was repeatedly peddling lies. But it didn’t care.”

“Very damaging”: Expert says Fox may be on the hook for more than $1.6B after Murdoch’s admission

Phang pointed out that Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was preoccupied with placating former President Donald Trump and retaining Trumpsters “because, according to the lawsuit, profits were more important than the truth.”

The voting software company, “armed with thousands of pages of texts and internal chats and emails by and between Fox hosts, producers and executives,” Phang wrote, Dominion has asked the judge overseeing the case to rule in its favor before the case goes to trial next month.

“And some legal experts agree: Dominion doesn’t just have the upper hand, it has the truth on its side,” the former prosecutor explained. “If Dominion is successful, then all that would be left to determine is the amount of damages that Dominion is entitled to receive. That’s where the numbers become astronomical. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in lost profits and reputational harm. But it’s also seeking punitive damages, which are not capped under New York state law and could also be in the billions of dollars.”

“And a multi-billion-dollar punitive damages verdict would not just punish Fox News,” Phang added. “It would send a ringing message to all media companies to keep themselves in check and uphold the truth.”

Fox has denied any wrongdoing and has accused Dominion of cherrypicking evidence in its filings to publicly smear the network. Fox has also accused Dominion of taking an “extreme” view of defamation law and called the lawsuit a “blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

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Legal experts have questioned whether Fox’s First Amendment defense will hold up in court.

Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and CNN legal analyst, similarly told Salon last month that the damages in the case could quickly swell beyond $1.6 billion.

I think they’re looking at those damages being multiplied and even for a large company like Fox, you’re looking potentially at billions of dollars of damages,” he said. “That’s very dangerous.”

about the Fox News lawsuit

The unique technologies than help to prevent widespread water scarcity

Many futuristic novels and films have explored what the world might look like without water. But water scarcity isn’t a problem for the far-off future: It’s already here.

In its 2021 report, UN Water outlined the scale of the crisis: 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries and 733 million of those people are in “high and critically water-stressed countries”.

In 2018 Cape Town, where I live and conduct my research, residents found themselves staring down “day zero“, when household water supplies would run dry. Good rains spared the South African city, but now other parts of the country face similarly dire predictions of empty taps.

This scenario is threatening to play out across Africa. In the Horn of Africa region, for example, large areas of Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya have seen four consecutive rainy seasons pass without decent rains. The rise of “megacities” in Africa — with millions moving into city areas — puts further pressures on already limited infrastructure.

And the crisis extends far beyond the African continent.

There is no one solution for this grim reality. A multi-pronged approach will be necessary, as Cape Town’s experience illustrated.

Technology will be a key part of solving the global water scarcity crisis. Technological solutions can run the gamut from the most basic, like water leak detectors for households, to highly sophisticated, like ways to pull moisture out of the air to produce clean drinking water or convert the planet’s abundant salt water into fresh water.

In a recent paper, colleagues and I outlined another potentially powerful technology: Carbon nanomaterials, which have been shown to remove organic, inorganic and biological pollutants from water.

Contamination threatens water sources

Contamination is one of the factors putting strain on water sources. All water supplies contain some microbes and pathogens. But industrial waste is a huge problem: Vehicles release heavy metal pollutants, for instance, and acid mine drainage seeps into water sources. This results in contaminated ground and surface water that cannot be safely used for most human activities, much less for drinking or washing food.

Some current technologies make the treatment of water too expensive. Others are simply not up to the job and are unable to remove microorganisms. In removing organic pollutants like pharmaceutical waste, organic dyes, plastics and detergents from wastewater, for instance, some conventional techniques such as membrane filtration have been found wanting.

That’s where carbon nanomaterials come in. With others, I am exploring their use and finding that they are more efficient and economically viable than conventional materials.

Nanomaterials

Nanomaterials are broadly defined as materials that contain particles of between 1 and 100 nanometers (nm) in size. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter. Different nanomaterials are composed of different atoms — some, like those I research, are made up of carbon atoms.

Carbon is, by mass, the second most abundant element in the human body after oxygen. It is also a common element of all known life. Carbon nanotechnologies are environmentally friendly because they hold less risk of secondary pollution than some adsorbents (solid substances used to remove contaminants from liquid or gas).

Engineered into nanomaterial form, carbon nanomaterials are being hailed by many scientists around the world for their superior physical and chemical properties. They are increasingly prized for their potential to remove heavy metals from water thanks to their large surface area and adsorption capabilities, their nano-scaled size and their chemical properties.

Carbon nanomaterials have all been shown to be effective in the treatment of wastewater.

Tackling water scarcity

I work with carbon-coated magnetic nanomaterials. This blended composite plays a crucial role in decontaminating water. At the same time, it removes materials such as heavy metals. That makes it ideal for water treatment, as do its easy, fast recovery and recyclability, thanks to what’s known as magnetic filtration. In this process, the magnetic nanomaterials added to the contaminated water are recovered after treatment by an external strong magnet. The recovered materials can be regenerated and be reused again.

Carbon-based nanomaterials still have shortcomings. Nanomaterials tend to clump together into large particles, reducing their capacity to adsorb (attract and hold) pollutants. And nanoparticles are not always fully recovered from treated water, leading to secondary contamination. We’re still not sure how to separate exhausted — fully utilized — nanomaterials from treated water.

The work continues in our lab and others all over the world. Scientists dislike timelines, since breakthroughs rarely happen within set deadlines. But our hope is that more and more advances will be made with carbon-based nanonmaterials in the years to come, giving the world an important tool to tackle water scarcity.

Salam Titinchi, Professor, University of the Western Cape

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

The cutthroat history behind the explosive “Perry Mason” grocery feud

Compared to the first season of HBO’s “Perry Mason,” led by Matthew Rhys as the titular detective-turned-attorney, the premiere of the second season was pretty tame. Last season, Mason tracked down a child-killer who stitched his victim’s eyes open. When he’s back in court this time, it’s because a pair of grocers is feuding.

Sunny Gryce (played by Sean Astin) is a kind of walking caricature of a blustering “by the bootstraps” early 20th century capitalist; he is represented by Mason and is suing his former employee, Ed Purtell (Matt Bush) for opening his own grocery store across the street. Based on Ed’s testimony, it sounds like he put in most of the organizational work at Sunny’s. He wrote the manager’s handbook, he came up with the slogan and he perfected the layout of the store. Why not apply that hustle to your own business?

But according to Sunny, Ed’s store is essentially a copy of his, which Mason goes on to demonstrate in court.

“Perry Mason” is a stylish, Depression-noir reboot that doesn’t exceed its basic procedural roots

“You know what I love, Ed? Quaker Crackels Cereal,” Mason said, holding up a cereal box. “I mostly eat ’em right out of the box, like popcorn. I’ve . . . I’ve even taken this to the movie theater. Where would I find that in your store?”

“Aisle six,” Ed said — same as Sunny’s.

The same is true for the Underwood Deviled Ham (aisle 12) and the Bromo (aisle 2). That’s three for three, Mason pointed out, “a batting average Lou Gehrig would be jealous of.” It’s clear that Mason doesn’t exactly feel great about the work he is doing for Sunny, especially after Sunny asks him to turn up the legal heat on Ed, even after the defense has offered to settle. This, in turn, brings one of the premiere’s main points of tension further into the spotlight: What does real justice actually look like? And, importantly for our protagonist, how do you help someone achieve it?

Without spoiling too much of the first episode, it’s unclear how exactly the competition between Ed and Sunny will contribute to the plot of the overall season (the episode did end with a murder, after all). However, what is clear is that Sunny isn’t one who is eager to back down. After receiving a visit from Mason about the terms of the settlement, Sunny offers this cartoonishly pugilistic line: “Were you in the war, Mason? Then you and I both know, firsthand, mercy is not something people can afford when they are in a war.”

Dramatic? Undoubtedly — but then again, so was the real-life world of grocery stores at that point in history.

“Perry Mason” is set in Depression-era Los Angeles. The 1920s was a period of acute materialism. As Bob Batchelor wrote in his paper “Advertising in the 1920s,” most Americans both had more financial success than they had in the previous decade and increasingly equated material goods with personal success. This attitude was certainly fostered by advertisers at the time.

“Billboards, newspapers, magazines, and radio commercials touted the virtues of their various advertisers’ products, and companies poured enormous sums of money into advertising,” Batchelor wrote. “Collectively, American companies spent around $700 million on advertising in 1914, but by 1929 that figure ballooned to nearly $3 billion.”

Many associate the Great Depression with the stock market crash in October 1929, but the economy started contracting in August of that year, beginning an economic downturn that lasted 43 months until March 1933. While marketing budgets were slashed, the resulting Depression-era advertisements were more focused.

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They trumpeted the virtues of thrift and patriotic spending — and how much better they were than their competitors. Keep in mind, this was before the Federal Trade Commission was given the authority to regulate “unfair or deceptive” advertising in 1938.

The supermarket — which offered a large selection of household items in a self-service atmosphere, as opposed to just groceries — was also a Depression-era development. The first U.S. supermarket, King Kullen, opened its doors in 1930. It was started by grocery veteran Michael J. Cillen, who had originally proposed the idea to his two former employers, Kroger and A&P, but they turned him down.

“Aggressive marketing was a key component to his new business venture,” wrote Jenny McTaggart for The Progressive Grocer. “And it immediately put independent grocers, manufacturers and others in the business on the defensive. A full-page King Kullen advertisement threatened, ‘Chain stores read these prices and weep . . . [G]ive the poor buying public a chance.'”

In advertisements, King Kullen named itself “The World’s Greatest Price Wrecker,” while another Northeastern supermarket chain, Big Bear, billed itself as “The World’s Greatest Price Crusher.”

It’s a piece of history that was mimicked in Perry Mason. During the trial, Mason asked Ed, “What’s the slogan for Sunny’s Market?” Ed sharply inhaled. “All under one roof.”

“And for your store?”

Ed inhaled again: “Everything under our roof.”

“Well, thank you for changing those few letters,” Mason retorted.

And when everyone — from the customer to the seller — is fighting for every last penny, those few letters seem to matter. The question remains how that fight will impact the characters for the rest of the season.

from this author

“Coordinated at a higher level”: White supremacist propaganda soared to all-time high last year

The Anti-Defamation League recorded the highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents in 2022, according to a new report released last week.

The number of incidents increased by 38% from the previous year, with a total of 6,751 cases reported last year, compared to 4,876 in 2021, ADL’s Center on Extremism found.

Similarly, the number of groups involved in incidents last year also increased, rising from 38 different groups to 50, said Carla Hill, Director of Investigative Research with ADL Center on Extremism.

At least three networks, including Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League (GDL) and White Lives Matter (WLM) were responsible for 93% of the activity, she added.

“So what we’re seeing is a lot of overlap,” Hill told Salon. “We’ll see propaganda distributed together from two different sources, so that really demonstrates how they’re networking and overlapping across the country.”

Every domestic extremist murder last year was committed by right-wingers: report

The groups use different tools to spread propaganda, varying from graffiti, posters, stickers, and banners to even yard signs and laser projections. The propaganda is then promoted online after members share messages on social media with the purpose of spreading fear.

“It’s to sow anxiety and fear within these communities and make them feel like this movement is even bigger than it is and to mainstream that message,” Hill said. “Repeat, repeat, repeat until people aren’t as offended by it anymore [since] they’ve heard it 6000 times.”

Patriot Front, which has led propaganda efforts for several years, uses inundation as a method to spread their message, Hill added. But their technique is to use soft messaging to push out extremist rhetoric in a way that is easily digestible, like including a link in their material, which leads people to a white supremacist website.

Other groups like GDL use explicit propaganda and release antisemitic messages. The network gets attention from just how visceral its messaging is and how they use antisemitism as a tool for entertainment, Hill noted.

“They think it’s funny that it upsets people and puts fear in these communities and they share that humor online,” Hill said. “It’s attracting more people. The leader of that group really uses that as a tool to recruit more.”

The report found that GDL had a significant crossover with other white supremacist groups and movements, and was responsible for at least 492 propaganda incidents in 2022.

Antisemitic propaganda more than doubled last year, rising from 352 incidents in 2021 to 852 incidents in 2022.

“Each group has their own decision on optics, and within the white supremacist movement, this is always a debate, ‘do we go hard and very vocal and specific, or do we soften it to try to get people on the fence to come over to our side,'” Hill said.

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Outside of these two different methods to recruit new members, there are also groups like White Lives Matter, which initially formed as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement to promote “the white race”. But the group attracted more and more extremists, who distributed antisemitic propaganda with swastikas.

The different types of propaganda have similar underlying messages though, said Jill Garvey, chief of staff at Western States Center.

“It’s all couched in this idea that there is some great controlling evil factor involved,” Garvey told Salon. “It’s usually narrated as an ‘all-powerful Jewish cabal’ that’s controlling media, entertainment, information and politics.”

Groups have become more coordinated over time, she added, pointing to Patriot Front — the Texas-based group responsible for roughly 80% of all propaganda incidents nationally.

Texas led the nation in white supremacist propaganda incidents last year, accounting for 527 of the 6,750 incidents tallied by the ADL in 2022 — a 61% increase statewide and a 38% jump nationally since 2021.

Patriot Front was most active in Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Utah.

The group has a mandate to spread a certain amount of propaganda, which explains the numbers, Hill said. Unlike other groups that function more as networks to spread hateful messaging where anyone can amplify their information, Patriot Front also has members.

The group was responsible for 26 events last year, including four of the largest flash demonstrations, consisting of marches in Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston and Indianapolis. Patriot Front also protested LGBTQ+ events in Texas and Ohio.

In June, 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested near Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, after police stopped a U-Haul truck near a “Pride in the Park” event and found members dressed uniformly and equipped with riot shields. They were charged with criminal conspiracy to riot.

Seventeen organizations sent a letter to the Department of Justice after the event, asking for federal intervention into Patriot Front’s coordinated plan to disrupt Pride in the Park. The letter pointed out that authorities were only able to step in after “a concerned community member alerted local law enforcement about a ‘little army’ of masked men”.

But the department didn’t inform them that they would launch an investigation, which would have served as “a good motivator” for local authorities to take these issues seriously, Garvey said.

She pointed out that local jurisdictions often lack the resources or the means to hold extremist groups accountable.

“Just as Patriot Front is coordinated at a higher level, these localities are not coordinated at a higher level,” Garvey said. “Even if the laws are on their side to prosecute these crimes, they may not really understand how to do it or be incentivized to do it.”

Beyond law enforcement and criminal investigations that can hold these groups accountable, it is also necessary for civic leaders and institutions to respond to the spread of white supremacist propaganda, Garvey said.

“Having a comprehensive coordinated response among elected officials and other civic leaders is the very best way to show a community that it doesn’t have to be intimidated and terrorized, and it is the fastest way to get agitators to back down,” Garvey said.

This is important as extremist groups are growing and becoming “coordinated a much higher level than people realize,” she added, pointing to resources Western States Center has to offer for civic leaders and toolkits for addressing white nationalism in schools and libraries.

“There is more sort of decentralized networking happening along these groups,” Garvey said. “That’s certainly a trend we’ve seen and it makes this activity a little bit more dangerous.”

about the rise of white supremacy

“Unacceptable”: Right-wing judge attempts to keep key abortion pill hearing secret

Ahead of a major hearing scheduled for Wednesday in a closely watched case which could further limit abortion access across the United States, reproductive rights advocates and journalists are decrying what one attorney called a right-wing judge’s “informal gag order… bordering on judicial misconduct.”

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is scheduled to preside over the first hearing in a case brought by right-wing group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in Amarillo, Texas on Wednesday, with lawyers for the organization arguing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should never have approved mifespristone for medication abortion use in 2000, and the U.S. Justice Department opposing that claim. ADF aims to force the FDA to revoke its approval.

As The Washington Post reported Saturday, the right-wing judge scheduled the hearing last Friday in a call with lawyers on both sides, and in what one expert called a “very irregular” move, directed the attorneys to keep the hearing under wraps in order to minimize the possibility of protests.

Kacsmaryk also said he would delay putting the hearing on the public court docket, as judges usually do to keep the public and media informed about developments. He indicated he would make the hearing public knowledge only on Tuesday evening, making it difficult for Texans and members of the media to travel to Amarillo from other parts of the state and country. The city is a five-and-a-half hour drive from Dallas, the closest major Texas city; a nearly four-hour drive from Oklahoma City; and served by few daily direct flights.

When I went last month, it took me nine hours door to door from NYC.

— Caroline Kitchener (@CAKitchener) March 12, 2023

At Law Dork, journalist Chris Geidner pointed out that Kacsmaryk violated the requirements he claims to uphold in his own courtroom. The “Judge Specific Requirements” on his page at the website for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas include that Kacsmaryk “heavily disfavor[s] sealing information placed in the judicial record.”

“Going further, Kacsmaryk’s requirements highlight the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s rulings that recognize ‘the public’s right to know’ about what’s going on in our courts, requiring litigants to explain—with signed declarations—why ‘the risks of disclosure’ would ‘outweigh’ that right of the public to know what’s happening in court,” noted Geidner. “In order to even consider sealing anything on his docket, Kacsmaryk requires litigants to ‘explain that no other viable alternative to sealing exists.'”

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s secrecy in the mifepristone case is bad enough on its own — but what makes it worse is how his secrecy here contradicts the principles about open courts described in his own court rules. https://t.co/XusPanJ9Wg

— Chris “Law Dork” Geidner (@chrisgeidner) March 13, 2023

Kacsmaryk said Friday on his call with the attorneys that he was requesting they keep information about the hearing secret “as a courtesy,” but Geidner said on Saturday that he “in effect, if not in actuality, put a gag order on the parties.”

“This is a civil case with huge national implications challenging public, some long-standing, government actions,” tweeted Geidner. “The affirmative decision to hide public notification of a hearing set on Friday until Tuesday night explicitly to decrease the chances of the public learning of the hearing in an attempt to decrease public participation is so unacceptable it is simply not judicial behavior.”

Following the hearing, Kacsmaryk could hand down a ruling at any time. A decision in favor of ADF would immediately force abortion clinics across the U.S. to shift to providing only surgical abortions—which account for fewer than half of abortions in the U.S. each year—or medication abortions using only misoprostol.

ADF has argued that the U.S. government ignored evidence of harmful side effects of mifepristone when it approved the drug in 2000, but medical experts say misoprostol-only abortions carry greater risks of side effects like cramping and bleeding. Using misosprostol without mifepristone is also somewhat less effective at ending a pregnancy.

The FDA is arguing in the case that it has rigorously reviewed the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone as it has repeatedly reaffirmed its authorization of the drug in the past 23 years, and said in a court filing that revoking its approval would “cause significant harm, depriving patients of a safe and effective drug that has been on the market for more than two decades.”

The key to mitigating food waste and solving supermarket shortages? Ugly fruits and vegetables

The world is facing a significant food waste problem, with up to half of all fruit and vegetables lost somewhere along the agricultural food chain. Globally, around 14% of food produced is lost after harvesting but before it reaches shops and supermarkets.

Alongside food prices (66%), food waste is a concern for 60% of people that participated in a recent survey published by the UK Food Standards Agency. Other research suggests that as much as 25% of apples, 20% of onions and 13% of potatoes grown in the UK are destroyed because they don’t look right. This means that producers’ efforts to meet stringent specifications from buyers can lead to perfectly edible produce being discarded before it even leaves the farm — simply because of how it looks.

Aside from the ongoing environmental implications of this food waste, UK shoppers currently face produce rationing in some supermarkets due to shortages of items like tomatoes, cucumbers and raspberries. Any solutions that increase locally grown produce on shop shelves could improve the availability of fresh food, particularly in urban areas.

When imperfect fruit and vegetables don’t make it to supermarket shelves, it can be due to cosmetic standards. Supermarkets and consumers often prefer produce of a fairly standard size that’s free of blemishes, scars and other imperfections. This means fruit and vegetables that are misshapen, discolored or even too small or too large, are rejected before they make it to supermarket shelves.

In recent years there has been a growing trend of selling such “ugly” fruit and vegetables, both by major supermarket chains, as well as speciality retailers that sell boxes of wonky produce. And research has shown that 87% of people say they would eat wonky fruit and vegetables if they were available. But other research indicates consumers can still be picky and difficult to predict. One study showed consumers are likely to throw away an apple with a spot, but would eat a bent cucumber.

Getting ugly produce into baskets

So how can producers and retailers boost the amount of non-standard fruit and veg that not only reaches our shelves, but also our plates? Our recent research suggests a separate channel for selling ugly produce would increase profits for growers, lower prices for consumers and boost overall demand for produce.

For growers, a dedicated channel — either independent or set up by a supermarket — to supply wonky fruit and veg creates a new line of business. For retailers, this provides an opportunity for further revenue over and above current sales of standard produce to shops. When selling both types of product to a single retailer, the ugly items might be undervalued compared with the standard-looking products. Our research also shows that selling the ugly produce through a dedicated channel is likely to increase total demand for fruit and vegetables, while also decreasing on-farm loss.

Having two parallel channels for selling produce (the main one and the dedicated “ugly” channel) would increase competition. This benefits shoppers by lowering prices for regular and ugly produce, versus selling both types of products alongside each other in one shop.

On the other hand, the growing market for ugly fruit and vegetables could be an economic threat to traditional retailers. It encourages new entrants into the market and could also limit the availability of “regular” produce because growers could become less stringent about ensuring produce meets traditional cosmetic standards.

But there is a way for traditional retailers to add ugly produce into their product offerings alongside other produce without affecting their profits. By building on existing consumer awareness of the environmental benefits of ugly food, they could also compete in this growing segment. This would benefit their bottom lines and help consumer acceptance of misshapen fruit and vegetables, possibly leading to less food waste and shortages like those UK shoppers are experiencing right now.

Boosting demand for imperfect fruit and vegetables across the supply chain will require all participants to get involved — from grower to seller. Here are some steps the various parties could take:

1. Educating consumers

Education about the environmental and economic impact of food waste could happen through marketing campaigns, in-store displays and even social media.

2. Reducing cosmetic standards

Supermarkets and other major food retailers could revise their cosmetic standards to accept a wider range of produce, including imperfect fruit and vegetables. This would help reduce food waste by making sure more produce is able to be sold.

3. Direct sales

Farmers and growers could sell non-standard produce directly to consumers through farmers’ markets or subscription services. This allows consumers to purchase fresh, locally grown produce that might not meet cosmetic standards for supermarkets but that is just as nutritionally beneficial.

4. Food donations

Supermarkets and growers could donate produce rejected for how it looks to food banks, shelters and other organization that serve those in need. This would help reduce food waste while also providing healthy food to those who might not otherwise have access to it.

5. Value-added products

Produce that doesn’t meet cosmetic standards could also be used to create other products such as soups, sauces and juices. In addition to reducing food waste, this would create new revenue streams for growers and retailers.

6. Food composting

Anything that cannot be sold or otherwise used should be composted. This would help reduce food waste while also creating nutrient-rich soil for future crops.

By implementing these solutions, the supply chain can reduce the amount of ugly or imperfect fruit and vegetables that are wasted, while also providing consumers with healthy, affordable produce, even in times of supply chain shortages.

Behzad Hezarkhani, Reader in Operations Management, Brunel University London; Güven Demirel, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management, Queen Mary University of London; Manoj Dora, Professor in Sustainable Production and Consumption, Anglia Ruskin University, and Yann Bouchery, Associate Professor in Operations Management, Kedge Business School

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

Republicans falsely blame “woke” ideology for SVB collapse — that’s linked to Trump-era deregulation

Republicans baselessly claimed over the weekend that “woke” ideology contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

SVB was seized by the federal government on Friday after the start-up-focused, venture-debt-specializing bank went insolvent after a bank run, following a management decision to sell $21 billion in bonds at a $1.8 billion loss as a result of Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

The collapse followed the Trump-era rollback of the Dodd-Frank bank regulation bill that passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The rollback exempted banks with less than $250 billion in holdings — like SVB — from more stringent bank regulations. SVB itself lobbied Congress to raise the threshold, according to The Lever.

“President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ decision to roll back Dodd Frank’s ‘too big to fail’ rules for banks like SVB – reducing both oversight and capital requirements – contributed to a costly collapse,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a statement.

“He should be apologizing”: Critics call out Trump’s deregulation lie to East Palestine residents

President Joe Biden, who on Monday vowed that the FDIC would cover depositors and said his administration would hold those responsible accountable, likewise cited the rollback as a key reason for the collapse.

“During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place strict requirements on banks like Silicon Valley Bank… including the Dodd-Frank law to make sure that the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again,” he said. “Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements. I’m going to ask Congress and the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely this kind of bank failure would happen again.”

Republicans, meanwhile, blamed the collapse on the bank going “woke.”

House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., described SVB as “one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing” during a Sunday appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“They were one of the most woke banks” — James Comer on SVB Bank pic.twitter.com/nGw6GvZTRs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2023

“This could be a trend and there are consequences for bad Democrat policy,” Comer continued, speaking about environmental and sustainability-related investments. Comer ultimately failed to explain how such investments could have caused SVB to topple.

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Donald Trump Jr. joined the fray on Twitter, writing that “SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices.”

“This won’t be the last failure of this nature so long as people are rewarded for pushing this bs,” he said.

SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices. This won’t be the last failure of this nature so long as people are rewarded for pushing this bs. https://t.co/xuthUl6Kdt

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 12, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also condemned SVB as left-leaning, singling out “DEI and politics” as key factors in the financial institution’s collapse.

“I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff,” he told Fox News. “I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, known for his staunch support and sizable financial donations to former President Donald Trump, blamed the Biden administration during an interview with Fox News.

“I think that the system [and] the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return,” Marcus said. “And these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.”

Several Democratic lawmakers have pushed back on claims of wokeness, which remain entirely unrelated to SVB’s downfall.

“Woke? Nope. This is old fashion greed,” Rep. Jimmy Gonzalez, D-Calif., wrote on Twitter. “In 2018, Trump & the [GOP] majority rollbacked regulations, in place since the financial crisis, that were meant to protect workers, homeowner, small businesses & prevent this from happenings. Don’t let Rs fool you.”

Woke? Nope. This is old fashion greed.

In 2018, Trump & the @GOP majority rollbacked regulations, in place since the financial crisis, that were meant to protect workers, homeowner, small businesses & prevent this from happenings.

Don’t let Rs fool you. #siliconevalleybank https://t.co/koc6gO0iv8

— Rep. Jimmy Gomez (@RepJimmyGomez) March 12, 2023

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., accused Republicans of thinking that “voters are so dumb” that “they won’t catch on” to a longstanding trend of categorizing entities in political opposition to GOP ideals as overly liberal and “woke.”

The term is just a joke now. They think voters are so dumb they won’t catch on. https://t.co/uKIQH5HXSu

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 12, 2023

NBC News reporter Ben Collins leveled blame at Republicans for SVB’s closure, alleging that the bank run was “frontrun by some of the GOP’s biggest donors.”

“I’m telling you, they’re actually running with the ‘woke banks’ thing. They’re already using scary placeholder acronyms ESG and DEI, which to them mean ‘diversity,'” Collins wrote on Twitter. “It serves to obfuscate the reality: there was a panicky bank run, frontrun by some of the GOP’s biggest donors.”

I’m telling you, they’re actually running with the “woke banks” thing. They’re already using scary placeholder acronyms ESG and DEI, which to them mean “diversity.”

It serves to obfuscate the reality: there was a panicky bank run, frontrun by some of the GOP’s biggest donors. https://t.co/Rrhxj6rTOs

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 12, 2023

NBC Senior business analyst Stephanie Rhule echoed this sentiment, writing that SVB’s demise “has absolutely NOTHING to do with a bank being ‘woke.'”

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with a bank being “woke”.
– 1 bank with an extreme Industry concentration got caught on the wrong side of the trade investing in MBS/UST.
– bad timing + communication around SVB raising $$ led to MASSIVE withdrawals & a run on the bank. https://t.co/OVtiwcvpyr

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) March 12, 2023

about GOP deregulation

They never say die: Hollywood should have listened to “The Goonies”

What may have been one of the best moments of Oscar night happened early, when Ke Huy Quan accepted the best supporting actor trophy for his role in the highly decorated “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” In an emotional speech, Quan thanked his wife, Echo, “who month after month, year after year for 20 years, told me that one day my time will come.”

It was a moving moment that recalled one of Quan’s previously most famous films, “The Goonies.” In the 1985 Richard Donner-directed adventure, Quan plays one of a group of kids who follow an old pirate map in search of treasure that will save their homes from being demolished by greedy developers. At a key moment in the film, Quan and the others are underground, at the bottom of a well, wet and exhausted, and Mikey (Sean Astin) must convince them to stay and keep looking for the treasure. He pleads, “Down here it’s our time. It’s our time down here.”

Quan’s time has come at last and he has found his treasure, shiny and gold. It only took 38 more years.

The Daniels on the ADHD theory of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” paper cuts and butts

Quan got his break as a child in 1984, playing Short Round, the scene-stealing and enterprising, young (very young) getaway driver and personal assistant for Harrison Ford’s Indy in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” A year later came the part in “The Goonies.” Quan portrayed Data, a kid inventor whose contraptions more often than not fail to work exactly as intended. The part — and the movie — were and continue to be beloved.

“It’s our time down here,” became the rallying cry for the film (as it was for the Goonies themselves). You can get the line on T-shirts, posters, mugs, a cross stitch. It’s the headline for a LinkedIn article on motivating teams.

What we don’t consider, don’t want to think about, is this: he was trying all this time.

Because it was about more than saving the neighborhood in “The Goonies.” It was about saving a kind of life, one with struggle but still deserving of dignity and respect. Those weren’t fancy houses the developers wanted to raze. They were lived-in, worn, in need of repair. And the bad guy developers wanted to turn them into a golf course, turning out the families in the process. The “Goonies” cry was anti-adult in the film (“They gotta do what’s right for them cause it’s their time up there”), but over the years, it’s become anti-establishment, anti-rich. Adults and the land-grabbing capitalists can have their manicured lawns. But kids in the damp, dangerous underworld will inherit the earth.

And it was their time for most of the other actors in the film. It was their time a long time ago and it continued to be.

Astin worked steadily after “The Goonies,” starring in “Rudy” and becoming the definitive Samwise Gamgee in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, among many other high-profile roles. He even made a comeback as Bob in “Stranger Things.” Corey Feldman was one of the most famous faces of the 1980s, appearing in “Gremlins,” “Stand By Me,” “The Lost Boys,” “The ‘Burbs.” Martha Plimpton performed on Broadway, racking up three Tony nods; she scored a Prime Time Emmy nomination for “Raising Hope” and later won for “The Good Wife.” Josh Brolin became . . . well, Josh Brolin. You may know him as Thanos, among many many roles.

“The Goonies” (Warner Bros. Entertainment)

Every performer who won an acting Oscar this year was over the age of 50.

But Quan struggled to find work after “The Goonies.” (In his Oscar speech, he gave a shout-out to his “‘Goonies’ brother for life Jeff Cohen,” who played Chunk in the film and who also had a hard time finding acting roles afterward.) Quan appeared on “Head of the Class” and “Encino Man.” Then things fell away. He earned a degree from USC School of Cinematic Arts, worked as a stunt coordinator and assistant director. He couldn’t find parts in front of the camera. He wasn’t cast in them.

Anyone who saw and loved “Goonies” over the years surely thought of Quan, wondered what had happened to him. Every time “Goonies” was on TV or showing in theaters again, we would remember and question. Where is he? Why did he just disappear?

Harrison Ford handing the Oscar to Ke Huy Quan as #EEAAO wins Best Picture! #Oscars pic.twitter.com/KBUK9Cipvn

— Letterboxd (@letterboxd) March 13, 2023

We tell ourselves he must have wanted to quit. We tell ourselves he must be on to other things, better things than acting. Maybe this dream was a childhood dream or a dream that wasn’t even his. What we don’t consider, don’t want to think about, is this: he was trying all this time. He never went away. Only the roles did. And their drying up has more to do with Hollywood’s racist failure of imagination and its limited idea of storytelling than any absence of talent on the actor’s part.

The embrace of Quan, the universal outpouring of love, joy and excitement for his comeback should send the message, louder than an organ made out of bones, more powerful than Data’s pop-out boxing gloves: we need different stories. We need different storytellers. Every performer who won an acting Oscar this year was over the age of 50.

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Vietnam-born Quan told the story of his journey beginning “on a boat,” of spending “a year in a refugee camp.” He said, “I cannot believe it’s happening to me.” We are hungry for all voices. Most of all: real ones, faces that tell the stories of lives lived, of disappointments, struggle and attempts. Of the trying, always trying, even when the world you’re trying to break into keeps attempting to leave you behind.

In his speech, Quan said, “Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine.” He then pointed at the camera, with tears in his eyes. “To all of you out there, please keep your dreams alive.” Goonies never say die.

about “Everything Everywhere All At Once”

Boreal wildfires in 2021 released more carbon emissions than any other fire this century

Two years ago, enormous fires ripped through some 46 million acres of forest in Russia, the country’s worst fire season on record. The scale of tree cover loss in the massive boreal, or northern, forests that blanket Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia that year was staggering — but so was the scale of destruction produced by the Indonesian peatland fires in 2015, the Australian bushfires in 2019, and the wildfires in the western United States in 2020.

Now, researchers have a clearer sense of just how significant the 2021 boreal forest fires were in terms of emissions. The fires produced more planet-heating carbon dioxide than any other extreme fire event that has occurred since the turn of the 21st century, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Boreal forests, characterized by conifers like spruce and pine, grow in the planet’s high latitudes where it is very cold — below freezing for at least half the year. The trees that live in this type of forest grow slowly and sequester carbon in their trunks and roots for hundreds of years, collectively comprising a massive trove of trapped emissions that researchers call a carbon sink. But the northernmost parts of the planet are warming faster than anywhere else on earth due to human-fueled climate change. Rising temperatures and related drought in these historically cool regions have led to an uptick in extreme wildfire activity and threaten to unleash the carbon stored in the trees that grow there, transforming a carbon sink into a carbon source.

In all, fires in boreal forests, considered to be the world’s largest land biome and a massive carbon sponge, produced nearly half a billion metric tons of carbon in 2021. That’s more carbon than the entire continent of Australia produced the same year, though some of the emissions produced by the fires will be sucked back up as forests regrow.

The study showed that for the past decade or so, boreal forests, especially forests in the uppermost reaches of Alaska, Canada, and Russia, have steadily become drier and hotter as heat waves and drought parched the environment. Fires in boreal forests are a normal part of the life cycle of trees that grow there. But climate change is throwing that cycle out of whack. Just in the past handful of years, forests in northern latitudes reached a tipping point and started to produce far more emissions than usual.

“You get drought, drought, drought, but then you hit a threshold, and all of a sudden, your emissions start to double or triple,” Josep G. Canadell, executive director of a climate research initiative called the Global Carbon Project and coauthor of the study, told Grist.

The researchers obtained the data for their study by tracking concentrations of emissions in the atmosphere using satellites, and then they plugged that information into a computer model to determine where, geographically, those emissions came from. They found that boreal forests, which typically produce about 10 percent of the globe’s annual wildfire emissions, accounted for 23 percent of the world’s wildfire emissions in 2021 — more than twice as much as normal.

James MacCarthy, a research associate at the World Resources Institute who studies wildfires and climate change and was not involved in the new study, told Grist that, while previous analyses have pointed to 2021 as a particularly destructive year for boreal forests, the study is a valuable contribution to the field because it “offers meaningful insights about where fire emissions increased the most within boreal regions and provides potential explanations for why those emissions are increasing.”

Canadell is most concerned about the study’s main takeaway: Boreal forests have served an important and underappreciated role in sequestering carbon emissions, but climate change threatens to unleash that stored carbon. “We need to be very careful with these systems in terms of their future evolution,” he said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/wildfires/boreal-wildfires-in-2021-released-more-carbon-emissions-than-any-other-fire-this-century/.

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

Texas man sues three women for “wrongful death” for helping his ex-wife obtain abortion medication

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A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.

Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.

Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.

The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.

A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.

The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva’s wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion. The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva would “snake his way into your head.”

“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”

“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women later told her. “You don’t want him looking through it.”

The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.

The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.

The legal status of these pre-Roe statutes remains a contentious question. In 2004, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those laws were “repealed by implication,” which U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman reaffirmed in a recent ruling. But Cain and others have repeatedly argued that the Legislature restored those laws into effect with recent abortion legislation. This issue went before the Texas Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed before a final ruling.

In 2021, the Legislature passed a law making it a state jail felony to provide abortion-inducing medication except under extremely specific circumstances.

Joanna Grossman, a law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, said this lawsuit is “absurd and inflammatory.” Since the pregnant patient is protected from prosecution, there is no underlying cause of action to bring a wrongful death suit in a self-managed abortion, she said.

“But this is going to cause such fear and chilling that it doesn’t matter whether [Mitchell] is right,” Grossman said. “Who is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news? And maybe they’re going to get sued, and maybe they’re going to get arrested, and it’s going to get dropped eventually, but in the meantime, they will have been terrified.”

But it’s possible this lawsuit could get traction, said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a law professor at South Texas College of Law.

“It’s scary to think that you can be sued for significant damages for helping a friend undertake acts that help her have even a self-medicated abortion,” Rhodes said. “Obviously, the allegations would have to be proven, but there is potentially merit to this suit under Texas’ abortion laws as they exist now.”

Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified.

“Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement.

Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.

Jolie McCullough contributed to this report

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-abortion-lawsuit/.

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

“Like negotiating with terrorists”: Ex-Fox producer worried accurate reporting may “insult” audience

New text messages revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed a former Tucker Carlson producer trash the network’s audience.

Newly revealed text messages show that Alex Pfeiffer, a former producer for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was uneasy about covering false election conspiracy theories purported by disgraced pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell. Powell claimed to have an affidavit showing that a large number of votes had been covertly flipped by Dominion “at the direction” of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died years earlier. Powell also said the voting software company had ties to the Clinton Foundation and Soros, claims which are also unfounded and untrue.

The Washington Post reported that Fox executive and former Trump aide Raj Shah tried to play both sides when it came to covering Powell’s lies. When former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with Powell, endorsed false election claims during a press conference on Nov 19, 2020, Carlson expressed doubts. “She never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson said on his show. A Nov. 17 text showed that Carlson wrote, “Sidney Powell is lying.”

Prosecutors call out Fox News’ Jan. 6 spin for omitting damning footage of “QAnon shaman”

Shah responded to Powell’s “outlandish” claims by rallying Trump’s administration to reject her allegations, writing in an email to his bosses, “After criticism from social media for Tucker’s segment questioning Attorney Sidney Powell’s outlandish voter fraud claims, our consultants and I coordinated an effort to generate Trump administration pushback against her claims.”

“We encouraged several sources within the administration to tell reporters that Powell offered no evidence for her claims and didn’t speak for the president,” he added. Shortly thereafter on Nov. 22, Trump’s campaign, released a statement via Giuliani and campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, saying that Powell was “practicing law on her own” and was “not a member” of Trump’s legal team.

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

Shah, however, advised Tucker Carlson’s team to approach Powell with sensitivity on air.

“Might wanna address this, but this stuff is so f—— insane. Vote rigging to the tune of millions? C’mon,” he wrote to Pfeiffer.

“It is so insane but our viewers believe it so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t proof might insult them,” Pfeiffer replied.

Shah suggested that Carlson describe the affidavit as “not new info, not proof” but then quickly “pivot to being deferential.”

Pfeiffer, who has since left the network, responded by trashing Fox viewers.

“Like negotiating with terrorists,” Pfeiffer wrote. “But especially dumb ones. Cousin f—– types not saudi royalty.”

"It is so insane but our viewers believe it," Tucker's producer said.

After it was suggested they not be too harsh on the claim, he called it "surreal":

“Like negotiating with terrorists, but especially dumb ones. Cousin f—– types not saudi royalty.”https://t.co/ChWxLtUZcl pic.twitter.com/GiFt0UMqo0

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 12, 2023

about the Fox News lawsuit

From Rihanna to the Daniels, here are the hottest looks from the Oscars’ “champagne carpet”

Before the 95th annual Oscars kicked off at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, the fun began on the red carpet.

OK, so actually there was no red carpet this year — it’s been described as a “champagne” carpet instead. According to Lisa Love, who was part of the Academy Awards’creative team alongside Met Gala creative director Raúl Àvila, the color was specifically chosen to “evoke the sunset, because this is the sunset before the golden hour.”

As one might expect, the carpet got dirty pretty quickly and had to be first recut and then replaced so none of the muddied patches would be visible. Of course that didn’t stop the nominees from striking a pose while showing off their Oscar outfits, which ranged from elegant and classy to bold and extravagant.

These 9 decadent Oscars night-approved recipes are all winners

Although the Academy has never had a strict dress code, it pushed for one in 2021, telling attendees in an email that “Formal is totally cool if you want to go there, but casual is really not.” That meant ballroom gowns, tuxedos and suits were cool. Jeans, a leopard-printed bikini and, yes, even a swan dress were not cool. Despite the wardrobe limitations, this year’s nominees managed to steal the show by adding pops of color, plenty of sequins and so much tulle (literally, so much tulle!) into their formal wear.

Specifically, there were four major trends we saw on the carpet. The first was the effortlessly romantic look, which featured a beautiful color palette of white, neutral, champagne, blush and pink. The second was the brave look, which featured bold jewel tones and color-blocking (think clashing colors all included in one uniform outfit). Then there’s the SunnyD look, which featured nothing but yellows and oranges — all summery tones. And lastly, there’s the playful and unconventional look, which basically means men who strayed away from the usual black tuxedo. This look also featured high-collars, fun brooches and elongated, colorful lapels.

There were more than 180 outfits from this year’s champagne carpet, so we narrowed it down to the most notable ones. Even so, that came to 46, along with more information on who wore them.

Florence Pugh

Florence Pugh attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

After appearing in three films last year — “Don’t Worry Darling,” “The Wonder” and as the voice of Goldilocks in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” — Pugh will next star in Zach Braff’s “The Good Person.” She also recently finished shooting “Dune 2.” Pugh wore a show-stopping neutral draped Valentino gown with a pair of black shorts underneath.

Janelle Monae

Janelle Monáe attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Monáe played a relentless school teacher who avenges her sister’s death in Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Monáe wore a custom Vera Wang gown that featured a plunging bra top and a bright orange skirt.

Angela Bassett

Angela Bassett attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Bassett reprised her role as Ramona in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which earned her a nomination for best supporting actress. The film itself received five nominations and won the award for best costume design. On the champagne carpet, Bassett turned heads in a bold purple Moschino gown with a dramatic, asymmetrical neckline and an elegant mermaid silhouette.

Michelle Yeoh

Michelle Yeoh attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 12, 2023 (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)

Yeoh won the best actress award for her performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which received an astounding 11 Oscar nods. Yeoh will also star in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” and Kenneth Branagh’s “A Haunting in Venice.” She also turned heads on the champagne carpet with her ethereal white fringe Dior gown and dainty headpiece.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 12, 2023 (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)

Lee Curtis, who donned a radiant jeweled gown, beat her “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-star Stephanie Hsu to take home the Oscar for best supporting actress — her first Academy Award ever!

Mindy Kaling

Mindy Kaling attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Kaling, who is the executive producer of “Velma” and the voice of its titular character, wore a custom white Vera Wang gown with a cut-out bodice and detached sleeves.

Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Blanchett received a best actress nomination for her role in the musical-drama “Tár,” which earned six total Oscar nominations. She’s also set to star in Eli Roth’s upcoming sci-fi action comedy “Borderlands.” Blanchett wore a black-and-blue ’80s-inspired Louis Vuitton gown.

Stephanie Hsu

Stephanie Hsu attends the 95th Oscars (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Nominated for best supporting actress, Hsu wowed viewers with her moving performance as Joy/Jobu Tupaki in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” She also took center stage alongside David Byrne to perform Mitski’s “This Is a Life.” Hsu wore a Barbie-inspired gown with a strapless bodice and bubble hem.

Kerry Condon

Kerry Condon attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Condon earned a best supporting actress nomination for her performance in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” She wore a one-strap yellow gown by Versace.

James Hong

James Hong attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Hong starred in the Oscar-nominated films “Turning Red” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” He wore a simple suit and a blue bowtie adorned with Waymond’s signature googly eyes.

Zoë Saldana

Zoe Saldana attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Saldana reprised her role as Neytiri Sully in “Avatar: The Way of Water” — which earned four nominations — and is set to star in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” She wore a blush-colored Fendi slip dress with mesh details and a silver necklace.

Hong Chau

Chau received a best supporting actress nomination for her role in “The Whale.” She also starred in “The Menu” and will star in Wes Anderson’s upcoming romantic comedy-drama “Asteroid City.” Chau wore a custom pink Prada gown with a Mandarin collar that paid tribute to her Vietnamese heritage.

Ke Huy Quan

Ke Huy Quan attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Quan took home the best supporting actor award for his role as the lovable Waymond in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” He wore a black single-breasted tuxedo by Giorgio Armani with a black bowtie and his signature black-rimmed glasses.

Allison Williams

Allison Williams attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California ( Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Following her epic battle with M3GAN — the titular character in the horror film “M3GAN” — Williams stepped onto the champagne carpet, wearing a sheer pink Giambattista Valli couture gown.

Sandra Oh

Sandra Oh attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 12, 2023 (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

After appearing in three films — “Umma,” “Turning Red” and “The Same Storm” — Oh will star in an upcoming untitled comedy film alongside Awkwafina, Jason Schwartzman, Tony Hale, Holland Taylor and Will Ferrell. Oh wore a yellow-orange Giambattista Valli gown with a statement choker.

Monica Barbaro

Monica Barbaro attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Barbaro starred as Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace in “Top Gun: Maverick,” which earned six nominations and took home the award for Best Sound. She also starred in Jonah Feingold’s rom-com “At Midnight.” Barbaro wore a two-toned Elie Saab haute couture gown with a plunging V-neck and a gorgeous full skirt.

Ariana DeBose

Ariana DeBose attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

The “West Side Story” actor is set to star as Calypso in the upcoming superhero film “Kraven the Hunter.” DeBose wore a custom white Atelier Versace gown with diamond jewels and a $7,500 Omega Constellation watch.

Jennifer Connelly

Jennifer Connelly attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Connelly starred in the Oscar-nominated “Top Gun: Maverick” and in “Bad Behaviour,” which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21. She wore an off-shoulder Louis Vuitton gown with a sparkly centerpiece.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 12, 2023 (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Following his performances in “DC League of Super-Pets” and “Black Adam,” Johnson is set to appear in the action-adventure Christmas film “Red One.” Johnson also stole the show in a ballet pink suit, a matching rose pin and a black bow-tie.

Halle Berry

Halle Berry attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Berry starred in the sci-fi disaster film “Moonfall.” She will also star in the upcoming sci-fi adventure film “The Mothership.” She walked the champagne carpet in a high-slit Tamara Ralph white gown adorned with flower jewels on the collar and hip.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert at 95th Oscars (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Collectively known as the Daniels, the film directors took home several awards — including best director — for their hit film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The pair both wore crimson at the ceremony — Kwan wore a crimson suit with gold floral designs along the sleeves and the word “Punk” written across his back (similar to Evelyn’s Lunar New Year party look) while Scheinert wore a crimson shirt under his suit.

Danai Gurira

Danai Gurira attends the 95th Oscars (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Gurira, who played fearless warrior Okoye in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” donned a black sleeveless Jason Wu gown along with a towering updo that honored her African roots.

Nicole Kimpel and Antonio Banderas

Nicole Kimpel and Antonio Banderas attend the 95th Oscars (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

Banderas voiced the swashbuckling eponym of the Oscar-nominated animated film “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.” He will also star in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Banderas wore an elegant black-and-white suit with a black bow-tie and black shoes.

Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Polley won the best writing (adapted screenplay) award for her film “Women Talking,” based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews. She wore a suit with a white button up, a bow-tie and a rose pin.

Michelle Williams

Michelle Williams attends the 95th annual Oscars (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Williams was nominated for best actress for her stellar performance as the character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans.” She wore a sleeveless Chanel dress with an angelic, sheer cape and a diamond choker.

Rooney Mara

Rooney Mara attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Mara, who starred in “Women Talking,” wore a white tulle wrap dress knotted at the bottom along with matching colored heels and layered chokers.

Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Hayek voiced Kitty Softpaws, the ex-fiancée of Puss in the Oscar-nominated film “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.” She also starred in the hit film “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” Hayek stepped out in a bold orange sequin-embroidered gown custom designed by Gucci. She finished her look off with a stylish gold clutch.

Cara Delevingne

Cara Delevingne attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Delevingne appeared in the second season of Hulu’s popular mystery comedy-drama series “Only Murders in the Building.” She wore an eye-catching red Elie Saab gown with a thigh-high slit and a chic diamond choker.

David Byrne

David Byrne attends the 95th Oscars (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Byrne joined Stephanie Hsu to perform Mitski’s “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” In addition to donning a pair of hot dog fingers on stage, Byrne wore a crisp all-white suit, akin to Col. Sanders’ classic get-up.

Ram Charan

Ram Charan attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagi)

Charan starred as Alluri Sitarama Raju, an ambitious officer for the British Raj, in the Telugu-language epic action film “RRR.” He wore a sleek black bandhgala, or a straight-fitting band collared jacket, adorned with medallion brooches.

Rihanna

Rihanna attends the 95th Oscars (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

A month after her halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl, Rihanna took center stage at the Oscars to perform “Lift Me Up,” the lead single from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and a nominee for best original song. As for Rihanna’s champagne carpet look, the singer wore a custom Alaïa leather dress over a sheer bodysuit that exposed her very pregnant belly.

Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson attends the 95th Oscars (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)

Jackson will star in the upcoming superhero film “The Marvels,” slated to premiere in November. He wore a metallic silver suit with a white button-up and a matching silver bowtie.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Gaga performed “Hold My Hand,” the lead single from “Top Gun: Maverick,” which earned a nomination for best original song. Before she took off all her makeup and put on a black T-shirt, ripped jeans and sneakers, Gaga graced the champagne carpet in a sheer black Versace dress with an exposed corset and a drop-waist full skirt.

Austin Butler

Austin Butler attends the 95th Oscars (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Butler played Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s biographical drama “Elvis,” which earned eight Oscar nominations. Butler wore a black velvet suit by Saint Laurent with a white button down, black dress shoes and Cartier jewelry.

Ana de Armas

Ana de Armas attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

De Armas earned a nomination as best actress for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” She paid tribute to Monroe in a figure-fitting, metallic-colored gown, similar to Monroe’s famed “Happy Birthday” dress.

Harry Shum Jr.

Harry Shum Jr. attends the 95th Oscars (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Shum, who made us laugh as chef Chad in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” wore a white kimono-style Adeam jacket with a navy belt, matching navy pants and Christian Louboutin shoes.

Paul Mescal

Paul Mescal attends the 95th Oscars (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Mescal was nominated as best actor for his performance in the coming-of-age film “Aftersun.” On the champagne carpet, he rocked a retro white Gucci suit with a black bowtie, red rose pin and flared pants.

Brian Tyree Henry

Brian Tyree Henry attends the 95th annual Oscars (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Henry was nominated as best supporting actor for his role in Lila Neugebauer’s dramatic film “Causeway.” He also starred as Lemon in the action comedy film “Bullet Train” and will star in the superhero film “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” On the champagne carpet, he wore an all-white blazer with lace detailing on the collar and lapels.

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Yousafzai served as an executive producer of “Joyland,” which was the first Pakistani film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Yousafzai wore a hooded Ralph Lauren gown embellished with silver sequins.

Halle Bailey

Halle Bailey attends the 95th Oscars (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Bailey, who will play Ariel in the upcoming live-action Disney film “The Little Mermaid,” channeled her character on the champagne carpet with a sheer aqua-colored corset gown.

Laverne Cox

Laverne Cox attends the 95th Oscars (Kayla Oaddams/WireImage)

Host of the E! television series “Live from the Red Carpet,” Cox embraced the color blocking trend and wore a vintage Vera Wang gown with a taupe bodice, a bright blue train, a black skirt and matching black sleeves.

Sigourney Weaver

Sigourney Weaver attends the 95th Oscars (ike Coppola/Getty Images)

Alongside Saldana, Weaver returned to “Avatar: The Way of Water” as Dr. Grace Augustine and the daughter of her avatar. She wore a champagne-colored Givenchy dress with Fernando Jorge jewelry and pointed heels.

Kate Hudson

Kate Hudson attends the 95th Oscars (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Hudson played an ex-supermodel turned fashion-designer in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” and will next star in the comedy “A Little White Lie.” Hudson dazzled the carpet in a silver mermaid-inspired gown custom made by Rodarte.

Marlee Matlin

Marlee Matlin attends the 95th Oscars (Kayla Oaddams/WireImage)

Matlin returned to the ceremony alongside “CODA” co-star Troy Kotsur. She wore a dramatic all-black gown with feathers at the bottom alongside a cropped black jacket.

Melissa McCarthy

Melissa McCarthy attends the 95th Oscars (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

McCarthy, who will play Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” donned a fiery red Christian Siriano ball gown with a full tulle skirt.

Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman attends the 95th Oscars (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Kidman will star in three films this year: “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” “A Family Affair” and “Spellbound.” She wore a custom Armani Privé one-shoulder gown covered in sequins and floral accessories on her shoulder and hip.

about red carpet fashion:

Who cares about Donald Trump’s crimes? GOP appeal grows as walls close in

It was reported on Friday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, will be testifying before a grand jury today. This is widely considered to be leading to a probable indictment of Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case after the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, invited the former president to testify last week. Apparently, prosecutors routinely give that option to targets they are about to charge with a crime.

You’ll recall that the case pertains to the hush money scheme cooked by Trump and the National Inquirer back in 2016 to pay off women who slept with Donald Trump. The Daniels case ended up being a criminal investigation when it was revealed that Cohen bought her story through a shell company and was later reimbursed by Trump personally. Cohen went to jail for his part in this and his indictment left no doubt that he was doing the bidding of Trump who was nonetheless not charged. It appears that Bragg may have decided to rectify that.

Meanwhile, the case in Georgia seems to be getting close to some kind of conclusion. The New York Attorney General’s civil case against Trump and the Trump Org. is still in play. And the E. Jean Carroll defamation case is chugging right along just as the pair of Special Prosecutor cases pertaining to the classified documents theft and the January 6th insurrection are being energetically investigated.

It’s a lot.

Double duds: Jim Jordan’s and Tucker Carlson’s lazy conspiracy theories bore MAGA

Here we have a former president, and current Republican front-runner for the GOP nomination, as the target or subject of criminal investigations and massive civil litigation. And these cases run the gamut from tawdry payoffs to a porn star and the defamation of a woman who accuses him of rape to massive financial crimes, electoral fraud, espionage and sedition. These cases are going to be rolling out over the course of months as the presidential race is heating up.

Everyone is aware of this and yet, it doesn’t seem to be a deal breaker.

In fact, to the extent that the GOP establishment and some voters are second-guessing a third Trump campaign, it is rarely mentioned that he is a one-man crime spree. Their only concern is that they really want to win and they aren’t sure that he has it in him to go another round. However, if he manages to pull off a primary win you can be sure that they’ll be right on board all the way, indictments or no indictments.

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

Trump thinks an indictment will actually help him and it will almost certainly motivate his supporters to fork over more of their hard earned cash. After the Mar-a-Lago search, he was collecting over $1 million a day for several days afterwards. And virtually everyone in the GOP reflexively defended him. Even arch-rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis jumped in with a perfect rendition of Trumpian talking points:

“The raid on [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves,”

I’m only surprised he didn’t call it the”woke federal agencies” and the “woke regime.” It’s very unlike DeSantis to resist using the word woke at least twice in every sentence. But it did send the message that even those who are trying to knock Trump off his pedestal are with him when it comes to committing crimes. And Trump has every reason to believe they will continue to do so. When asked at the recent CPAC gathering if he would drop out of the race if he were to be indicted Trump told reporters, “Oh, absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving … probably it’ll enhance my numbers, but it’s a very bad thing for America. It’s very bad for the country.”

The monumental problem Republicans face is that it doesn’t matter if he’s indicted, on trial or even in jail.

There have been a number of times in the past few months as these cases have been heating up when Trump has gone even farther and hinted that if he is legally pursued, there will be violence. After the Mar-a-Lago raid, he made it pretty clear :

“If a thing like that happened, I would have no prohibition against running,” Trump said in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”

When Hewitt asked him how he would respond to accusations that he was inciting violence, he fatuously replied, “That’s not inciting. I’m just saying what my opinion is. I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.” Over the weekend he said it again on his social media platform Truth Social:

The Department of Injustice has fully weaponized Law Enforcement in the United States, except against Joe and Hunter Biden. The American people will not stand for what is happening on our Borders, with our Rigged Elections, or with the Soviet style Weaponization of Law Enforcement!

Remember, he’s not priming some of the crazies in his party like those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th to take matters into their own hands. He’s just stating his opinion. And he’s certainly not sending any messages by recording a song with the “January 6th Choir” — prisoners who are being held without bail because they present a threat to others — which is now the number one song on iTunes.

We’re starting to hear some faint rumblings of something called “Trump fatigue,” which suggests that while people really like him they are just getting worn down by all the drama. That’s probably a real phenomenon. It used to happen with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were always dogged by scandal (although they are rank amateurs compared to Trump.) Sometimes people just want a break.

There is no secret plan: First they came for trans people

I would not be surprised if there are a fair number of Republicans who will feel that way if these legal cases actually draw blood. But I suspect that his hardcore following will become even more devoted, just as he suspects. Keep in mind that Trump brought in a lot of new voters who had never participated in politics before. They don’t care about policy. They certainly don’t care about the Republican Party which they have been programmed to believe is just as much the enemy as the Democrats. They’ll follow him wherever he wants to go.

At the moment Trump is refusing to pledge that he will support the eventual nominee in 2024 if he loses the primary. Of course he is. And he has hinted broadly at a possible third-party run should he be rejected by the Republicans, although that’s a very tough undertaking I’m not sure he would be prepared to do.

The monumental problem Republicans face is that it doesn’t matter if he’s indicted, on trial or in jail, there are some voters who will not vote for anyone but him as long as he’s in the mix. And he has said repeatedly that he will not drop out, no matter what. One of his rivals could get 70% of the delegates and he will still have that 30% and they will be with him or no one. They’re in it for Trump. And the party just can’t get around that.

Prosecutors call out Fox News’ Jan. 6 spin for omitting damning footage of “QAnon shaman”

Prosecutors on Sunday said that Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s segment showing “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley at the Capitol on Jan. 6 omitted key footage.

Carlson, who received exclusive access to thousands of hours of footage from the attack on the Capitol from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., last week aired a segment showing Chansley walking through the Capitol accompanied by police officers, one of whom at one point opened a door for him.

“Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape,” Carlson said on Monday. “The tapes show the Capitol Police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides.”

But Justice Department prosecutors involved in the seditious conspiracy trial of five Proud Boys leaders including Dominic Pezzola said in a court filing over the weekend that the video only shows four minutes of Chansley inside the Capitol after he had already been inside for over 40 minutes.

“Leave us the hell alone”: Family of fallen Capitol Police officer reacts to Tucker Carlson footage

“Prior to that time, Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at 2:09 p.m. with the mob, entered the Capitol less than one minute behind Pezzola during the initial breach of the building, and faced off with members of the U.S. Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in front of the Senate Chamber doors while elected officials, including the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from the chamber,” the filing said.

Prosecutors added that Chansley “was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events for the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol.”

The filing added that Capitol Police officers had been overwhelmed by the rioters and were trying to minimize the damage.

“For a period that afternoon, those defending the Capitol were in triage mode — trying to deal with the most violent element of those unlawfully present, holding those portions of the Capitol that had not yet been seized by rioters, and protecting those Members and staffers who were still trapped in the Capitol,” the filing said.

Prosecutors said that “it is true that a sole officer, who was trying to de-escalate the situation, was with Chansley as he made his way to the Senate floor after initially breaching the Chamber.”

“But the televised footage fails to show that Chansley subsequently refused to be escorted out by this lone officer and instead left the Capitol only after additional officers arrived and forcibly escorted him out,” the filing added.

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Chansley, who is not accused of violence, pleaded guilty to obstruction in 2001 and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. He is scheduled to be released in July, according to Politico.

Chanley’s allies have argued that the video aired on Fox News could have helped his defense but the Justice Department said in the filing that it sent all but 10 seconds of the footage to Chanlsey’s lawyer in September 2021, about three weeks after he pleaded guilty but more than a month before his sentencing, according to Politico.

Chanley’s attorney William Shipley told the outlet that the DOJ was more focused on the substance of the video than whether it had violated Chanlsey’s rights by not turning over the video before his plea.

“The Government knows its lawful obligations, and artfully avoided making a positive assertion that it complied with them in a timely fashion as to Mr. Chansley,” he said.

The filing on Sunday came after attorneys for Pezzola argued that the footage aired by Carlson means that the entire case should be dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct.

“Once tethered to facts and reality,” prosecutors wrote, “defendant Pezzola’s arguments quickly unravel.”

about Tucker’s Jan. 6 spin

How the Academy Awards managed to be both uplifting and disappointing – everything, all at once

Before spiraling into the everything bagel that is Sunday’s telecast of the 95th Academy Awards it’s somewhat illuminating to look back at a few insights from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters.

There are approximately 10,000 of them, but a few anonymously revealed which performances and films they selected for various publications and why. Many were honest but polite, some were brutal and candid. One, an actor who, according to EW.com, has played roles “in critically heralded prestige dramas, biting mainstream thrillers, and on Emmy-winning TV shows” is outright racist and sexist.

To a person, they provide a view into the thought process behind all awards season wins, and the Oscars especially. Taken together, they explain why the smart money has been on “Everything Everywhere All at Once” since this awards season kicked off.

The Daniels’ multiverse epic had 11 nominations and garnered seven wins, including for best picture, best actress for Michelle Yeoh, a best supporting actor statue for Ke Huy Quan, and, in something of a category upset, a best supporting actress Oscar for industry veteran Jamie Lee Curtis.

The Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, also scored hardware for best director and the best original screenplay, with Paul Rogers winning for best film editing.

Each of these winners is a first-time Oscar nominee, with Curtis earning both her nod and the award after more than 46 years in the business. Each win is the product of a work that is bold, creative and inimitable.

A rising tide sailed the Oscars away from controversy, but “The Whale” still rocked the boat

This being the Oscars, though, there will always be that everything bagel element where one puts all their hopes and dreams, weak tea punchlines, a guy in a Cocaine Bear costume, the adorable miniature donkey co-star of “The Banshees of Inisherin,” sesame, poppy seeds, and salt, onto one very expensive night. When that happens, something is going to collapse in on itself.

Because, as we’ve learned, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes the truth, which can be both glorious and infuriating. The 2023 Oscars ceremony was too long but entertaining while reminding us that the industry’s biggest awards night is a popularity contest dominated by white people.

Now, how can this be so in a year that the best picture winner, with its majority-Asian cast, beat “Top Gun: Maverick,” an “Avatar,” a war movie, a film about Elvis, and a biographically influenced work from Hollywood emperor Steven Spielberg?

How could this possibly be true in a year in which Quan completed the comeback awards season marathon on top after decades of being shut out of the business entirely, and Yeoh bested perennial nominee and two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett in her category? It’s somewhat hinted at in those anonymous ballots – although those wins seemed like a lock, none of it was guaranteed.

If the most influential voters had decided that these wins were not the story the body as a whole should be telling, this year’s ceremony would have left a very different flavor in our mouths instead of the palatably bittersweet yumminess many experienced.

As we’ve learned, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes the truth, which can be both glorious and infuriating.

Overall the telecast itself, though more than three-and-a-half hours long, struck a decent balance between entertainment and self-congratulation. Three-time Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel didn’t try to swing for the fences with his material, perhaps to avoid controversy. Last year’s telecast provided enough of that with The Slap, which Kimmel gently prodded in his monologue and a couple of times during the ceremony.

“We want you to have fun. We want you to feel safe. And most importantly, we want me to feel safe. So we have strict policies in place,” he said. “If anyone in this theater commits an act of violence at any point during the show, you will be awarded the Oscar for best actor and be permitted to give an 18-minute long speech.”

He then added, “Seriously, the Academy has a crisis team in place. If anything unpredictable or violent happens during the ceremony, just do what you did last year: nothing. Maybe even give the assailant a hug.”

But there’s something to be said for the host striving to be forgettable on a night that was predicted to be memorable for many reasons. This year’s batch of Oscar nominees featured many first-timers, which increased the likelihood that history would be made.

Not only did Yeoh become the first Asian woman to win best actress, but Telugu sleeper hit “RRR” (which stands for “Rise Roar Revolt”) yield the first original song from an Indian film to win an Oscar with “Naatu Naatu.”

Dancers perform “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR” onstage at the 95th Annual Academy Awards held at Dolby Theatre on March 12, 2023 in Los Angeles, California (Rich Polk/Variety via Getty Images)

That these wins happened in a year in which Oscar nominations for “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” acknowledge each worldwide sensation’s role in reminding audiences of the theatrical experience’s necessity in terms of fully experiencing their spectacle and scope. Either could have easily muscled “Everything Everywhere All at Once” off its pedestal.

Then again, neither Tom Cruise nor James Cameron showed up – “The two guys who insisted we go to the theater didn’t go to the theater,” Kimmy quipped – no doubt suspecting there would be no reason for them to rise from their seats. (If that’s the case, they’re partly right, since “Top Gun: Maverick” snagged the Oscar for best sound editing and “Avatar: The Way of Water” swam off with the visual effects award.)

Evoking the importance of being in a theater, however, were the strong musical performances. Together they enlivened the telecast as opposed to bringing them to to halt, save for the odd killer moment from the likes of Lady Gaga.

She delivered again, face stripped of makeup and disrobing from her couture to wear a simple black t-shirt and ripped jeans to perform “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun.” It’s best to get out of Rihanna’s way, I suppose, who sparkled in her performance of “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

That had stiff competition from the pure frenzied precision that was the live performance of “Naatu Naatu,” outdone only by its composer M.M. Keeravaani breaking into his version of The Carpenters’ “Top of the World” while accepting his Oscar.

In terms of sheer charm and weirdness, David Byrne and Stephanie Hsu’s duo on “Everything Everywhere” single “This Is a Life” may have stolen the evening. It was lovely and harmonious, revealing itself to be the evening’s gratifying condiment when Byrne waved his hot dog hands in the air. A complementary contrast was Lenny Kravitz performing “Calling All Angels” during the In Memoriam segment, lending it an air of sweet remembrance as opposed to dirges of yesteryear.

Stephanie Hsu, David Byrne, Raccacoonie and more perform “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at the Oscars on March 12, 2023 (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)What’s so terrible about any of that? (Save for the usual significant omissions from the memorial lineup, including Anne Heche, Paul Sorvino, and the problematic Tom Sizemore, among others.) Little to nothing. It’s the notes of burnt garlic on the other side of a bite when we contemplate who wasn’t there and who didn’t win.

During his monologue, Kimmel acknowledged that Viola Davis’ and Danielle Deadwyler’s work in “The Woman King” and “Till” are nomination-worthy without specifically pointing to the Andrea Riseborough of it all, which he never would.

Indeed, the typical Oscar viewer knows and cares little about studio “For Your Consideration” campaigns and understands why that nomination over the others was controversial. What people should understand, however, is the way that the notion of certain people being “overdue” for an award favors some actors more than others and brings out some of the Oscar voters’ most irritating and regressive habits. Curtis’ Oscar and Brendan Fraser’s best actor win over category favorites Colin Farrell for “The Banshees of Inisherin” and Austin Butler for “Elvis” evince this.

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Curtis won over Angela Bassett, whose nomination for her stellar performance in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” made her the favorite to win in this category. Certainly, Disney poured a queen’s ransom into campaigning for her. But if some of the cattiest murmurings hold any veracity, it seems that a major studio doing this for a Black actress is somehow viewed less charitably than a smaller one doing the same, hand-in-hand with a charismatic cast and directors working the public.

Curtis and Bassett each gave outstanding performances, but in the “How hasn’t this person gotten an Oscar yet?” pageant, the decks have long been stacked in Curtis’ favor.

Curtis and Bassett each gave outstanding performances, but in the “How hasn’t this person gotten an Oscar yet?” pageant, the decks have long been stacked in Curtis’ favor. She’s had a great many leading role opportunities in her career and is the face of a decades-spanning horror franchise.

Bassett has been working for nearly as long, receiving an Oscar nomination for “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (which she should have won for) and famously slaying it in “Waiting to Exhale.” Those were two blockbuster parts compared to . . . how many for the Scream Queen?

Fraser’s win highlights a different Oscar voter tendency, one in which actors of average build are rewarded for disappearing inside of prosthetics and performing their hearts out through layers of spirit gum and latex. In “The Whale” he delivers a moving performance while drowning in a fat suit made to make him look like a 600-pound man. Fraser also disappeared from Hollywood for years, making a methodical comeback over the past few years by appearing in very select roles.

However, the paramount criticism of “The Whale” is that it is fatphobic. Fraser is extraordinary, by most accounts. Butler also disappeared into the persona of King for “Elvis” to the point that he couldn’t shake his accent. But Butler is a newcomer relative to Fraser, who is “overdue” . . . right? In any case, it was a win destined to be loved and hated in a single pass.

Brendan Fraser at the 95th Annual Academy Awards held at Dolby Theatre on March 12, 2023 in Los Angeles, California (Rich Polk/Variety via Getty Images)

Millions of us watch the Oscars each year nevertheless for its confluence of magic, heartbreak, inspiration and gossip fodder. Quan, in his tearful speech, reminded everyone watching, “Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine. To all of you out there: Please keep your dreams alive.” Seconds later, Curtis won her prize, with Bassett refusing to mask her dismay at losing.

Still, when best cinematography presenters Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors looked at her and said, “Hey, Auntie. We love you,” they spoke for the many people watching and feeling the same frustration.

This Oscars was not marred by fighting or controversy or victories by the undeserving, but it may be remembered for who wasn’t in the room and maybe should have been if all things were truly equal. At least there was some justice and joy in Yeoh and Quan claiming their gold, with Yeoh echoing her co-star in telling the world, and women specifically, to never give up. That may land differently for a deserving veteran for whom such glory remains elusive no matter how hard she works. For people who support such an artist, acceptance speech bromides can be inspiring, exasperating and true – all of these, all at once.

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Double duds: Jim Jordan’s and Tucker Carlson’s lazy conspiracy theories bore MAGA

When Republicans took the House of Representatives in the midterms, the widespread expectation in the political media was that the GOP propaganda machine was about to kick into high gear and generate a firehose of conspiracy theories that would make even Donald Trump’s record of lying look feeble. The new Speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, previewed what looked like it would be a Soviet-style war on truth, from rewriting the history of January 6 to pumping out lies about federal “assault” on conservatives. The expectation was that this would be a robust and terrifying effort that not only wowed Republican voters but successfully bullied the mainstream media into elevating Republican lies out of fear of being accused of “bias.”

I don’t want to speak too soon, but so far, the Republican noise machine has been — dare I say? — underwhelming. Last week was supposed to be a banner week for the two biggest propaganda initiatives started by McCarthy’s caucus. However, the efforts went over like a wet fart in both cases.

First, Tucker Carlson of Fox News attempted to rewrite the January 6 insurrection with supposedly previously unseen footage of the riot. But even within Republican circles, there’s a palpable sense of disappointment. This was supposed to be the blockbuster release of dazzling right-wing propaganda, but it’s got the same vibe as the “Game of Thrones” series finale.

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Then there is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio’s “weaponization of federal government” committee. No one of good faith believed that the Jordan committee’s hearing about the so-called “Twitter files” last week would produce any damning evidence against Democrats. (Plenty of evidence of Donald Trump using his power to suppress speech has been unearthed, but of course, none of that bothers the supposed free speech warriors of the right.) But the big surprise was how boring the whole thing was. The conspiracy theories lacked imagination. Republican fake outrage was low energy, too. The only fun was watching Democrats kick around disgraced journalist Matt Taibbi.

"Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention" — Wasserman Schultz does a great job exposing Taibbi's right-wing grift here pic.twitter.com/wn4iPi50AX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2023

So far, the Republican noise machine has been — dare I say? — underwhelming.

This was after another entertaining face plant when Jordan’s FBI “whistleblowers” were exposed as a bunch of conspiracy theorists on the Trumpworld payroll. The whole committee has been such a snooze that Republicans are starting to gripe to journalists that Jordan isn’t doing more to put some razzle dazzle on his B.S. Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post reports that Republicans on Capitol Hill are calling the committee “lackluster and unfocused” and complaining that Jordan isn’t working harder as the hype man for right-wing pseudo-scandals.

“Jordan’s investigative weapon was loaded with blanks,” mocked former Justice Department officials Frederick Baron and Dennis Aftergut at the never-Trump site The Bulwark.

Kevin McCarthy won’t let Republicans “move on” from January 6

The same vibe characterizes the Republican reception to Carlson’s recent efforts to pretend that his “exclusive” access to the January 6 video files had somehow proved the insurrection was both peaceful and justified. Carlson has been an enthusiastic propagandist before, which is how he got so rich and famous. But he really half-assed this whole thing, with stodgy footage and feeble pleas to the audience to simply empty their memories of the hours and hours of footage they’ve previously seen of Trump fans ransacking the Capitol.

Why work hard at generating disinformation when phoning it in works just as well?

As Joan Walsh of the Nation wrote, Carlson’s “don’t believe your lying eyes” segment was “strangely lifeless.” Walsh noted that Carlson is “increasingly making a joke of himself—even inside his own network.” As Justin Peters at Slate pointed out, the effort was so uninspired that “Carlson’s report was initially met with silence from the other hosts and programs on Fox News.” Embarrassingly, when Fox News host Bret Baier finally did deign to respond to Carlson, it was with a segment “emphasizing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s outright rejection of Carlson’s narrative, and noting that Jan. 6 defendants ‘assaulted 140 police officers, some so badly they’ll never return to work.'”

It’s tempting to believe that lying about January 6 crosses some invisible moral line at the network, but that is unlikely what’s going on here. After all, Fox is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems now because they were willing to hype the Big Lie that led to the insurrection in the first place. We’re not talking about people who are troubled by dishonesty. This reaction likely has more to do with how ho-hum Carlson’s approach has been. He didn’t even try to make a semblance of a case here. All he did was show images of those moments when rioters weren’t beating cops, as if that erased all the other moments in time when they were being violent. Even the most devoted MAGA fan is going to struggle to defend that ruse, which is the equivalent of pointing to all those times Ted Bundy wasn’t murdering women. The whole thing had a paint-by-numbers feel to it.

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Jordan and Carlson are starting to seem bored with their own schtick. And why wouldn’t they get tired of it all? Years of doing this likely has taught them that it doesn’t really matter how artful their propaganda is. The effect is the same whether it’s dazzling or drab: MAGA types will pretend to believe it. Everyone else rolls their eyes in weary disgust. No one is manipulated, persuaded, or moved. All their audiences want is some noise to spew in order to deflect criticism. They have no aesthetic discernment on the quality of the lies. Clumsy agitprop works exactly as well as more graceful lies. Why work hard at generating disinformation when phoning it in works just as well?

Still, there’s a dark irony in all this. Both Carlson and Jordan have become famous and powerful by dint of their effectiveness at spreading conspiracy theories. Carlson gets paid $6 million a year, strictly due to his acting chops, whether he’s pretending to care about the sexiness of M&Ms or to believe in the intelligence of Donald Trump. Similarly, Jordan rose high in the ranks of House Republicans because he’s talented at faking outrage. Yet both these men are showing less passion for conspiracy theories these days than your average unpaid and anonymous QAnon troll. It must be tiring, looking forward to the rest of their lives spent trying to feign zeal over fake culture war fights or made-up controversies. Not that they deserve your pity, of course. Being professional liars is the path they chose for themselves, and they’re clearly stuck following it to the end.

Republicans try — but can’t — distance themselves from Tucker Carlson’s lies

There is no secret plan: First they came for trans people

A very accomplished and famous doctor recently told me, “if you really listen to the patient, they will tell you the diagnosis.” His advice applies to many areas of life. For example, journalists and other people who think and write publicly about politics should follow it. When newsmakers (and everyday people too) talk, we should listen closely and not try to impose our own meaning and agendas on what they say. Too many times there is an impulse and bad habit of trying to discern secret meanings to triangulate and make inferences that are not present or merited. Even worse, too many members of the commentariat reach their own conclusions before they have actually taken a proper accounting of the facts and what a person actually has to say. As journalism scholar Jay Rosen explains, “In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts.”

If you listen closely, people will tell and show you who they really are, what they actually believe, and by doing so reveal their true character. Such a process of honest listening brings us much closer to the truth — even if we do not like what we find there. To wit, when Donald Trump and his supporters communicate their threats, love of violence, and overall contempt for democracy, they mean exactly what they say.

“The GOP is trying to eliminate this distinct group of people from public life.”

Take for instance, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene at last weekend’s CPAC gathering in Washington D.C. There the Republican announced that she is going to pass a bill in Congress called the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” that will supposedly “make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender affirming care on children.”

“These are kids who are confused about who they are and they are confused about who they are because of what they are seeing on the internet, what they see on social media and they are also confused, many of them, because these victims of this billion-dollar industry that mutilates the genitals of children, many of these victims have diagnoses of autism, mental illness, they have depression, anxiety, psychosis. Many of them live in foster care so they have already lived lives of abuse. These victims come in thinking they are going to find happiness and they are going to find security. in their identity because they think they can change their gender.”

“These boys think they can become girls and the girls think they can become boys but what’s happening to them is they are given puberty blockers that actually chemically castrates them, makes them sterile, they are given testosterone to girls as young as 11, 12 or 13 and within 4-5 years, some of them have to have hysterectomies because of the damage it does inside of them. There are teenage girls having their breasts cut off. That is a permanent damage to their body, they will never be able to breast-feed their baby. There are boys that are having their penises turned inside out. These are kids.”

The Independent offered this summary of what actual medical professionals have recommended regarding how best to support and care for transgender youth:

Gender-affirming care can span several kinds of treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and social transitioning support. Care standards from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other leading medical groups do not recommend that affirming surgeries be performed on minors, and the American Medical Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, among others, have established clear clinical guidelines for treating young trans people….

The American Academy of Pediatrics, meanwhile, is the nation’s largest professional association of pediatricians. The group recommends a “gender-affirming” and “nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.”

“The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks,” according to the organisation.

Words have actual meanings. Through her words, Greene has repeatedly shown herself to be a hate monger, white supremacist, White Christian nationalist, antisemite, neofascist and supporter of the Jan. 6 coup. Those facts must be repeated and not assumed or otherwise glossed over as something “obvious” because to do so is to normalize evil. And it is through normalization that neofascism and other forms of authoritarianism and illiberalism penetrate and poison an entire society.

The media is underestimating Donald Trump — again

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s speech at CPAC (and the larger pattern of attacks on the LGBTQ community by the right-wing) is part of a strategy known as stochastic terrorism, where a malign actor uses repetition, coded language and overt threats, humor, and other rhetorical moves to stigmatize an entire group of people as a way of encouraging violence against them. When said outcome takes place, those same actors will then deny any connection to the lethal events they incited.

America is sick with fascism.

There are now hundreds of laws being proposed across the country that are attempting to take away the civil and human rights of LGBTQ people. Books, classes, and public discussions about the history, lives, and contributions – and existence – of LGBTQ people are being banned by thought crime laws in states such as Florida and Texas. The number of hate crimes – including mass shootings – targeting LGBTQ people are increasing all over the United States.

It is clear, more than just trolling or posturing for political points, Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allies are engaging in a concerted campaign to literally erase LGBTQ people from American society.

CPAC speaker says, “Transgenderism must be eradicated,” while claiming it doesn’t exist

Via email, I recently asked journalist and author Brynn Tannehill for her thoughts about this escalating campaign of violence and threats against the LGBTQ community. She warned:

This is not just trolling or culture war rhetoric. They are clearly stating their intent to use the full force of government to remove transgender people from public life. They are looking to do this at both the state and national level, and are making all the necessary moves to do so already. At CPAC, the anti-trans lines received the biggest applause and cheers.

In 1933, the New York Times opined that Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric was just playing to the rubes, and when he became chancellor it would be business as usual as German business moderates would win out in his cabinet.

83 years later, in the days after the election of Donald Trump, Masha Gessen reminded us in Rule Number One of her Rules for Surviving Autocracy that we must “believe the autocrat”. Absolutely we must believe what the right is saying, particularly because they are already doing everything they would need to accomplish their stated goal of eradication.

When you look at what this eradication means in practice, it clearly meets the definition of cultural genocide, which is “the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements that make one group of people distinct from another.” Trans people violate gender norms. The GOP is trying to eliminate this distinct group of people from public life by forcing them to detransition, live as hermits in their houses, or flee to another country.

Even though the fascist threat to their democracy and society (and own safety) has repeatedly been made clear and obvious throughout the Age of Trump, too many Americans have chosen to be bystanders to history, watching these attacks on the LGBTQ community and doing nothing because “it doesn’t have anything to do with me” or “I am not gay or a lesbian or transgendered or one of THEM so who cares?” That is precisely the wrong approach to take when the human and civil rights of an entire group of people (or for that matter, an individual) are being imperiled.

America is sick with fascism. Fascism, at its core, is corrupt power. The Republican fascists and their allies and followers will not stop with the LGBTQ community, they are targeting other groups of people who they deem to be “un-American” or “immoral” or “not Christian.” By its very nature, fascism knows no limits or boundaries to its violence and cruelty. That rule applies to those people who are sympathetic to or even outright support Donald Trump, the Republican fascists, and the “conservative” movement. Such leaders have no respect for their followers and view them with contempt. In that way, fascism is cannibalistic. It starts with the so-called Other before it then turns its sights to “normal” people.

We should all listen very carefully to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the other Republican fascists, their followers and propagandists such as Fox News, and of course Donald Trump and his Hitler retribution threats. They are being very honest and direct about their plans for American society. They are not kidding. Believe them.

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