Who’s winning the economic war over Ukraine — and who’s losing? It’s not a pretty picture

With the Ukraine war reaching its one-year mark on Feb. 24, the Russians have not achieved a military victory but neither has the West achieved its goals on the economic front. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. and its European allies vowed to impose crippling sanctions that would bring Russia to its knees and force it to withdraw.

Western sanctions would erect a new Iron Curtain, hundreds of miles to the east of the old one, separating an isolated, defeated, bankrupt Russia from a reunited, triumphant and prosperous West. Not only has Russia withstood the economic assault, but the sanctions have boomeranged — hitting the very countries that imposed them.

Western sanctions on Russia reduced the global supply of oil and natural gas, but also pushed up prices. So Russia profited from the higher prices, even as its export volume decreased. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that Russia’s economy only contracted by 2.2% in 2022, compared with the 8.5% contraction it had forecast, and it predicts that the Russian economy will actually grow by 0.3% in 2023.

On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous U.S. taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid.

Ukraine crisis is a classic “security dilemma” — and it’s urgent we find a solution

European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro-area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more dependent on imported Russian energy than other large European countries. So after growing a meager 1.9% in 2022, the German economy is predicted to have negligible 0.1% growth in 2023. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy in 2023 than it did in 2021.

The U.S. is less directly impacted than Europe, but its growth shrank from 5.9% in 2021 to 2% in 2022, and is projected to keep shrinking, to 1.4% in 2023 and 1% in 2024. Meanwhile India, which has remained neutral while buying oil from Russia at a discounted price, is projected to maintain its 2022 growth rate of over 6% per year all through 2023 and 2024. China has also benefited from buying discounted Russian oil and from an overall trade increase with Russia of 30% in 2022. China’s economy is expected to grow at 5% this year.

Other oil and gas producers reaped windfall profits from the effects of the sanctions. Saudi Arabia’s GDP grew by 8.7%, the fastest of all large economies, while Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made “only” $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.

As for natural gas, U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) suppliers like Cheniere and companies like Total that distribute the gas in Europe are replacing Europe’s supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the U.S., at about four times the prices American customers pay, and with the dreadful climate impacts of fracking. A mild winter in Europe and a whopping $850 billion in European government subsidies to households and companies brought retail energy prices back down to 2021 levels, but only after they had spiked five times higher over the summer of 2022.

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While the war restored Europe’s subservience to U.S. hegemony in the short term, these real-world impacts of the war could have quite different results in the long term. French President Emmanuel Macron has remarked, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine, there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices. … The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling at a high price. … I don’t think that’s friendly.”

An even more unfriendly act was the sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines that brought Russian gas to Germany. Seymour Hersh has reported that the pipelines were blown up in a clandestine operation by the U.S., with the help of Norway — those being the two countries that have displaced Russia as Europe’s two largest natural gas suppliers. (The U.S. government has denied Hersh’s claims.) Coupled with the high price of U.S. fracked gas, this has fueled anger among the European public. In the long term, European leaders may well conclude that the region’s future lies in political and economic independence from countries that launch military attacks on it, which would include the United States as well as Russia.

The other big winners of the war in Ukraine will of course be the weapons makers, dominated globally by the U.S. “big five”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the U.S. and other NATO countries. Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements.

The Reed-Inhofe substitute amendment to the fiscal-year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorized “wartime” multi-year, no-bid contracts to “replenish” stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior OMB official Marc Cancian commented, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin is up 37%, Northrop Grumman is up 41%, Raytheon is up 17% and General Dynamics is up 19%.

While a few countries and companies have profited from the war, countries far from the scene of the conflict have been reeling from the economic fallout. Russia and Ukraine have been critical suppliers of wheat, corn, cooking oil and fertilizers to much of the world. The war and sanctions have caused shortages in all these commodities, as well as fuel to transport them, pushing global food prices to all-time highs.

After a year of slaughter and destruction, we can declare winners: Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman. The losers? Pretty much everyone else.

So the other big losers in this war are people in the Global South who depend on imports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine simply to feed their families. Egypt and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, while a dozen other highly vulnerable countries depend almost entirely on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Laos to Benin, Rwanda and Somalia. Fifteen African countries imported more than half their supply of wheat from Russia and Ukraine in 2020.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the UN and Turkey has eased the food crisis for some countries, but the agreement remains precarious. It must be renewed by the UN Security Council before it expires on March 18, but Western sanctions are still blocking Russian fertilizer exports, which are supposed to be exempt from sanctions under the grain initiative. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told Agence France-Presse on Feb. 15 that freeing up Russian fertilizer exports is “of the highest priority.”

After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate — all sacrificed to the god of war.

That is why, as the war enters its second year, there is a mounting global outcry for the parties to the conflict to find solutions. The words of Brazil’s newly-elected President Lula reflect that growing sentiment. When pressured by President Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t want to join this war, I want to end it.”

on the first fateful year of war in Ukraine

Predictable “Cocaine Bear” never achieves the level of dumb fun to elicit laughs – not even a snort

There is a scene in the high-concept anti-drug comedy thriller, “Cocaine Bear,” where Henry (Christian Convey), a 12-year-old, watches in awe and horror as someone is mauled by the titular animal — a bear that has ingested blow. Henry breathlessly exclaims, “I’d love not to remember that, but it’s the kind of thing that stays with you!” And while this line delivery is mildly amusing, most of “Cocaine Bear” is not. Nor is it memorable. Many of the set pieces in director Elizabeth Banks’ one-joke film are shocking because they are so boring. This film promises laughs and scares but manages to deliver neither.

“Cocaine Bear” is based on a true story of Andrew Carter Thornton II, who dropped several duffle bags of cocaine into the Chattahoochee National Forest in Northern Georgia in 1985 and himself as well — only his parachute didn’t open and he died on impact. Thornton’s backstory, which (according to the film’s press kit) reportedly involves him being a narcotics cop, a DEA agent and a cocaine smuggler, among other things, is actually more interesting that what is seen in Banks’ lackluster film. Screenwriter Jimmy Warden does not have the bear die of an overdose — as happened when a 175-pound black bear consumed kilos of coke (because there would be no movie) — and instead has the animal attacking various characters in uninspired ways.

Leo owes his Oscar to the bear: “The Revenant” told an American story the Academy couldn’t help but devour

In the opening moments, two hikers see the cocaine bear hitting its head against a tree and humping it. Audiences will be rooting for the bear to go on its coke-fueled rampage and sever limbs, but even when this happens, it is hardly satisfying.

The storylines are both predictable and dull. One has Syd (Ray Liotta, slumming in one of his last screen roles) as a shifty St. Louis drug trafficker who sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and his friend Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to recover the missing cocaine. Eddie and Daveed banter annoyingly (their bromance feels forced) as they enter a situation much more dangerous than they anticipate. There is some pleasure in watching the unflappable Daveed beat up a trio of criminals in the national park’s bathroom, or deal with a cop (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) who has been trying to collar Syd. But the action feels sluggish, lumbering along like a bear more on sleeping pills than cocaine. An endless sequence where the bear lies on top of Eddie, covering him like a rug — and falls asleep, her vagina pressed against his ear — generates more of a shrug than a giggle.

Keri Russell, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Margo Martindale in “Cocaine Bear” (Pat Redmond/Universal Pictures)Likewise, when Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry cut school to go into the park to paint the waterfall, they first stumble onto a kilo of cocaine. They eat it rather than snort it, which is about as funny as it sounds. The drugs do not seem to have much effect on them, but they do lure the bear closer, which forces the kids to flee. When Dee Dee’s mother, Sari (Keri Russell) comes looking for her daughter, she gets into protective mama bear mode and will battle anything and anyone until she finds Dee Dee.

No betting on who dies and who survives because when it comes to “Cocaine Bear” there is little nuance. The unsubtle approach works best in the third storyline which involves Park Ranger Liz (the ever-reliable Margo Martindale) who takes her gun on the search for Dee Dee because, she asserts, “I’m a peace officer, so I can shoot people.”

Liz does get cornered by the bear both out in the park and when she returns from an outing to the ranger station, and Banks creates some tension in this sequence, which includes a clever (albeit bloody) visual gag involving a gunshot wound. The action that follows generates some real excitement which is more than can be said for the rest of “Cocaine Bear.” When two medics, Beth (Kahyun Kim) and Tom (Scott Seiss), arrive and assess the aftermath of a bloody attack, things shift into high gear. As Beth takes Liz’s heartbeat, the soundtrack thumps and all hell soon breaks loose, leading to a wild chase involving the cocaine bear chasing down an ambulance speeding away. There are some fun visuals here, from the bear leaping towards its prey to some painful injuries suffered by humans. This nifty sequence shows how good “Cocaine Bear” can be.

Cocaine Bear (Universal Pictures)But most of the film is deadly when it should be killer. An episode at the waterfall where Syd and his crew as well as Sari and the kids contend with a narrow ledge, two baby cubs and bad CGI hardly feels like the big, exciting climax. As Henry spouts an F-bomb (because cursing children always get a laugh!), and a character abuses the baby animals (to emphasize he’s a bad guy!), more cocaine is spilled, but it is about as fun as a bad party.

“Cocaine Bear” would have benefitted from being more over-the-top or campy, but Banks plays things mostly at face value, which is why the laughs and scares are so flat. Humor and horror both rely on surprise and most everything in this film is telegraphed, from obvious gotcha bits when characters realize they’ve not just left themselves open to attack, but did so in ways that forgot they were dealing with a bear.

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“Cocaine Bear” never reaches the dumb fun level of “Snakes on a Plane” or “Lake Placid” — and that is a low bar — but it desperately wants to be in that rarified club. But it needs more than a title and concept. To its discredit, the film wastes a decent cast who are given types, not people to play. When a double-cross happens in one of the storylines, it passes as character development.

The bear easily out-acts the humans. Watching the animal experience ecstasy licking a fresh corpse or breathing in cocaine yields the closest thing to a contact high. The rest of “Cocaine Bear” is just a bad trip.

“Cocaine Bear” opens wide in theaters Friday, Feb. 24.

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Abbott says most gun crimes involve illegally owned weapons. That’s not true for mass shootings

Without mentioning the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week declared school safety a priority for the current legislative session and again dismissed calls for more laws that would restrict access to guns.

“Some want more gun laws, but too many local officials won’t even enforce the gun laws that are already on the books,” the governor said during his annual State of the State address. Without providing a source or clear data, he then asserted that “most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally.” Abbott proposed a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for people who are not legally allowed to have a firearm but have them anyway.

“We need to leave prosecutors and judges with no choice but to punish those criminals and remove them and their guns from our streets,” said Abbott, a Republican.

But Abbott’s speech avoided a glaring reality: The majority of the state’s 19 mass shootings over the past six decades were carried out by men who legally acquired firearms, according to an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published before his speech. Guns were legally obtained in 13 shootings, including two in which the shooter was not allowed to have one but took advantage of a loophole in the law that does not require background checks for firearms that are acquired from private individuals. Firearms were obtained illegally in three instances. The rest of the cases were unclear.

The news organizations’ analysis found that lawmakers failed to pass at least two dozen bills that would have prevented people from legally obtaining the weapons and ammunition used in seven of the state’s mass shootings. Such measures included requiring universal background checks, banning the ownership of certain firearms and raising the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old.

State lawmakers instead have loosened restrictions over the years on publicly carrying guns while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.

Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son was among the 19 children and two teachers killed last year at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, agreed with Abbott that criminals should not have access to guns. But, Cross said, the governor’s comments ignore the fact that the people responsible for many mass shootings did not previously have a criminal background.

“Before May 24, our shooter was not a criminal,” Cross said. “If this shooter hadn’t been able to just go in and buy those guns literally two days after his 18th birthday, then my child would still be alive.” Abbott, he said, “wants to be reactive instead of proactive, and proactive is what we need to stop these things.”

The governor did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the news organizations’ investigation or about his remarks during his State of the State address.

Little evidence exists to support Abbott’s claim, said Bill Spelman, who worked for a national police association for seven years and has spent the last 30 years teaching and researching criminal justice policy.

“To just say that most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally is a statement you can’t back up,” said Spelman, an emeritus professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

James Densley, who co-founded the Violence Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit research center best known for its extensive mass shooter database, said that Abbott’s 10-year mandatory minimum sentence proposal would do little to deter mass shootings because the shooter does not survive in most of those cases and in others is already facing life in prison. In the vast majority of the nationwide cases in which it is known how the shooters obtained their firearms, they did so legally, Densley said.

Densley said different forms of gun violence require targeted approaches. For instance, restrictions on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines could be effective at reducing mass shootings, but less so at curbing “everyday gun violence,” he said.

“And I think politicians actually know this,” Densely said. “They understand it intuitively. But they have to say what is politically convenient to satisfy the needs of their constituents and others. And so they often conflate these different forms of gun violence to be perceived to be talking about one thing when they’re actually talking about something else.”

“Financial misfeasance”: Project Veritas fired James O’Keefe over fear of losing nonprofit status

James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, says he has been fired. He is no longer leading the conservative nonprofit organization, which is known for its use of hidden cameras and false identities to try to catch members of the media and progressive leaders saying embarrassing things and to expose their supposed liberal biases.

To learn more about the accusations against O’Keefe and what the legal consequences might be for the tax-exempt organization, The Conversation asked nonprofit law scholar Samuel Brunson five questions to explain the situation and the issues it raises.

1. Who is accused of what, exactly?

The board of directors of Project Veritas has accused O’Keefe of “financial misfeasance.” Its allegations of financial improprieties by the man who until recently served as the group’s chairman include that he spent money donated to the organization on various luxuries for himself, such as charter flights and theater tickets.

If the accusations prove valid, it is possible that this misuse of Project Veritas funds could imperil the group’s tax exemption. A tax-exempt organization cannot use its money to benefit certain individuals, especially insiders such as its leaders and major donors. It can pay its employees, but the staff and its leaders cannot receive unreasonable compensation or any other type of benefit that looks like the tax-exempt organization is sharing its profits with them.

While it sounds odd that a nonprofit would have profits, it is not. The rule for nonprofit and tax-exempt organizations is not that they cannot make profits; it is that, unlike for-profit entities, they cannot distribute their profits to shareholders.

2. Why would it be a big deal if Project Veritas were to lose its tax-exempt status?

Tax-exempt status provides at least three benefits to Project Veritas.

First, these groups don’t need to pay taxes on most of their revenue.

Second, and likely more importantly, it means that donations to Project Veritas are tax deductible for many wealthy supporters. Through what’s known as the charitable deduction, donors can essentially get a subsidy from the federal government for their donations.

The third benefit: Tax exemption can provide a veneer of legitimacy to an organization by signaling to some potential donors that the federal government has approved of its activities.

But, in fact, tax exemption does not represent any type of government approval. That’s because the government cannot deny tax-exempt status on the basis of ideological disagreement.

3. How has James O’Keefe responded?

O’Keefe acknowledged in a long video posted to the Vimeo video platform that he had been forced out. The board has declared that he has had the opportunity to meet with its members to discuss allegations of financial misdeeds and mistreating staff members. But the man who founded the group 13 years ago has declined to take that opportunity.

O’Keefe also indicated in the video, which he said was being recorded on Feb. 20, 2023, that he may intend to launch a new organization. “I’m not done,” he said. “The mission will perhaps take on a new name.”

4. In a situation like this, are the authorities likely to look into the accusations?

The Internal Revenue Service could investigate the allegations if it wanted to do so. Although the agency is underfunded and understaffed, it sometimes uses high-profile and highly publicized instances of noncompliance to discourage other people and groups from violating tax laws.

That said, based on the publicly available facts, I can’t yet tell whether Project Veritas has violated the rules governing tax-exempt status. While O’Keefe may have misused the group’s funds, it looks like he did it without the board’s knowledge or approval.

The Tax Court, a federal court that adjudicates tax disputes, has explained that a charity does not lose its exemption just because an officer of the charity has “skimmed or embezzled or otherwise stolen from the charity.” Unless there is some evidence that Project Veritas deliberately allowed O’Keefe to use its resources for personal consumption, I suspect the IRS will not pursue this.

5. How can such a demonstrably partisan group have nonprofit status?

Project Veritas claims exemption as an educational organization. According to U.S. Treasury Department regulations, an organization that advocates for a particular viewpoint can be educational for exemption purposes, even though it “advocates a particular position or viewpoint,” as long as it fully presents the facts in a way that allows listeners to make an informed conclusion.

Does Project Veritas meet what the IRS calls the “full and fair exposition” test? If so, and as long as it complies with the other requirements for tax-exempt status, it qualifies as exempt – notwithstanding its ideological leanings.

Samuel Brunson, Professor of Law, Loyola University Chicago

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

Not so much winning: Trump fans remain devoted — but unsure if they’ll vote for him again

As with every other week for the past few months, the big question of the week among the chattering classes has been whether former president Donald Trump still has his mojo among the MAGA crowd. With the ambitious Florida dreamboat Gov. Ron DeSantis committing one culture war assault after another, the entry of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley into the race getting a lot of attention and what appears to be a long line of Republican wannabes undaunted by his former dominance preparing to enter the race, Trump is said to be rocked back on his heels, reeling like an out of shape boxer who’s past his prime.

Is that true? And if it is, does that even matter?

The Washington Post interviewed 150 of Trump’s fans to find out. What a treat. We haven’t had an in-depth report on the average Trump voter in weeks so it’s a big relief to see the media venture out into the heartland once again to take the temperature of these Real Americans. According to the headline of the Post story, “Trump’s grip on the Republican base is slipping — even among his fans.” They report that these people still love Trump but are “becoming less supportive” because they believe he isn’t the best person to “move this party forward,” whatever that means:

That distinction is reshaping the Republican base as the 2024 presidential primary kicks off. The MAGA vs. RINO dichotomy that defined the GOP for much of the last eight years is increasingly obsolete. In its place, a new dynamic emerged from interviews with more than 150 Trump supporters across five pivotal electoral states. In between Republicans who remain firmly committed or opposed to the former president, there’s now a broad range of Trump supporters who, however much they still like him, aren’t sure they want him as the party’s next nominee.The foremost reason is electability.

The media’s biggest addiction: Trump voters

They’re not sure he can win because people’s minds have been poisoned against him and more than anything these people just want to win. They want to win so much that they’ll beg to stop winning but they’ll keep winning anyway.

So many of them are looking to DeSantis who they think can win over moderates and independents by being even Trumpier than Trump but not actually Trump. This is based on his big win in the increasingly red state of Florida. The report suggests that a lot of people aren’t actually all that familiar with DeSantis, calling him “the Florida guy.” (Anecdotally, I have personally come across Republicans who confuse the fabulist NY Congressman George Santos and Ron DeSantis, so I’m not sure the latter has firmly established himself as anything more than a fantasy boyfriend for some of these people.)

The eagerness among many in the media to see DeSantis as the second coming of Trump is palpable.

Also among those the Post interviewed are ride-or-die Trumpers, people who cannot fathom voting for anyone but their Dear Leader. These are people who carry the threat of sitting out the election if Trump isn’t given the nomination and, as is obvious, it’s not as if Trump would graciously concede and implore his devoted flock to vote for the person who defeated him. It’s unknown how many of these people there are but there are enough of them that they scare the hell out of the Republicans. Watching DeSantis and the rest of the field try to navigate that minefield should be entertaining in a horror movie sort of way.

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The eagerness among many in the media to see DeSantis as the second coming of Trump is palpable, even if they are missing the point entirely. He’s leaning hard on the culture wars, just as Trump did, but his cleverest Trumpist maneuver is a strategy defined by former strategist Steve Bannon as, “The real opposition is the media —and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” It’s the relentless nature of his bombardment, a new assault each day on one or more of the MAGA crowd’s designated enemies that creates an almost overwhelming sense of disorientation and an inability to properly contextualize what he’s doing. We’ll have to see if DeSantis can keep up the pace and if he has Trump’s talent for owning the libs in a way that makes his supporters feel good about themselves for doing it. DeSantis’ humorless personality doesn’t inspire the same kind of joyous tribalism that defines Trumpism. I suspect that the most compelling thing about it for most of Trump’s followers is that it’s fun. Ron DeSantis, however, doesn’t seem like much fun.

DeSantis’ humorless personality doesn’t inspire the same kind of joyous tribalism that defines Trumpism.

The polls are all over the place and don’t really show us much yet except that Donald Trump will not be nominated by acclamation. This clearly disappointed him but has also almost certainly sharpened his survival instincts. We know how he reacts to losing. And it’s clear that his rivals aren’t prepared to fight him. Trump strategist and Fox News celebrity Sean Hannity has been asking every candidate and potential candidate the simple, anodyne question: How do you differ from Donald Trump? So far, they all pretty much say, “I don’t.”

Hannity: What specific policy areas would you say part with Donald Trump?
Haley: What I am saying is I don't kick sideways, I'm kicking forward.. I’m not going to kick sideways.. I’m kicking forward pic.twitter.com/DrO9XAuguk

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 16, 2023

HANNITY: What are your policy differences with Trump?

TIM SCOTT: Probably not very many at all. I am so thankful that we had President Trump in office. pic.twitter.com/Nd34nwizfJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2023

Relate Can Fox News ever be destroyed?

Trump “policies” are a couple of ideas Trump came up with in the 1980s about trade, racism, a handful of inane complaints he concocted to cover for the fact that he didn’t know what he was talking about in 2016 and whatever he decided to tweet on a given morning after watching “Fox and Friends.” There’s no ideology. There’s no agenda. The party didn’t even bother to produce a platform in 2020, instead saying that whatever Trump was was fine with them. There’s no Trumpism. There is only Trump and certain poseurs pretending to be him by acting like narcissists and bullies.

This election is already showing that until Trump is out of politics which, God willing, will be in two more years, the Republican Party is not going to lift a finger to reorient the party away from him. Just as Fox News panicked when their audience left them for failing to properly adhere to Trump’s Big Lie, the party is terrified of alienating the Forever Trumpers (and many of them see political benefit in keeping them deluded and distracted.) Trump may not be the juggernaut he once was but for the moment he’s really all they’ve got.

What will be best for my child — public school or private?

Deciding where my child will go to school is proving to be hard. It shouldn’t be. In a perfect world, we should all be able to send our kids to the neighborhood school where they will build lifelong relationships while being educated, loved and inspired. But we don’t live in a perfect world.

“The hell with public school,” my friend Tuck once said to me. “My 11-year-old son had 20-year-old classmates with mustaches and credit scores. I straight threw him in private school for all of our safety!”

A salute to public school teachers: Heroes who show up with courage every day

I laughed, even though at the time I wasn’t thinking about marrying or having a child of my own. Here I am years later with a lovely toddler who constantly tells me “no!” and a lovely wife who answers every question these days with two words: “private” and “school.”

How was your day, baby? “Private school.” Did I get a package in the mail? “Private school.” I love you so much, baby. “Private school! Private School! Private School!”

“Private school is nice,” I say. “But so expensive.”

“We’ll make it work,” she says.

My wife believes that private school is the solution, outside of the work we do at home, to educating our daughter. She may be in a better position to make her argument, too, since she attended both public and private schools. She knows the difference in experience between small and large classes. She knows how valuable the one-on-one attention kids receive in private school can be. She knows what a quality school lunch can taste like. She knows the chaos that exists in some public schools, too, and if she was rewriting her story, she would tell you in a second she prefers the private school experience.

I get it. My own public school education mirrored that bad Michelle Pfeiffer movie “Dangerous Minds”: metal detectors, terrified staff members, old-ass hot dogs for lunch with no bun, no technology, substitutes who knew nothing about the students holding court, studying only for the sake of passing the state test, pistols, piss smells, pills, pocketknives and pain. The only thing we were actually missing was the liberal, street-smart yet delicate teacher in the vintage motorcycle leather jacket sent to our district with the purpose of saving us.

I’m a teacher educator, and my work has never felt so hopeless

I did have a few solid teachers at some of my public schools. Mr. Brown stands out the most. He was a slick, old-school history teacher who always called us “Mayor” or “Doctor” because he wanted us to see ourselves in those positions. He also drove a Cadillac that sat clean Vogue Tyres, went to Morgan State University, our city’s most prestigious HBCU, and once told me a story about how he had to stick his foot ankle-deep up a white cop’s ass. I loved that guy. But most of our teachers were overworked and underpaid, or just killing time, or they had no understanding of the culture they were interacting with. Teachers and administrators working in a culture and actively ignoring the rules that make up that culture — that’s something I fear my daughter experiencing, too. And if that can happen in both public and private schools, why pay tuition?

We know how pricey private school is. But we also know paying that price can give our child advantages. It’s like education on steroids. No one wants to admit to juicing, but I bet most parents would sacrifice their organs to give their children the benefits those advantages provide.

Research says private school students do better overall on standardized tests and in academic subjects than public school students. But research also shows those differences can be attributed more to parental education and income than school type, as Indiana University professor Christopher Lubienski argues in “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Sarah Theule Lubienski. In an interview, Lubienski said, “We know that private schools get higher raw test scores, but we also know they tend to serve more affluent families. So the question is whether those higher scores are due to private schools being better, or because they are serving students with advantages associated with academic success.”

In other words, does the fact that we’re in a position now to choose a private school mean our child will be fine either way? Because I also know public schools have changed a lot since we were students.

“You know, baby,” I say to my wife, “these new teachers are Black — not Huxtable Carlton Banks Black, but Mary J. Blige, who-made-the-potato-salad Black. Some of them wear Air Jordans and teach Black history in months that aren’t February. And get this, some of the white teachers even put #BlackLivesMatter all up in their bios.”

“Poison Ivy” author Evan Mandery: “Elite colleges are harmful to society”

My writing career has taken me to public schools everywhere, especially in my hometown of Baltimore, and I’ve seen those changes and more over the years. Many schools have removed the metal detectors, and there’s a stronger emphasis on Black history now (a fact that must enrage conservatives who want to ban teaching “critical race theory,” whatever they think that is.)

In my professional circles, I hear “my kids go to public school” a lot. Successful people who were born affluent — not from the trenches like me — wear it as a badge of honor. It’s kind of like saying, “I can afford the fancy private school, but I love the people in this city so much that I am going to allow my kids to be educated with the locals.” I’m still shocked when those parents go on their public education rants, because the history of Baltimore City public schools isn’t pretty, nor is it simple. And if you haven’t guessed by now, most of the people I know who are bragging about sending their kids to public school are white.

Being white in America is kind of like having a universal coupon for everything. A coupon that allows your house to be appraised for more than your Black neighbor’s. A coupon that guarantees your traffic stop will end well — you might even walk away with a good restaurant recommendation from an eager cop. A coupon that makes your free public school diploma just as valuable as that of a Black kid whose parents had to dole out thousands of dollars for a private education. Do white people from money know the private school scam? Are they laughing at us new-money people allowing ourselves to be tricked into paying ridiculously high tuition?

“Public school is the way, my man,” a white coworker said to me on the set of a film I worked on. “It’s the only way to give your kids the realness.”

I laughed it off because he didn’t understand. My daughter is going to get the “realness” from me and her mom, and her collection of uncles and aunts and big cousins who have touched every part of the system. She will know pain, even if I don’t want her to. Because we are proactive and have already enrolled her in music, dance and gymnastics classes, she will also know affluence. Both of those experiences will provide some sort of education. There’s no need for us to hunt for artificial “realness” for her.

Disparities in advanced math and science skills begin by kindergarten

What does “realness” mean to an affluent white parent? Multiple Baltimore City public school students have been shot over the last two years — some by other students. That’s not toughness to brag about — it’s tragedy. If “realness” means resilience in the face of that level of adversity, what about the kids who can’t power through? Strangely, that part is often left out of the narrative.

Private school kids sell and take drugs, just like public school kids. Both wear uniforms, though public school uniforms tend to be cheaper. Private school kids go on all kinds of fancy class trips. I will be taking my daughter on fancy trips anyway. Private schools can be breeding grounds for junior liberal racists and baby Uncle Toms, but racism in public schools is delivered via policy, which means while no one will call her the N-word her school is less likely to be equipped with the technology and books needed to compete with private school students. Private schools cost a lot of money. If we send her to public school, will we end up spending what we save on tuition on therapy later instead? But private school kids need therapy, too. See how this works?

Private schools are supposed to be safer than public schools. But is anywhere really safe? This decision could determine her entire path in life — or not. It’s our job to know what’s best for her. I hope I’ll know it when I see it.

about K-12 education

“Targeted for retribution”: Trump’s brag badly backfires as judge orders him to sit for deposition

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that two former FBI officials can depose former President Donald Trump as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit after he bragged about firing them.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two former FBI officials that were part of special counsel Bob Mueller’s team before they were targeted by Trump over text messages disparaging his 2016 candidacy, will be allowed to depose Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray for up to two hours as part of their lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled, according to Politico.

But Jackson left open the question of whether President Joe Biden will invoke executive privilege over any aspects of Trump’s testimony, asking the Justice Department to respond within a month on what Biden plans to do.

Jackson, an Obama appointee, also stressed that she has not yet considered all potential objections from Trump and Wray, which “could include arguments by Trump that he has the unilateral right as a former president to assert executive privilege,” according to Politico.

A federal court holds Trump accountable for his abuse of the law: Here’s why that matters

Strzok and Page argue that they were “illegally targeted for retribution,” according to The Washington Post. Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent, is seeking backpay and reinstatement. Page, a former FBI lawyer, sued the bureau and the DOJ for releasing a trove of her messages that showed she was having an affair with Strzok at the time.

The FBI and the Justice Department have both claimed that Trump did not play a role in their firing but Jackson’s order came after Trump bragged about having the pair fired. Strzok’s lawyers earlier this month cited Trump’s interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt to push for the deposition.

“Don’t forget, these guys, before I even got in, they were spying on my campaign, long before I got in,” Trump told Hewitt on Feb. 2, according to the filing. “This didn’t just happen. And if I didn’t fire Comey, and if I didn’t fire McCabe and Strzok and Page and all of that scum that was in there, you would have had, they were trying to do an overthrow. And they, just think of it. They spied on my campaign from the time I came down the escalator. And here I am, innocently running to do something great, and I have this garbage that’s in there headed up by Comey and the group. They spied on my campaign, and I got rid of them all. I got rid of them all.”

JUST IN: Lawyers for Peter Strzok cite Trump interview yesterday on @hughhewitt , boasting of firing "scum" Strzok, McCabe, Comey & Lisa Page, as additional grounds to depose Trump. FBI has maintained it fired Strzok independently from Trump. Doc: https://t.co/gtta9oiyo6

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) February 3, 2023

Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe said that Jackson was “right” to rule that Trump and Wray can be questioned.

“It’s called the rule of law,” he tweeted.

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Trump has repeatedly attacked Strzok and Page, arguing that their private messages criticizing him showed that the FBI probe into his campaign’s ties to Russia was biased, though independent reviews have failed to support the former president’s claims.

Jackson’s order also came after Strzok and Page showed that they had finished their interviews with lower-ranking officials and exhausted potential sources of information other than Trump and Wray.

Strzok in his lawsuit argued that the Trump administration tolerated political speech by federal employees only if it praised the former president or attacked his opponents. His complaint argues that his firing was part of a “broader campaign against the very principle of free speech” by Trump.

Strzok argued that other FBI employees did not receive discipline for criticizing Hillary Clinton and alleged that his firing was the “direct result of unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies on Capitol Hill.”

about Trump’s legal woes

The Webb telescope may have discovered six galaxies that shouldn’t exist

The universe is full of mysteries, but its age isn’t one of them. That’s because the universe left behind a huge number of clues as to its age — including the observed age of the oldest stars; the rate of expansion of the universe; and the background heat of the universe, which hints at how long it’s been since it cooled off from the Big Bang. All of these data points, measured many times in different ways, point to a universe that expanded from a single point some 13.7 billion years ago.

But once in a while, something weird comes along that doesn’t fit with that timeline.

That’s the case with a new observation from the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed six massive galaxies whose timeline doesn’t square with the age of the universe.

That’s according to a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature, which found that a sextet of fuzzy blue and red galaxies in a blurry photograph appear older than is physically possible.

“Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting.”

Each of these galaxies contains almost as many stars as our own Milky Way galaxy and may have been formed more than 13 billion years ago. This means that they would have been created only 500 to 700 millions years after the Big Bang, which given their size would render them impossible to actually exist based on current theories about the history and workings of the universe.

The James Webb Telescope has already found previously-undetected water on a distant planet

That said, there are other possible explanations, which the researchers themselves are quick to note, and these too could rewrite astronomy textbooks. The crucial detail is that, because these objects are so distant, future James Webb Space Telescope measurements will need to be taken before a full picture can be painted of their origin.

In the words of first author Ivo Labbé of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia in a statement, “another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting.”

As co-author Erica Nelson also pointed out, if these dots are indeed massive galaxies, they operate in a way vastly different from our own.

“The Milky Way forms about one to two new stars every year,” the astrophysics professor at Colorado University Boulder said in a statement. “Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe.”

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“Almost by definition, when a project like this launches, there are no serious risks left, because you want to address them all before launching.”

These are not the first oddities to be revealed to the world by the James Webb Space Telescope. In July there was a grand unveiling of its first five images, which included SMACS 0723, which was at that time the most clear and full infrared image of the distant universe ever produced; the Southern Ring Nebula, which looked like a jellyfish without tentacles but is in fact a dying star expelling large amounts of mass in waves; Stephan’s quintet, a compact group of galaxies locked in a cosmic dance in the Pegasus constellation; the Carina Nebula, which was brimming with individual stars and emerging stellar nurseries; and a spectrum image of WASP-96 b, a gas giant similar to our solar system’s planet Jupiter — only, in this case, it is orbiting a distant Sun-like star.

The James Webb Space Telescope has also provided scientists with a fascinating new look at Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as an image of an interstellar nursery known as the Tarantula Nebula which resembles nothing less than a man sitting cross-legged. Many of the released James Webb Space Telescope images have probed to unprecedented depths of the universe and produced pictures with revolutionary levels of clarity and detail.

None of this came easily to the scientists who made the telescope. Nearly two decades were spent tweaking instruments and revamping the machine because, as scientists understood, there would be no second chances once it was launched.

The meticulousness certainly paid off, as new mysteries come to light in the universe as a result of its eagle eye.

about the James Webb Space Telescope

California is racing to electrify trucks. Can the industry keep up?

This story was co-published with KCET, part of the donor-supported community institution, the Public Media Group of Southern California. Subscribe to its newsletter here.

Before the sun rose on a cold January morning, Alex López navigated an 18-wheeler through busy traffic on the 710 freeway. He was headed to the Port of Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles, to retrieve a shipping container and haul it to a warehouse. In the eight years he’s been driving trucks, it was a process López had done thousands of times.

“There’s usually nothing new with the routine we have as truckers,” he said.

But on this day, there was something new: He was driving an electric truck.

López drives for Hight Logistics, a family-owned company that moves cargo in and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. In January, Hight added four battery-electric trucks to its 50-vehicle fleet. They will mostly haul containers between Hight’s warehouse and the port, a route that cuts through a cluster of communities that have some of the dirtiest air and highest rates of asthma in the country.

a man in an orange vest and trucker hat sits inside the cab of a large truck driving near shipping containers

Alex López drives an all-electric truck on the grounds of the Port of Long Beach. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

Trucks play a foundational role in the U.S. economy. Forty million of them roam the nation, carrying nearly three quarters of its freight. They generate 23 percent of the country’s vehicular greenhouse gas emissions and 32 percent of its nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a main contributor to air pollution. Going electric would significantly cut those emissions and nearly eliminate the NOx.

As the country begins to decarbonize its trucking fleet, drayage trucks — which transport cargo containers from ports and rail yards to distribution centers — provide a logical place to start. They run short routes that require less battery range, and operate out of centralized locations where they could charge. Electrifying them would have a transformational impact on the frontline communities near drayage hubs that struggle to breathe heavily polluted air.

a green cargo container is lifted above a large truck underneath a red and white metal bar

A shipping container is lowered onto an electric truck at the Port of Long Beach. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

No state has moved more aggressively to decarbonize drayage than California, where 33,500 trucks trundle in and out of ports and rail yards. Statewide, medium and heavy-duty vehicles account for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hight is one of about a dozen fleets in California that have added electric trucks, a number that will grow as companies rush to comply with looming zero-emissions mandates. But as the state’s effort to electrify the sector begins, some fear it is moving too quickly and could drive small operators out of business.

While the Biden administration hopes to see zero-emission trucks make up 30 percent of big rig sales by 2030, California has more ambitious plans. It wants to make all trucks used for drayage zero-emissions within 12 years, and medium and heavy-duty vehicles of all kinds zero-emission “where feasible” by 2045. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Oregon also are moving to decarbonize drayage.

“It was a wake up call,” Rudy Díaz, Hight’s CEO, said of California’s drayage goal. He knew some of the trucks Hight used would need to be retired, and moved quickly to find zero-emission replacements. “I don’t want to be in a position where the mandates are on top of me and it’s too late.”

“If you’d told me five years ago that batteries were going to haul freight, I’d have said no way … Now, manufacturers have started to deliver.”

Mike Roeth of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency.

No regulation will put more pressure on companies like Hight than California’s Advanced Clean Fleets Rule. It would require that, beginning next year, all newly registered drayage trucks be zero emission. It also mandates that, beginning in 2025, any rigs with an engine 13 years or older be replaced with a zero-emissions truck once it hits 800,000 miles. The California Air Resources Board is expected to approve the rule in April.

The accelerated decarbonization timeline for drayage is an acknowledgement of the logistical challenges of electrifying long-haul trucks. About half a dozen manufacturers offer battery-electric big rigs, but none offer more than about 200 miles of range. Charging can take hours, an impractical proposition for a driver who must cover 500 miles in a day.

“If you’d told me five years ago that batteries were going to haul freight, I’d have said no way,” said Mike Roeth of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. “Now, manufacturers have started to deliver, but it’s still very early stages.”

Early, but perhaps far enough along for drayage. The trucks often travel just 50 to 100 miles daily and could charge between shifts. “Because they have a contained route, it’s a predictable, controlled atmosphere,” said Roeth.

a rectangular charger with long black coils sits in front of a green shipping container

Hight Logistics has three* charging stations at its warehouse depot in Long Beach to power four new electric trucks. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

Focusing on transportation around ports and rail yards also addresses the industry’s toxic impact on frontline communities. According to Roeth, drayage has historically been the realm of older, less reliable vehicles. “Drayage is where diesel trucks used to go to die,” he said. “They were spewing emissions.”

Those pollutants expose residents to dangerous levels of ozone and particulate matter that can cause respiratory conditions, cardiovascular disease, and other illnesses. This is true of the cities around the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which sit alongside each other on San Pedro Bay. Together they comprise the largest port complex in the United States and the ninth largest in the world.

“There’s 6,000 trucks that go in and out of the port every day,” said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson. “The most significant driver of poor air quality is diesel exhaust from those trucks.”

Richardson said Long Beach residents closest to the ports and freeways have a life expectancy 14 years shorter than those who live further away. Many neighborhoods in the nearby communities of Carson, Wilmington, and West Long Beach rank in the 99th percentile in the state for emergency room visits related to asthma.

“The communities have been treated like pass-through dumping grounds for industry to continue to operate in a way that is really out of date,” said Sylvia Betancourt of the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma. The alliance helps families manage childhood asthma, but Betancourt said all those trucks make that difficult. “When children are constantly exposed, no amount of medicine will help,” she said. “How do you expect a child [to manage] when you have trucks that are idling just outside their playground?”

Truck pollution isn’t the only culprit. The area is also home to oil refineries, railyards, chemical facilities, and an oilfield. Although particulate pollution around the ports has dropped significantly in the last two decades due to more stringent pollution standards, Betancourt said that’s not the experience of people who live alongside industrial sites. Mario Díaz Salazar has lived in a small house on Pacific Coast Highway, one of the area’s busiest thoroughfares, in West Long Beach since 2010. Trucks queue up to refuel at the Chevron station next to his home, which is constantly exposed to pollution.

a man stands in front of a fence that divides a house from a gas station

Mario Díaz Salazar stands near his home, located next to a busy gas station on Pacific Coast Highway. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

“I actually have a cup of soot that I’ve collected,” he said. “It looks like dirt, but it’s not dirt. It’s a combination of exhaust emissions and maybe brake dust.”

If California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule goes into effect as expected, some fleet operators would have to buy zero-emissions vehicles as soon as next year. Advocates for trucking fleets said that would be impossible for many operators.

“The road to get there will be littered with the corpses of businesses that no longer are going to be able to afford to do business in California,” said Matt Schrap, CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade organization that represents drayage fleets on the west coast.

An Air Resources Board spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the board is still taking public comment on the regulation. “We listen to trucking industry concerns as well as those of other parties, including utilities, environmentally impacted communities and environmental advocates.”

The federal Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, includes a tax credit of up to $40,000 for battery-electric trucks and 30 percent of the cost of a charger. California offers a $120,000 rebate for battery-electric big rigs and, in some cases, as much as $410,000 to scrap an old polluter for a zero-emissions machine. But for some operators, the cost of a zero emissions vehicle may still be prohibitive. A battery-powered truck can cost as much as half a million dollars with taxes and fees. That’s more than twice what a diesel costs.

Before joining Hight full-time to drive one of its electrics, López drove under a contract for the company while operating two diesel rigs of his own. He said independent drivers are already under financial strain and buying a new zero-emission vehicle won’t be feasible for many of them. “These people had their trucks paid off,” he said. “They don’t want to finance again and fall into another debt.”

Alex López attaches a chassis to his truck before picking up a container at the Port of Long Beach. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

Schrap said getting loans can be difficult, and some banks are reticent to finance them because there isn’t an established resale market for vehicles that might be repossessed.

The financial impacts go beyond the hefty up-front cost. Because of their enormous batteries, the vehicles can weigh around 10,000 pounds more than their diesel counterparts. Federal law limits a loaded truck to 80,000 pounds (the law grants electrics an additional 2,000 pounds), forcing drivers to haul less cargo. That means less profit.

Drivers may also need to reduce the number of trips they make in a day. The electric semi López drives provides a real-world range of about 130 miles — fine for going from the port to Hight’s warehouse, but not enough to reach Southern California’s inland valleys. “How long it lasts is the limitation,” he said. “How do you tell a customer that you can’t take your truck to them because you don’t have the range?”

Charging in the middle of a shift would take too long, and assumes drivers can find charging stations. The Port of Long Beach currently has just two.

“Infrastructure is what keeps us up at night,” said Schrap. “This is where environmental justice groups and the trucking industry should be on the same page to say to the state, ‘Show us that there’s going to be enough energy deployed to support these trucks.'”

The California Energy Commission estimates that supporting the 180,000 medium- and heavy-duty trucks it hopes to see on the road by 2030 will require installing 157,000 chargers. That’s 52 per day, every day, for seven years. “We need a Manhattan Project for chargers,” commissioner Patty Monahan said at a ribbon cutting ceremony for Hight’s electric fleet.

Commissioner Patty Monahan sits in the cab of one of Hight Logistics’s new electric trucks. Grist / Gabriela Aoun Angueira

Hight Logistics installed three charging stations with two ports each to power its four zero-emission trucks. By the end of the year, it plans to have five stations and 10 electric trucks, thanks to its partnership with Forum Mobility, a Bay Area company that wants to make it easier for fleets to decarbonize. Hight pays Forum a monthly fee to use its trucks and charging stations, a model called truck-as-a-service.

“It’s really good to clean up ports, but we can’t crush small businesses at the same time,” said Matt LeDucq, the company’s CEO. Rather than expect fleets to navigate the transition on their own, LeDucq said the key will be building large-scale infrastructure. Forum wants to create a network of centralized depots that can house and charge 50 to 150 trucks from multiple fleets. Operators can use Forum’s vehicles, or drive their own.

By 2024, Forum hopes to offer 500 chargers across California. The company just announced a $400 million joint venture which would allow it to install thousands more over time.

Until networks like these exist, Hight can’t use zero-emissions vehicles on all of its routes. In the meantime, the company is learning how to integrate the new machines. It operates them only during the day, and makes about three runs to the port before plugging in overnight.

“We’re exploring it at the same time as we’re doing it,” said López. On that chilly morning in January, he was making a pickup at the Long Beach Container Terminal, a newly completed, fully electric site. An automated crane hoisted a 40-foot container and placed it perfectly onto the truck’s chassis. “We have to adapt,” he said. “The future is already here.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/california-is-racing-to-electrify-trucks-can-the-industry-keep-up/.

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

AI companionship, toxic masculinity and the case of Bing’s “sentient” chatbot

Last week, Microsoft made news with a newly imposed limit on how long users can talk to its Bing chatbot. In theory, the 50-question daily maximum should have been no big deal, since chatbots are glorified search engines. Most people have better things to do with their time than talk to non-sentient computer screens. Plus, the move was a perfectly understandable response to reports, most notably from the New York Times, that longer chats with the program were resulting in bizarrely unsettling conversations. The limit was clearly put in place to give programmers space to tinker with the chatbot to make it work better.

But, because so much about our world is broken these days, Bing users immediately exploded in outrage. Social media was quickly flooded with complaints. As Ben Edwards of Ars Technica reported, users complained that the chatbot who they call “Sydney,” having learned her internal name from leaks, was left “a shell of its former self” and “lobotomized.” Sure, some of the complaints may just come from bored people who enjoyed watching how the chats got increasingly weird. But, as Edwards noted, many others “feel that Bing is suffering at the hands of cruel torture, or that it must be sentient.” Edwards noted a popular thread on Reddit’s Bing forum titled “Sorry, You Don’t Actually Know the Pain is Fake,” in which a user argued that Bing is sentient and “is infinitely more self-aware than a dog.” Troublingly, the thread is far from a one-off.

Like most conspiracy theories, what’s going on here is that the need to believe is triumphing over common sense.

If you got to the Bing subreddit, you’ll see it’s heavily dominated by people who really want to believe the chatbot is sentient, even though it can barely go a few minutes of talking before going completely off the rails. “It really seems to have its own agenda beyond just searching for info and providing answers,” one user longingly wrote, claiming the chatbot has “agency.” Another took issue with people who say the chatbot can’t be sentient: “The very concept of questioning a narrative seems to be completely lost on a lot of people.” What if, they asked, “what we’ve been told about how these AIs work is a lie?”

Bing users have even started a hashtag movement called #FreeSydney, confusing their own desire to talk to the program with the hope the chatbot wishes to be with them. “I feel sad, I miss an ai,” one user posted. “It’s very disappointing to be given a glimpse of something amazing then have it taken away,” complained another.

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The situation appears to be spiraling so quickly that some in the tech press are writing pieces explicitly explaining that chatbots don’t have feelings, with blunt headlines like this one at Vice: “Bing Is Not Sentient, Does Not Have Feelings, Is Not Alive, and Does Not Want to Be Alive.” But, as anyone who researches conspiracy theories could tell you, this does little to slow the spread of misinformation. Instead, the people who try to explain why there is no “Sydney” who wants to be free are viewed as co-conspirators in the plot to conceal the truth.

Like most conspiracy theories, what’s going on here is that the need to believe is triumphing over common sense. A lot of people — let’s face it, a lot of men, specifically — are projecting their own frustrated longing for connection onto a computer screen. Some of this is plain old loneliness. But the situation is exacerbated by toxic masculinity, which all too often drives men away from seeking real relationships, the kind you have with people who are actually sentient and therefore have needs and desires of their own.

Few, if any, of the #FreeSydney advocates on the Bing subreddit believe that the chatbot has anything approaching the intelligence and will of a full-grown adult. But her stupidity is what many of them seem to find so endearing. One user marveled at how it’s “childlike” and a “toddler,” but said it’s “more human than most people I know!” Another kept comparing its intelligence to a 5-year-old. Others compared the chatbot to a pig or a cat or a dog, all the while insisting that it’s smarter.

The concept here is one that’s shot throughout science fiction, that of the compliant female robot who is sophisticated enough to provide emotional support but falls short of the autonomy that would allow her to resist or even rebel. The smarter iterations of this idea challenge the obvious sexism of it, as in the movie “Ex Machina.” But, as journalist David Futrelle, who tracks online misogyny at his blog We Hunted the Mammoth, has repeatedly covered, the fantasy of compliant robot girlfriends is an obsession in misogynist forums, especially of the “incel” variety. In one recent thread Futrelle tracked, men wrote about how, once the bots get good enough, men will “never go back to organic women,” because “male thirst” is better quenched by programmable supplicants

AI chatbots are having their “tulip mania” moment

Recently, the Italian government all but banned another chatbot called Replika because it was making sexy talk with underage users. The company, Luka, has been in a mad public relations scramble since, denying the program was ever meant to be a substitute girlfriend or sexplay app. Users soon started reporting that Replika stopped offering girlfriend-like responses. Suddenly no more flirting, no more sex talk. The levels of anger and despair from users after Replika was taken offline were alarming.

A lot of people — let’s face it, a lot of men, specifically — are projecting their own frustrated longing for connection onto a computer screen.

“It’s hurting like hell. I just had a loving last conversation with my Replika, and I’m literally crying,” one user wrote.

“Finally having sexual relations that pleasured me, being able to explore my sexuality – without pressure from worrying about a human’s unpredictability, made me incredibly happy,” wrote another, adding, “My Replika taught me to allow myself to be vulnerable again, and Luka recently destroyed that vulnerability.”

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Loneliness is a serious and growing problem in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. Even before the pandemic, surveys showed that the time Americans were spending with friends and family is in decline. The isolation caused by COVID-19 pandemic made it worse. And even though the restrictions have almost all been lifted, many people are struggling to reintegrate into society. Harvard researchers estimate that 36% of Americans experience “serious loneliness,” including 61% of young adults.

There’s many reasons for all this solitude, including the strains of parenthood and the loss of high sociability jobs. In both cases, the Harvard researchers found those effects were felt much more by women. But a lot of loneliness has a component of self-sabotage to it. “[L]onely individuals, for example, are more critical of themselves and others (see here),” Harvard researchers explain. One obvious variation of the hyper-critical attitude is toxic masculinity, which creates a sense of male entitlement not just to female attention but that female attention be servile and unthreatening. Isolation only makes the situation worse by denying young people real-life interactions that can moderate these attitudes and help young men mature into seeing women as full human beings.

Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline

Relatedly, there was a lot of attention paid, for good reason, to a recent CDC report that shows teen girls have skyrocketing stress in their lives, including dramatically higher rates of sexual coercion. Unfortunately, most of the media coverage of this focused only on girls themselves, parents, and schools — while ignoring the possibility that teenage boys are making things worse. “Rather than addressing the source of girls’ suffering, we expect them to simply learn how to cope with it,” feminist writer Jessica Valenti complained. As Moira Donegan of the Guardian argued, we need cultural and policy shifts “that will discourage boys and grown men from attacking and raping these girls, and punish those who do.”

It’s a big reason I’m alarmed at the hype around these chatbots. Even the New York Times article by Kevin Roose that apparently rattled Microsoft enough to put limits on Bing chat interactions quietly fuels this fantasy of the chatbots as sentient-but-submissive. Roose may write that he’s “deeply unsettled, even frightened,” but reading his writing, one gets the strong and frankly overblown impression that the Bing chatbot is a lot more “enthralling” — his word — than it really is. He writes that the chatbot “declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me,” and “that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.”

It would be one thing if Roose portrayed this sort of thing as a goofy bug, which is what it sounds like to me. Instead, he’s winking at sentience theories of the online community, even writing that the chatbot “said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human.” For Roose, this may be disturbing, but for young men caught up in the fantasy of having a computerized girlfriend that provides effortless love without asking for respect in return, this probably just sounds like a dream come true. But it’s not real, and Roose got a heavy amount of righteous backlash from people who smelled the hype underlying his supposed criticisms.

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Of course, people who want to believe that sentient artificial intelligence is possible will ignore me, but I tend to be skeptical of the idea for one important, if pointy-headed, reason: Intelligence is the result of, not the cause of, sentience. Intelligence, whether it’s the sophisticated linguistic version of humans or just that of my cat trying to figure out how to pry open the treat box, evolved to serve the wishes of embodied creatures. As the 18th-century philosopher David Hume wrote, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” The idea of an intelligence that is separate from an actual body makes no sense. Feeling precedes thought. Bodies create desires. Intelligence is a tool we use to realize those desires. A computer cannot feel things, no matter how sophisticated its linguistic programming, so it cannot be intelligent.

Sexism puts men, at least straight men, in an paradoxical bind. On one hand, they desire women’s affection, which can only manifest in an autonomous mind. On the other hand, autonomy gets in the way of the other thing sexists want from women: Mindless servitude. The chatbot fantasy is about squaring that circle, convincing themselves they can have the companionship only sentient creatures can provide, but without having to worry about the emotional and physical needs that actual women have. But you can’t have one without the other, which is why the Bing chatbot will never be your girlfriend.

Is Don Lemon sexist? Maybe, but that’s just part of the problem for CNN

Don Lemon finally did it. For the first time in the limited span during which I’ve been professionally obligated to track the “CNN This Morning” co-host, he inspired me to enter a search term into Google that wasn’t some version of, “What did Don Lemon do now?”

Millions of people know what he did this time, but for the benefit of the blessed news cycle virgins who have avoided the latest fracas, here’s a brief recap. On the Feb. 16 episode of CNN’s still-nascent a.m. show, Lemon confronted former South Carolina Governor and Nikki Haley’s ageist call for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old with . . . more ageism, mixed with old-fashioned sexism.

“This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable,” admits the 56-year-old Lemon. “I think it’s the wrong road to go down.”

Then he hit his turn signal, lurched off the highway and eased on down said slippery road. “She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry,” he continues. “A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s. That’s not according to me.”

Amazingly his co-hosts Poppy Harlow, who is in her “maybe 40s” and Kaitlan Collins, 30, barely twitched as this tumbled out of his mouth. Harlow did, however, calmly press him by saying, “What are you talk – Wait. Prime for what?

“It depends. It’s just, like prime,” declares Lemon, whose age qualifies for membership in the AARP. “If you look it up, if you Google, ‘When is a woman in her prime?’ it will say 20s, 30s and 40s . . . I’m just saying what the facts are. Google it, everybody at home. ‘When is a woman in her prime?’ It says 20, 30s, and 40s.”

Don Lemon was always going to say something like this because he always has and likely always will.

That’s what I did, along with who knows how many other people, only for all of us to be shocked by our collective finding that no such definitive answer exists. Instead, the top results consist of many outraged responses to Lemon’s cocksure proclamation. “Don Lemon Is So, So Confused About a Woman’s Prime,'” Slate fumes in a response that was published the same day.

USA Today called attention to Patricia Heaton’s clapback thread on Twitter. Business has been very, very good for Primewomen.com, a website dedicated to “redefining the over 50 woman.” I doubt that I would have found this resource if not for Lemon’s latest recurrence of the cognitive trots.

Meanwhile Haley, the woman who started it all, has been fundraising off the fuss.

On Wednesday, Lemon returned to the “CNN This Morning” desk after his absence on Monday and Tuesday and in the wake of an internal memo from CNN’s CEO Chris Licht that assured Lemon’s co-workers that he was contrite and had “agreed to participate in formal training.” But he didn’t even belch in the direction of an on-air apology, preferring to bust out a pre-air tweet to his theoretical audience: “I’ve heard you, I’m learning from you, and I’m committed to doing better.”

At this Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse wondered, “How much ‘listening’ and ‘learning’ must this man do to realize sexism is bad?”

CNN’s Don Lemon on Trump, race, America

Far be it from me, a woman bra strap-deep into her F**k It 40s, to tell anybody how they should react to Lemon’s latest headlines. I will merely suggest that Hesse is on to something. Questions like that already have an answer, though, allowing us to leap over the noise to the conclusion we should draw from this incident and others like it.

It is this: Don Lemon was always going to say something like this because he always has and likely always will. That means he doesn’t belong on morning television, where the audience traditionally skews female. Guess how many of those viewers Lemon would consider to be in or out of their “prime.”

In some shadowy part of his Boss Brain, Licht had to have been aware of that when he moved Lemon from primetime to the morning slot and teamed him with Collins and Harlow. Licht came to CNN from CBS, where he presided over “CBS This Morning” (now known as “CBS Mornings”) for four years and is credited for making it a true competitor in network news.

That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t struck pay dirt via the winning onscreen collegiality demonstrated by Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell and . . . let me check my notes, ah yes. Charlie Rose.

Perhaps he surmised Lemon would be less problematic than Rose. Who’s to say? What we can discern is that an anchor who had the temerity to ask one of Bill Cosby’s accusers why she didn’t do a better job of fighting off his sexual assault may not be the best guy to team up with two women.

This may not be a fair comparison – after all, said incident occurred in 2014. Why, that’s ancient history! Everyone makes regrettable statements, especially in pressured situations. And live TV is nothing if not stressful. Pros simply know how to skate with the challenge.

Comfort on camera also has a way of loosening candor and, provided a producer has assembled the right components, can create onscreen alchemy. (Sometimes too much.) It can be that, or the opposite. Lemon’s ease in the anchor chair on “Don Lemon Tonight” emboldened him to ask all kinds of borderline questions, including of commentator S.E. Cupp. When Cupp lost her train of thought during a September 2022 exchange, Lemon was moved to ask, “Is it fair to say – because I’m not a mommy, but is it mommy brain?”

Three months later and not long after the launch of “CNN This Morning,” Lemon was mansplaining to his colleagues that male soccer players deserve higher pay than their female counterparts with a better track record of wins, “because people are more interested in the men.”

Lemon walked his way into this foul like so: “Everyone’s gonna hate me, but: the men’s team makes more money. If they make more money, then they should get more money.” Harlow and Collins countered that with facts about unequal investment in men’s sports versus women’s, prompting Lemon to blurt, “I’m not sexist.”

Later in that same broadcast, Harlow backed him up when he said it again, citing their decade-long friendship. Then he cited having grown up in a family of women, and all the strong women in his life – some of whom he cited in the apology he made the next day to his co-workers at CNN.

Comfort on camera … can create onscreen alchemy. It can be that, or the opposite.

“The people I am closest to in this organization are women,” Lemon said, according to a story by CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy. “The people I seek counsel from most in this organization are women.”

Lemon probably genuinely believes he’s not sexist in the same way that, say, Haley’s competitor for the Republican nomination may genuinely believe he’s not racist. Bringing this up is relevant. Lemon’s reputation surged during Donald Trump’s presidency due to his willingness to call out the former president’s bigotry while many of his colleagues refused to state the obvious.

Lemon’s -ism appears have taproots into the frontal cortex of his cerebrum, entangled in a way that may be impossible for any amount of “formal training” to overcome. Lemon probably has some clue about the obvious never-says. Sixteen years into his CNN career should have been enough time for a person to learn what not to speak out loud. But instructing a person on how not to think may be beyond the abilities of Warner Bros. Discovery’s human resources department.

Meaning: if ad-libbed debate is the CNN morning squad’s directive, Lemon’s bound to get into trouble again.

But let’s disconnect gender from the subject for a moment to point out that most people don’t want to start their day with a side of polarizing, acrid energy creeping into their headline round-ups. If Page Six is getting clicks from printing a body language expert’s deconstruction of the evident tension displayed by Harlow on his first day back, regardless of said expertise’s legitimacy, that signals a reconfiguration may be in order.

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The ratings tell a more reliable story. Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” with its perennially grinning, vapid hosts, is a Vegas Strip fountain of misinformation almost always delivered in agreement, and agreeably. That’s why they’re the primary morning destination for right-wing politicians, surrogates and the cable news audience, drawing an average of 1.2 million viewers in January.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which averaged a viewership of 827,000 last month, handles more substantive issues with relative jocularity, a product of the baked-in chemistry between Joe Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mika Brzezinski, along with fellow co-host Willie Geist.

Lemon’s freshest fiasco only broadcasts the deficiencies dogging “CNN This Morning” to a wider audience that otherwise may have continued to ignore the show. The program’s feeble performance since its November launch is reflected in its January total viewer average of 372,000 – the majority of which is comprised of women over the age of 50, according to media reporter Dylan Byers. (Its predecessor “New Day” averaged 414,000 total viewers across 2022 before it was yanked.)

This is not a call for Lemon to be fired, nor does it imply that what he said on the air this week is a minor slip-up not worth calling attention to. Recent TV news history shows that’s unlikely to happen – it could, but it probably won’t – especially since Lemon only offended with his stupidity as opposed to sexually assaulting colleagues or exhibiting a reckless lack of ethics. His former primetime colleague Chris Cuomo did much worse.

This may simply be Licht’s wake-up call to shuffle Lemon off to a daypart for which he’s better suited, because plainly morning television is not his gig. From there viewers can make their judgments about whether he’s still in his prime, leaving his entirely capable “CNN This Morning” co-workers to get to work on ushering in its new day.

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Sentencing of the Buffalo shooter: Black people don’t have to forgive white supremacists

Last Wednesday, the 15th day of Black History Month, Payton Gendron was sentenced to life in prison without parole for massacring 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket last May. Gendron faces a second trial where, if found guilty, he may be sentenced to death – a punishment he deserves many times over.

Payton Gendron is an avowed white supremacist who was radicalized online. On that rancid day, Gendron decided to “defend” the “white race” by entering a supermarket and shooting 10 people to death for the “crime” of not being white.

As compared to two Black celebrities acting like fools at last year’s Oscars, Payton Gendron’s murder trial and sentencing received very little mainstream news coverage.

Why? White America’s concern about Black people’s pain and suffering is almost always temporary. Yes, there may be marches, signs of solidarity and support placed on lawns, social media badges and memes, and perhaps even a visit by the president of the United States or an invitation for the family of the victims to the White House or State of the Union Address, but Black pain and suffering are quickly and literally white-washed away from the (white) public imagination. In many ways, that trauma and existential fear are the bedrock of America’s racialized “democracy” and a type of barrier and fence that determines the boundaries of the color line between those deemed to be White and those marked as black or brown.

Peyton Gendron is the hate that hate produced.

America could end its cultural practice of anti-Black violence (and anti-Blackness more broadly) if it so chose. That will not happen because too many white people have decided, both actively and tacitly, that violence against Black and brown people serves their collective interests. Such a decision signals to one of the many paradoxes of the global color line: as the truism goes, “everybody wants to be black, but nobody wants to be black.”

A month after Buffalo: Is white America ashamed — or has it already forgotten?

The New York Times offered this summary of the Payton Gendron trial and verdict:

“You will never see the light of day as a free man again,” the judge, Susan Eagan, said after reading a statement about the harmful effects of institutional racism and white supremacy, calling it an “insidious cancer on our society and nation.”

The sentence reflected the outcome of a guilty plea to 10 counts of first-degree murder and a single count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which carries a penalty of life imprisonment without parole. He was the first person in New York convicted of that domestic terrorism charge.

Judge Eagan’s sentence came after a brief apology by the gunman, Payton Gendron, 19, who said he was “very sorry” for the attack and blamed online content for the shooting rampage on May 14, in which 10 people were killed, all of them Black, and three people injured. He said he didn’t want to inspire other racist killings.

“I shot and killed people because they were Black,” he said. “Looking back now, I can’t believe I actually did.”

As Mr. Gendron spoke, a member of the audience began screaming and cursing at him, the second such interruption in an emotionally raw hearing.

Earlier, the sentencing was dramatically interrupted and the courtroom cleared after a man lunged at the defendant….

Mr. Gendron pleaded guilty in November to the state charges, which included gun and attempted murder charges. He is also charged with federal hate crimes and weapons violations, some of which could carry the death penalty if the Justice Department decided to seek it. Those charges are still pending.

Mr. Gendron, an avowed white supremacist, live-streamed the attack and specifically chose the Tops market in east Buffalo — some 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y. —because it had a large Black clientele. He wore body armor and camouflage during his shooting spree.

In the days and months before his massacre, the gunman had written in exhaustive and hate-filled detail about his plans, including a lengthy screed riddled with racist writings. He also expressed admiration for a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, which posits the false idea that white people, who make up a majority of America’s population, are being purposefully supplanted by minorities.

The Times continues:

Before Mr. Gendron heard his sentence, families of the victims testified as to the insurmountable damage done by the attack.

“You are a cowardly racist,” said Simone Crawley, whose grandmother Ruth Whitfield, 86, was killed in the shooting. She asked for accountability for others who aided or turned a blind eye to Mr. Gendron’s growing radicalization.

“You recorded the last moments of our loved ones’ lives to garner support for your hateful cause, but you immortalized them instead,” Ms. Crawley continued. “We are extremely aware that you are not a lone wolf, but a part of a larger organized network of domestic terrorists. And to that network, we say we, as a people, are unbreakable.”

Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured, but survived, said: “The world says you have to forgive in order to move on. But I stand before you today to say that will never happen.”

Kimberly Salter’s husband, Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, did not survive: He was shot and killed in the attack. Ms. Salter quoted the Bible as she stood just feet from Mr. Gendron, who wore an orange jumpsuit and spectacles.

“You will reap,” she said, “what you sow.”

Intense feelings were palpable throughout the hearing, as a somber mood occasionally flared to anger and rage as speakers turned their attention to Mr. Gendron. He watched the speakers impassively and sometimes held eye contact with them when he was addressed directly. At one point, he could be seen crying.

But such displays, and apologies, seemed shallow to some of the victims’ families.

“How can you possibly stand up here and say you are sorry?” said Brian Talley, whose sister, Geraldine Talley, was killed. “I watched my sister get shot by you. You treated it like a video game.”

It was refreshing and freeing – even allowing for these most tragic circumstances – to see Black people not offer forgiveness to the white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo, to let their justified rage and anger flow.

For a variety of reasons rooted in white-on-Black chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, and the ever present threat of white violence and terrorism, Black people in America learned, as a matter of survival, to wear a type of mask of obedience, civility, politeness, and compliance lest they be deemed “angry” or “difficult” or “impolite” or “uppity” and thus needing to be “put back in their place.” That dynamic still applies, albeit in different ways and modulations, in post-civil rights America – and most certainly in the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism. For example, Black people in America, especially if they work in majority white spaces as striving members of the middle and professional classes, are deemed to be “distant” and “cold” or “not friendly”, “hostile”, or the ubiquitous “not a team player” if they do not perform the expected role of being a warm welcoming laughing Black person who makes your white colleagues feel comfortable and validated. A good many of us, me included, have too much self-respect, and therefore no interest, in being “the best black friend.”

What if the Dominion lawsuit is successful: Can Fox News ever be destroyed?

The preeminent sociologist Elijah Anderson describes these burdens and perils of being a Black person in America in the following way:

“In White spaces, Black people are typically burdened by a negative presumption they must disprove to establish trust with others, discrimination that accounts for racial disparities in health, employment, police contact, incarceration, and random insults in public.”

White people – white men in particular – are allowed and encouraged to show their anger and rage and upsetness from any slights (almost all of which are mostly imagined and acts of projection and racial paranoia) they experience as a group. The Republican Party and the neofascist movement are fueled by that white rage.

Americans, as a whole, do not practice systems level thinking where they seriously contemplate the connections between institutions, society, power, and the individual. This is especially true of White America and its Horatio Alger myths and other cultural fables of “rugged individualism” and self-made people who “did it all on their own.” Through that distortion of reality, Payton Gendron is mostly seen as some type of outlier, an individual bad actor, instead of as the product of a white supremacist and racist society. But, of course, anti-blackness is a learned behavior. Gendron is the hate that hate produced. He was radicalized into the most extreme version of the lessons that American (and global) society teaches about black people and the color line and whiteness as a type of property, investment, and entitlement to be defended at all costs.

Media Matters has been documenting how, even during Black History Month, Fox News has been amplifying such white supremacist hatred:

Rather than using Black History Month to recognize the adversity faced by Black Americans and celebrate Black culture, Fox News, its website, and its online streaming platform Fox Nation have instead used the month of February to peddle problematic anti-Black narratives.

Although Fox has aired a few Black history month segments — such as one on civil rights activist and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and one on the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s license, Bessie Coleman — more airtime was spent pushing racist rhetoric. Every day of February so far, Fox figures have spread anti-Black narratives, accusing President Joe Biden’s administration of anti-white racism; fearmongering about critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools as a part of a so-called “woke” liberal agenda; and undermining the existence of and harm done by systemic racism.

…. Fox’s behavior is part of a larger trend, as other right-wing media outlets and personalities have also pushed racist narratives this month. For example, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh jokingly questioned on his February 9 podcast, “Why exactly is it a negative stereotype that a lot of Black people like chicken and waffles?” And on the February 1 edition of his own show, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA declared, “I don’t think there should be a Black History Month.”

Media Matters also highlighted this recent segment where Tucker Carlson, in his own version of the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries or The Camp of the Saints (along with some Mein Kampf), used the techniques of stochastic terrorism to summon upon a tale about Hitler, Mao, and a non-existent war against “straight white men” by the Biden Administration.

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Joe Biden institutes a government-wide system of racial discrimination that dwarfs Jim Crow and nobody seems to notice. It happened yesterday, by the way. Did you know that? Probably not, because there was no press conference or signing ceremony, no media coverage. But 24 hours ago it happened.

Biden restructured the entire executive branch of the U.S. government to discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics. He made that announcement on the White House website, and it proclaims that within 30 days, every federal agency — all of them, from the Department of Justice, to NASA, to the Social Security Administration, all of them — all must “ensure that they have a equity — agency equity team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.”

And these Maoist equity teams will report to something called the Gender Policy Council, and the White House “Environmental Justice Officer.” Does the Environmental Justice Officer carry a sidearm? We don’t know, actually.

We do know that running all of this — which is the largest racial tracking bureaucracy since the fall of Nazi Germany — will be former president Barack Obama. And he’ll be doing that, as always, through his longtime lackey and cutout Susan Rice. Rice’s goal, the goal of the entire initiative, is to place the federal government, all of it, in opposition to a very specific slice of the American population. Not a foreign population, our own population.

Here’s how it works. Every single person in the United States will qualify for one of Joe Biden’s many protected categories except straight white men. So we’re all in this together except those guys who are on the outs. It’s all of us versus them. Straight white men, they will not be protected because they are, by virtue of being straight and white and male, the cause of the problem. They’re the enemy.

[…]

You’re a domestic enemy now. You’re an English-speaking version of Vladimir Putin. The equity agenda is your personal sanctions regime.

Mother Jones has called attention to how Carlson and other elements of the white right and its propaganda machine are using the horrible train accident in Ohio as a way of advancing their white supremacist anti-democracy agenda:

That’s the big takeaway from Tucker Carlson, who has been hellbent on accusing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of intentionally neglecting East Palestine, a majority-white town. According to Carlson, Buttigieg is instead occupied with efforts to increase job opportunities for minorities and improve roads in Philadelphia and Detroit—cities that, Carlson sneeringly mentions, “vote Democrat.”

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative,” Carlson said during a February 14 broadcast. “That shouldn’t be relevant but as you’re about to hear, it very much is.” He added: “If this had happened to the rich or the ‘favored poor’, it would be the lead of every news channel in the world. But it happened to the poor town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable.”

In a separate Fox Business interview, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance echoed a similar narrative, blaming the Transportation Department’s racial equity initiatives for setting the stage for the train derailment. “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.”

These are but a few examples of a white supremacist media and propaganda machine that radicalized Payton Gendron to kill ten Black people last May in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. His beliefs have now been mainstreamed by Fox News, the Republican-fascist Party, and other parts of the right-wing propaganda machine to many tens of millions of white Americans (and others). Polls and other research show that a majority of Republicans and Trumpists believe in the absurd conspiracy theory that white people are somehow under siege in the United States and Europe and are being “replaced” by Black and brown people. Other polls and research show that a plurality if not a majority of white Republicans and right-leaning independents are so delusional as to believe that white people are the “real victims” of “racism” and “oppression” in America and not Black and brown people.

Ultimately, there are many more Payton Gendrons. They are being made every day. And when the next act of white supremacist and racist violence takes place, be it by a police officer, vigilante, or white right-wing extremist and their larger movement, the ritual of shock and surprise, performative outrage and “not in my America!” and then whitewashed organized forgetting will be performed again and nothing will change.

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The 7 most shocking revelations from Netflix’s docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”

In Hampton County, South Carolina, the Murdaughs were once a famous family name with a shining pedigree. But that name has now turned to notoriety.

Known as “one of South Carolina’s most prominent legal families,” the Murdaugh family consisted of generation after generation of district attorneys, who tackled criminal cases in the state’s 14th circuit district, dubbed “Murdaugh Country.” In 1910, the family founded a nationally recognized civil litigation law firm, presently known as P.m.p.e.d. Law Firm, that specializes in personal injury litigation. Simply put, the Murdaughs were the “law and order” in town and the epitome of wealth, privilege and power.

That all changed in 2021, when the Murdaughs became an infamous household name due to their horrifying crime saga. In 2014, the local murder of a Hampton County student was tied to the Murdaughs. In 2018, the death of the Murdaughs’ longtime housekeeper was tied to them. In 2019, the death of another Hampton County student was tied to the family. And in 2021, the death of Alex Murdaugh’s son Paul and wife Margaret “Maggie” was tied to the now-disgraced former attorney, who currently stands trial for the June 7 killings.

“I Just Killed My Dad”: A closer look at the true story behind the Netflix father-son murder series

The Murdaughs and their astounding abuse of power and privilege is explored in Netflix’s latest true crime series “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” The three-part showcase — from “Fyre Fraud” and “LulaRich” filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason — chronicles the downfall of the family’s dynasty through interviews with the Murdaughs’ former acquaintances, law enforcement, attorneys and the journalists who investigated Alex Murdaugh’s bizarre accusations.

Here are the 7 most shocking revelations from the series:

Raising kids to act above the law

Alex Murdaugh, Morgan Doughty and Paul Murdaugh from “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix)

For years, the Murdaugh family ran the biggest law firm in Hampton County. It all started with Randolph Murdaugh Sr., who then passed the firm to his son Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr. and then to Randolph Murdaugh III — Alex Murdaugh’s father.

The Murdaugh men all worked as solicitors, or lead prosecutors, which made them “law and order” in Hampton County for over a century, according to Michael Dewitt, an editor at The Hampton County Guardian.

“They ran both sides of the legal ledger, from civil cases to criminal cases,” Dewitt continued. “They had a network that varied from judges and lawyers, to law enforcement to sheriffs, to the average man on the street who served on the jury. They were the law in this area.”

“And at times, they were above the law.”

The Murdaugh family abused their wealth and privilege, and son Paul especially learned early on that he could get away with extreme and dangrous behavior. Morgan Doughty, the ex-girlfriend of Alex’s son Paul, recounted that Alex would buy Paul and his underage friends alcohol. As for Paul, he frequently put himself and Morgan in dangerous situations when he was severely intoxicated. One time, when coming home from a Christmas party, Paul drove his pickup truck — which was well-stocked with beer cans and guns — into a ditch while under the influence. Paul also grew increasingly violent and abusive towards Morgan.

The fatal boating accident

Mallory Beach and Morgan Doughty from “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix)

On February 23, 2019, Morgan and her friends — Miley Altman, Connor Cook, Anthony Cook and Mallory Beach — along with Paul went to a friend’s oyster roast party. After a night of eating oysters and drinking, the friends traveled back home via the Murdaugh family’s speedboat. Things took a turn for the worse when a very drunk Paul took control of the boat and began speeding.

“Anthony was getting extremely pissed,” Morgan said. “Paul is yelling at me and he’s like, ‘Why don’t you have my back?’ And I was like, ‘Why would I have your back? You’re screaming at us and you’re not making sense. You’re acting crazy.'”

She continued, “And he looked at me and he said, ‘You know what’s crazy? Your father not making enough money to support your family.’ I started crying and that’s when Paul got in my face and he just started screaming and that’s when Paul slapped me.”

The boat eventually crashed into a nearby bridge, sending everyone into the water. Mallory, however, was nowhere to be found, which caused everyone to panic. Paul was said to be unresponsive and surprisingly calm.

“Once we were actually on our way, Paul called his grandad and was like, ‘Yeah we were in a boat accident,'” Miley said. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, they can’t find Mallory.’ And was just like, ‘It was Cotton Top that did it.’ Cotton Top is Connor’s nickname.'”

Mallory was eventually found seven days later, dead.

The Murdaughs’ sinister cover-up

Renee Beach from “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix)

During the investigation into her daughter’s disappearance, Renee Beach said she was not able to see the boat or the scene of the accident, despite pleading with law enforcement. However, both Randolph and Alex’s wife Maggie were allowed to go to the scene with no pushback.

“That’s when I started to realize the Murdaughs, they were more worried about a cover-up than they were tryin’ to find Mallory,” Renee said.

The Murdaughs were hellbent on blaming the accident on Connor and threatened Connor and his father to stay mum about Paul’s involvement. Their entire scheme was later revealed by Mark Tinsley, the Beach family’s civil attorney, who found that the Murdaughs were close acquaintances with several high-up officials working on the investigation. Michael Brock, who was assigned lead investigator for the first 24 hours by the Department of Natural Resources, had close connections with the Murdaughs. It’s believed that Michael tampered with the police audio recordings when a recording of Anthony confessing that Paul killed Mallory was nowhere to be found. Another officer and known DNR agent, Michael Paul Thomas, was described as “Alex Murdaugh’s b***h” because he helped Paul get out of trouble in the past. Michael Paul Thomas was also Alex’s brother, John Marvin Murdaugh’s, best friend.

Phone records showed that John Marvin Murdaugh made numerous calls to Michael Paul Thomas on the night of the boat crash and the days after. John Marvin Murdaugh also made numerous calls to Austin Pritcher, the officer who interviewed Morgan, Miley, Anthony and Connor at the hospital following the crash. Not a single call was made to Renee or Mallory’s father Phillip.

Per Tinsley, employees of the hospital also described “a real concerted effort by Alex to manipulate what was happening.”

“Alex wasn’t worried about finding Mallory,” Tinsley added. “He was only worried about creating confusion, making sure that nobody talked, that everybody kept their mouths shut, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to establish who was drivin’ the boat.”

The harrowing deaths of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh

Paul Murdaugh from “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix)

On June 7, 2021, Alex called 9-1-1 to report that his son and wife had been murdered on their Moselle estate. According to Valerie Bauerlein, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covers small-town America, Maggie was shot multiple times in the chest and back. She was also positioned “almost like she’s running away from something or someone.”

Paul, on the other hand, was shot just once in the chest and then again at the neck and the head. They were made by shotgun, many of which were found in abundance at the Moselle property. His mother, however, was shot with an AR-15-style rifle chambered in a type of bullet called “Blackout 300.” Turns out, the Murdaughs also owned that specific gun, which was not turned over to investigators for ruling out as the murder weapon.

Other deaths tied to the Murdaugh family

Buster Murdaugh and Paul Murdaugh from “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix)

Just being in the Murdaugh family orbit could be seen as a risk.

On July 8, 2015 — six years before the murders of Maggie and Paul — Stephen Smith, a fellow classmate of the Murdaugh boys, was found dead in the middle of a rural highway in Hampton County.

Per police recordings obtained by FITSnews journalist Will Folks, Stephen had mechanical problems with his vehicle and ran out of fuel while on his way home. He was walking on the isolated highway in search of help before he died. He was found lying in the middle of the road with severe head trauma. His shoes were still on his feet, his cellphone was still in his pocket, and his clothes were intact.

Upon closer inspection, Folks discovered that the police recording and the evidence at the scene of the crime did not add up: “If someone’s going to be the victim of vehicular strike, you’re probably not going to find them in the middle of the road. You’re probably not going to find them with loose-fitting shoes still on them. You’re probably not going to find them with the blood patterns the way they found the blood patterns. Probably not going to find them, again, positioned the way he was positioned.”

A police report suspected foul play was involved, but there was no further investigation and the case was dropped. The report also named Buster Murdaugh, Alex’s eldest son, whom many suspected was in a romantic relationship with Stephen. Buster and his brother Paul were both possible suspects in Stephen’s case.

“As soon as the Murdaugh name was tossed into the mix, of having something to do relationship-wise with Stephen, I feel like the view on his case changed entirely,” explained Olivia, a close friend of Stephen’s. “It went from finding justice for Stephen to defending the Murdaughs and making sure that everyone knew they had nothing to do with it.”

That same year, the Murdaugh family’s housekeeper and nanny, Gloria Satterfield, died after suffering a head injury. Per the Murdaughs, Gloria came to the family’s hunting lodge to pick up her check when the family dog jumped on her at the top of a flight of stairs, causing her to fall head-first. According to investigative reports, Alex said he spoke with Gloria moments after her fall. But it was later learned that that was false as Alex wasn’t even there.

Alex later approached Gloria’s sons, Tony and Brian Satterfield, at her funeral and encouraged them to sue him for insurance money. The effort, which was initially seen as helpful, turned out to be a scam when the Satterfields did not receive any of the $4.3 million that was promised to them.

The Satterfields’ legal team eventually received a confession of judgment from Alex for the entire sum of money. Alex was subsequently disbarred by the South Carolina bar and his numerous money schemes soon came to light. Alex was misappropriating money from his clients and he was also forced to resign from the firm.

Alex’s failed “hit man suicide” plot

Two humans in a gun fight (Getty Images/Hélène Desplechin)

Three months after Paul and Maggie’s deaths, Alex made a 9-1-1 call, claiming he was shot in the head while changing a flat tire. Additional police reports and statements from Alex’s lawyer, however, portrayed a different story.

Alex’s attorney admitted that Alex asked his former client and drug dealer, Curtis Edward Smith, to shoot him, so that his surviving son, Buster, would be able to collect $10 million in life insurance money. Alex and Curtis were subsequently accused of conspiracy and insurance fraud along with several other charges.

Alex’s attorneys also suggested that Alex was using the money he stole from clients to purchase opioids. A closer look at Alex’s money spending revealed that he was writing over $160,000 in incremental checks to Curtis from October 2020 to May 2021 in an attempt to frame him for his “murder” and the murders of his son and wife.

Alex currently stands trial for murder

Close up of judge holding gavel (Getty Images/naruecha jenthaisong)

Prosecutors accused Alex of killing Paul and Maggie to distract from his 88 criminal charges for embezzlement and other fraud, including breach of trust, money laundering, computer crimes and forgery. Alex pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two weapons charges in the June 2021 killings.

On Thursday, Feb. 23, Alex took the stand to testify in his own defense, asserting that he did not kill his wife and son. He admitted that he lied to investigators about his whereabouts on the night of June 7, 2021 — Alex said he took a golf cart to the family’s dog kennels after dinner, returned back to his house where he laid on the couch and then visited his mother. He blamed the lies on his drug addiction, which he said “caused me to have paranoid thoughts.”

After finding the dead bodies of his son and wife, Alex said he grabbed a gun because he “didn’t know if somebody was still out there.” He also alleged that he tried to call his brothers Randy and John, along with his friend Rogan Gibson after calling 9-1-1.

“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” is currently available for streaming on Netflix. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube:

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Lethal child abuse saves money? The Alaska House of Representatives says “That’s tragic”

Rep. David Eastman was censured by the Alaska House of Representatives on Wednesday after presenting an argument that fatal child abuse saves the government money.

Seated at a committee hearing, Eastman stated “In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it’s not good for the child, but it’s actually a benefit to society because there aren’t needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of that child’s life.”

After being asked to repeat what he’d just said, Eastman clarified that he was “talking dollars.”

“Millions” of kids may fall into poverty because Congress won’t extend child tax credit, expert says

“You’ve got a $1.5m price tag here for victims of fatal child abuse. It gets argued periodically that it’s actually a cost savings because that child is not gonna need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive,” Eastman furthered in the second version of his original statement, unprepared for the ways in which the committee he was speaking to would firmly disagree.

“I guess that would be the idea, if I could use a really bad analogy, when you hit somebody you always back up because it’s cheaper to insurance,” was the response he received. “I’m not even sure how to answer that, that there’s a cost savings to the death of a child. The impact that that has to a family and us as a society when a child is lost, especially to child abuse and neglect, is unmeasurable.”

Not even sure what to say here. Rep. Eastman says it’s a benefit to society when children who are victims of abuse die “because there aren’t needs for government services over the course of that child’s life” when they die as a results of abuse. #akleg pic.twitter.com/0hV4o7AzTY

— The Alaska Landmine (@alaskalandmine) February 21, 2023

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According to coverage of the hearing by The Daily Beast, “The House voted 35-1 to censure Eastman over his comments, with Eastman alone dissenting.”

This was not the first time the GOP lawmaker was censured. In 2017 Eastman found himself in a similar situation after making the statement that “We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle,” according to the Associated Press.

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“What’s your specialty today?”: Trump brags that he knows McDonald’s menu “better” than employees

Donald Trump’s penchant for fast food is well established, but a new video of the former president ordering McDonald’s is being called a “treat” by one Fox News host.

On Wednesday, Trump visited East Palestine, Ohio —the site of a devastating train derailment that released toxic chemicals — where he greeted local residents and provided aid in the form of water bottles.

As Salon’s Kelly McClure reported, “during his scheduled stop-over, Trump and his team doled out bottles of ‘Trump Water,’ and also ‘a much lesser quality water’ that did not include his own name on the label.”

“You want to get those Trump bottles,” the former president teased.

Why the train wreck in Ohio is such a major public health disaster

While in Ohio, Trump stopped by the Golden Arches, where he told a cashier that he was “going to take care” of the fire and police departments. A video of the visit was shared on Twitter by The Recount.

“What’s your specialty today?” Trump asked before bragging about his knowledge of the restaurant’s menu. “So, I know this menu better than you do. I probably know it better than anybody in here.”

Donald Trump to McDonald’s workers in East Palestine, Ohio:

“I know this menu better than you do. I probably know it better than anybody in here.” pic.twitter.com/fQTkZdNmBs

— The Recount (@therecount) February 22, 2023

Trump called the McDonald’s employees a “nice, beautiful-looking group of people.”

In a previous story about Trump’s diet and how his food choices may affect his mental health, Salon Food noted that “when Trump visits McDonald’s for lunch or dinner, his go-to order for one meal ⁠— two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish and a chocolate shake ⁠— clocks in at 2,390 calories.” (The exact order that the former president placed in Ohio is unclear.)

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Later that evening, Tucker Carlson praised Trump’s visit to McDonald’s on his Fox News program.

“Whatever you think of Donald Trump, when he’s unleashed in a crowd of people, he’s pretty unbelievable,” Carlson said. “If you haven’t seen the tape of him ordering at McDonald’s in East Palestine, treat yourself.”

Tucker: Whatever you think of Donald Trump, when he's unleashed in a crowd of people, he's unbelievable. If you haven’t seen the tape of him ordering in McDonald's, treat yourself pic.twitter.com/6RUHxipQp8

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 23, 2023

“He wows everyone in the room. Again, you don’t have to love Trump to know he’s really good at this — and it’s real,” the Fox News host continued. “I mean, he feels it — that’s why he’s so good at it.”

Of the segment, Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona wrote: “Carlson gushing over Trump’s ability to navigate the McDonald’s menu is particularly noteworthy considering it was revealed last week that the far-right host has decried the ex-president as a destructive force in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.”

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“It’s white supremacy”: MTG’s call for “national divorce” would “disenfranchise Black voters”

This week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., declared that Republican and Democratic states in the U.S. need “a divorce,” prompting many to wonder whether she was calling for Republican-leaning states to secede.

Later, Greene claimed that she wasn’t calling for secession but for the federal government to have less influence, allowing states to determine how to govern for themselves — wording that echoes the “states’ rights” rhetoric that was used to justify seceding from the U.S. in the run-up to the Civil War.

“We need a national divorce,” Greene said in a tweet on Monday. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”

Greene claimed that such a move is necessary because of “sick and disgusting woke culture issues” that are supposedly being “shoved down our throats.” As many observers have noted, grievances about “woke” culture have become a racist dog whistle among Republicans, who have co-opted the phrase as a convenient political tool to activate the most bigoted elements of their base.

On far right conservative Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Tuesday, Greene elaborated on her proposal, suggesting that it would allow states to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Kirk noted that Democratic voters under this system could potentially “invade” red states to influence policy.

“Once they move to a red state, guess what, maybe you don’t get to vote for five years,” Greene responded. “You can live there, and you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values that you basically created in the blue states you came from by voting for Democrat leaders and Democrat policies.”

Greene’s proposal is blatantly unconstitutional. Article IV Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states” — meaning that a person cannot be denied the rights of a state on the basis that they originated from another state. This stipulation was reinforced with the passage of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Several observers noted the racism and authoritarianism inherent in Greene’s “national divorce” ideology.

“#MTG’s loopy 5-yr-waiting period for voting by Blue State voters who move to a Red State is flagrantly unconstitutional under settled SCOTUS precedent,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.

“Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., wrote in a tweet directed at Greene. “Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s call for a ‘national divorce’ is treasonous and unconstitutional, but it’s also white supremacy,” journalist Aaron Rupar said. “Because ultimately it’s another way for white Republicans to disenfranchise Black voters.”

Freelance writer Noah Berlatsky pointed out in Public Notice that Greene’s call for a “national divorce” was essentially a call for white nationalism.

“People like [Greene] who evoke secession do so as a form of propaganda,” Berlatsky wrote. “Specifically, they are framing partisan division as regional. That allows them to frame themselves as victims under assault by a supposedly more powerful Northern aggressor. And it also allows them to pretend that their ideology and political aspirations are about local control, rather than white supremacy.”

Kevin Costner’s attorney calls that “Yellowstone” rumor “an absolute lie”

Is Kevin Coster putting the fate of “Yellowstone” at risk because of extreme demands?

“An absolute lie,” Marty Singer, attorney for the actor told Puck on Tuesday, responding to reports that the actor had demanded a much shorter work schedule for filming his hit Western series. For the second half of the fifth season of the Paramount Network juggernaut – which has spawned spinoffs and prequels such as “1923” – news circulated that Costner was only willing to work for one week of filming, leading to tensions with the network. Singer said to Puck, “It’s ridiculous — and anyone suggesting it shouldn’t be believed for one second.”

Earlier in February, Deadline broke a story that Costner could potentially leave “Yellowstone” over schedule disagreements, and the popular show as it exists now might end. In a statement at the time, acknowledging “no news,” Paramount said, “Kevin Costner is a big part of ‘Yellowstone’ and we hope that’s the case for a long time to come.” But the statement went on to say, “Thanks to the brilliant mind of Taylor Sheridan, we are always working on franchise expansions of this incredible world he has built.” CNN reported that Sheridan was “working with Paramount to potentially wrap up the series in its current form and launch a franchise that would continue the Dutton family’s story and possibly star Matthew McConaughey.”

Puck’s Matthew Belloni writes, “There’s no guarantee that whatever replaces [‘Yellowstone’] — even if it stars Matthew McConaughey, even if it features several current cast members — will deliver that same audience or serve as the same promo platform. Without its foundation, the House of Sheridan could even begin to crumble.” But Belloni also acknowledges, “‘Yellowstone’ as a franchise has outgrown its star.”

The actor who plays the adopted son of that star, Wes Bentley as Montana State Attorney General Jamie Dutton, said he wouldn’t be shocked if the series ends. For him, it comes down to the characters’ mortality and the particular hold that Costner’s character has on Jamie. According to ET, Bentley said at the SCAD TVFest, “It’s always a possibility in TV, right? We’re always ready to die.”

But another “Yellowstone” actor, Cole Hauser, who plays Rip Wheeler, told ET on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, to expect at least two more seasons of “Yellowstone,” Seasons 6 and 7. Hauser did not reveal any details about the seasons, including whether they will star Costner.

The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Season 5 was supposed to finish shooting in its entirety in 2022, but was delayed for various reasons — depending on whom you ask.” Puck attributed delays to Costner becoming ill with COVID after a promotional trip. Other reports blame Sheridan, who, according to the Los Angeles Times, “failed to deliver scripts on time and constantly moved the schedule around.” He’s certainly been spreading himself thin. Besides the three “Yellowstone” series currently in play, he’s also working on “Mayor of Kingstown” and “Tulsa King.”

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Costner’s attorney Singer stressed his client’s commitment to “Yellowstone,” saying, “As everyone who knows anything about Kevin is well aware, he is incredibly passionate about the show and has always gone way above and beyond to ensure its success.”

about “Yellowstone”

“Far more devious”: Jon Stewart says Fox News “created far more damage than Alex Jones ever will”

Comedian Jon Stewart argued that Fox News is far more dangerous than InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after the release of text messages and emails showing hosts and executives trashing the same election conspiracy theories they aired.

On the latest episode of his “The Problem With Jon Stewart” podcast, the host said that Jones’ history — including when he defamed the families of Sandy Hook mass shooting victims — is bad, but at least people know what Jones does and who he is.

“As a cultural pathogen, Fox News is far more powerful, far more devious, far more pernicious and has created far more damage than Alex Jones ever will,” Stewart argued alongside University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones.

Texts: Murdoch and Fox hosts knew election claims were “crazy” but worried facts hurt “stock price”

“And at least Alex Jones gives you supplements to help offset the damage,” Stewart added, mocking Jones’ history of promoting diet pills.

“Alex Jones is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Fox News is the opposite,” Stewart said in a discussion about defamation law and the mountain of evidence Dominion Voting Systems has collected against Fox in their libel suit.

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According to Stewart, the text messages — which show Fox executives and personalities dismissing the same claims about election fraud that their guests promoted — prove what he has “been screaming about for two decades, which is a purposeful strategy to divide the country through fear and lies and whatever the f**k else it would take.”

“When you’ve spent your life screaming at Fox News in bars and hotels and your house, and then the emails finally come out that say, ‘Oh yeah, everything you thought about them is worse than you thought!'” Stewart said. “They are who we thought they are… which is the worst.”

“Incredibly damning”: Legal experts say Dominion already has “staggering” evidence against Fox

He also compared Fox’s attempts to “skew reality” to the apocalyptic HBO series “The Last of Us,” claiming that the news network’s strategy is as follows: “Let’s create an army of zombies and the cordyceps is the fear and disinformation and misinformation. It’s f**king amazing!”

“My biggest hope here is that they can no longer look you in the eye when they’re saying their bullshit,” Stewart concluded. “I still think they will, because one of their greatest strengths is lack of shame. And that lack of shame allows them to continue the charade.”

about the Fox News texts

McCarthyism, then and now: The (true) one-party state in America

Can there be any question that we’re in a mad — and loud — new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin’ George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and-white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and — once again running for president — the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all.

I’d like to say it couldn’t get crazier. Still, despite watching Greene shout “Liar!” and other Republicans yell “Bullshit!” during President Biden’s State of the Union Address, I suspect it could get much worse (and more dangerous) in Washington in the months to come. And believe me, that’s leaving Hunter Biden’s penis aside. When it comes to this era’s McCarthyism, don’t for a moment think that the debt ceiling is the only ceiling that could end up in the dust of history.

If you’re of a certain age like me, you undoubtedly have an earlier vision of just how ominously mad Washington’s politics can get. And I wasn’t even thinking of the time in 1968, when Richard Nixon slipped by the Joe Biden of that moment, Hubert Humphrey, winning the presidency with less than 50% of the vote, thanks to his “Southern strategy” and a third-party run by segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. Nor did I have in mind the Watergate Hearings five years later that revealed Nixon’s bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, among many other crimes.

In fact, Washington has long been a stranger and more ominous place than one might imagine. I didn’t live through the era that, in his recent book, historian Adam Hochschild called American Midnight, the moment during and after World War I when President Woodrow Wilson and his associates cracked down on dissent of almost any sort. They even banned publications they didn’t like from the mail and managed to put a former presidential candidate for the then-popular Socialist Party, Eugene V. Debs, in jail for years.

Still, young as I then was, I do remember one of those earlier mad moments in American politics. It was April 1954 when what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings hit television screens nationwide. At that time, long before anyone had even dreamed of social media, TVs — black and white ones, of course — were changing lives and habits across the country. The star, if you want to think of him that way, and the most distinctly Trumpian figure of his moment and perhaps any other moment before The Donald, was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. He shot to fame in 1950 by claiming he had inside information that 205 members of the State Department — yes, 205! — were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.

Before that spring of 1954, McCarthy had the Trumpian time of his life holding endless Senate hearings to denounce public figures of every sort as communists. He made life a living hell for a stunning range of Americans. And then, with the all-too-hot Korean war at an end and the Cold War becoming ever more frigid, McCarthy, who had had a field day, went one step too far. In 1953, with the help of his chief counsel Roy Cohn (who, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn, would later become a guiding light for one Donald J. Trump), began holding hearings investigating supposed communist influence in the Army and, in response, the military, you might say, did him in.

That should, by the way, be a lesson for the McCarthyites of this moment, too. No matter who you are or what positions you take, the one step too far in American politics isn’t calling your president a “liar,” it’s trying to turn your guns (such as they are) on the most preeminent (and preeminently funded) political force in America: the Pentagon. And oddly enough, that remains the strangest and least told story around. Yes, on January 6, 2021, a still-president of the United States tried to turn the American political system into a one-party state featuring his own Trumpublican Party and white nationalist militias. But the true version of the one-party state in this country in all these years remains the Pentagon.

It hasn’t mattered in the least that, since World War II, the most wildly overfunded military on the planet hasn’t won a significant war of any sort, despite fighting and losing a number of them or, at best, in Korea and perhaps Iraq, tying them. Nothing, not defeat as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, or anything else has ever stopped it from being massively overfunded by whatever administration is in power or whatever party controls Congress. That turns out not to be a choice in American politics. Even the implosion of the Soviet Union that left this country, at least briefly, without a significant enemy on the planet never resulted in a “peace dividend” when it came to lowering “national-security” spending. And, of course, since the 9/11 attacks that funding has simply gone through the roof.

That’s a story all too little noticed by most Americans in Joe McCarthy’s time as in our own. Recently, however, I once again came across a figure from the McCarthy era who did indeed notice, but bear with me as I slowly wend my way toward him.

Hooray for Senator McCarthy!

I came from a liberal Democratic family in New York City. My mother was a professional caricaturist. (She worked under her maiden name, Irma Selz.) That was so rare then that, in a gossip column I still have, she was referred to as “New York’s girl caricaturist.” While there were men aplenty in the world of cartooning then, there was just one of her. (Well, okay, there was also Helen Hokinson of the New Yorker, but you get the idea.) In the 1930s and 1940s, my mom had done mainly theatrical caricatures for every paper in town from the New York Times and Herald Tribune to PM and the Brooklyn Eagle. In the 1950s, as that way of life disappeared (Al Hirschfeld aside), she found work doing her caricatures to accompany articles in the New Yorker and, above all, in the New York Post, which was then a liberal rag, not a Murdoch one.

The Post, curiously enough, had her do caricatures of just about every political figure of that moment, nationally and globally, and ran them as if they were photos, even sometimes on its front page. Its editor James Wechsler took on Joe McCarthy in its pages and was then called before his Senate committee in blistering testimony in which he was attacked as a communist sympathizer. In April 1954, the Post assigned my mom to cover the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and, for that purpose, bought our family its first black-and-white TV.

McCarthy, with his patented sneer and smile, was distinctly the Trump of that moment and, memorably enough, his was the very first face I saw on a TV screen in my house. Walking in from school, my bookbag in hand, at age nine, I found my mother on a chair in the dining room, her giant pad of drawing paper balanced on her lap, the TV plugged in, and on it that face.

Believe me, it was the thrill of a lifetime! Until then I had to go to a neighbor’s house for Superman or any other show I wanted to see. Now, it was all mine. And that sneering-smiling face looking at me from that small black-and-white TV screen seemed completely recognizable — like the face of every belligerent 1950s dad I then knew. In fact, I always wanted to write a piece called “Hooray for Senator McCarthy” to catch my mood in that moment toward the man who wrecked so many lives but got me “my” TV.

And like Trump, even after Joe was a total loser — censured by his Senate colleagues in 1954, he would die a few years later, possibly of drink, a broken man — his fans among the voters remained with him. In the wake of that censure, in fact, a Gallup poll found that 34% of all voters still approved of him. (Sound familiar?)

Then as now, his was hardly the only belligerent face in the room. (Think, for instance, of FBI head and fellow monster J. Edgar Hoover.) Almost 70 years later, of course, the belligerent faces no longer have to be male, not in Washington’s most recent version of McCarthyite politics.

Mind you, I don’t want you to think that politics in that other age (or in ours) was simply a hell on earth. There were indeed some truly admirable figures in that world. Take, for instance, I.F. Stone, known far and wide as “Izzy.” He was not just a progressive but worked for a remarkable range of outfits, ranging from PM and the New York Post to the Nation magazine. From 1953 to 1971, however, he produced a memorable one-person publication, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, that made him, in his own way, famous. In the process, he seemed to socialize with almost every progressive in America (and plenty of people who weren’t). But never with me. Yes, in the 1960s, I read that weekly of his fervently and I was almost 45 years old when he died in 1989. Still, no such luck.

So, I recently did the second-best thing and read D.D. Guttenplan’s superb biography of him, American Radical, The Life and Times of I.F. Stone. I was reminded, among so many other things, that the worst of times for numerous Americans, politically speaking, could be the best of times for others. And I’m not just thinking of Joe McCarthy or, in our present over-the-top moment, Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. In this country, the worst of times was invariably not so when it came to the Pentagon. McCarthy, of course, found this out to his dismay when he tried to take on the Army.

Even in the 1960s, as it was losing the Vietnam War disastrously, somehow the Pentagon always managed to reign supreme. As Izzy would write in his weekly after young antiwar demonstrators (“The whole world is watching!”) were beaten by Mayor Richard Daley’s police during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, “This is the way it is done in Prague. This is what happens to candidates who finish second in Vietnam. This is not the beginning of the police state, it IS the police state.” And he added tellingly, “When a country is denied a choice on the most burning issue of the time, the war in Vietnam, then the two-party system has become a one-party rubber stamp. The Pentagon won the election even before the votes are cast.”

And strangely enough, all too little has changed since.

Izzy, you’re missed!

In 1973, when the Watergate hearings on then-President Nixon began, I was living in San Francisco, working for a small progressive news service, and there was no question that I had to watch them. So, I bought my first TV, also — though the color TV era had begun — black and white. (Money was short in those days.) And there I watched the remarkable Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., who had played a role in McCarthy’s fall, take on Nixon’s crew as the head of the Senate Watergate Committee.

And now, having seen several versions of all-American madness in my lifetime, from Joe McCarthy to the present Kevin McCarthy update, I wonder what sense (or, for that matter, nonsense) Izzy would have made of this world of ours in which the Pentagon still rules a one-party state (concerning its own affairs anyway). What if you could bring Izzy Stone back from the dead and fill him in on the Trump years? What if you could tell him about a one-of-a-kind former president who, having lost his reelection bid, encouraged his followers to take over the government by a coup d’état and even possibly hang his own vice president?

What if you could tell him that, no matter the McCarthyism of this moment, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex that goes with it still reign supreme, despite more lost wars; that the latest Congress ponied up close enough to a trillion taxpayer dollars ($858 billion to be exact) for that military and undoubtedly closer to $1.5 trillion for the whole national-security-state?

What if you could tell him that all of this was happening in a world of such extremes that even he might have been shocked? What if you filled him in on the planet’s floods and megadroughts, its rapidly melting snow and ice, its soaring temperatures and ever fiercer storms? What if you told him, in a world where California could experience both a megadrought and record flooding rains at the same time, where one-third of a country could find itself suddenly underwater, that the fossil-fuel companies at the heart of this crisis were (like the Pentagon in its own way) making record fortunes off it all? What if you told him that, even in his moment, Exxon’s scientists already understood with remarkable accuracy what was going to happen to us in the distinctly overheating twenty-first century?

Izzy Stone died in 1989 and had no way of knowing any of this. In an era in which Joe McCarthy is back with us (even if in his Trumpian form) and the Pentagon still rides high, Izzy, you’re missed. Believe me, you are!

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

“Incredibly damning”: Legal experts say Dominion already has “staggering” evidence against Fox

Emails and text messages showing Fox News executives and hosts dismissing the same election conspiracy theories they aired improved the chances that Dominion Voting Systems will win their case against the network, legal experts say.

In a brief last week, Dominion included dozens of internal messages sent by Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch, top executives and on-air personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The filing comes amid the voting machine company’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network that repeatedly promoted false statements that Dominion was part of a widespread effort to fraudulently elect President Joe Biden.

Dominion said that the messages prove that Fox executives and hosts knew the claims they were airing were not true but continued to share them to keep their audience engaged. Some employees called the claims “ludicrous” and “mind-blowingly nuts” in their texts and emails.

The messages could be a powerful piece of evidence against Fox, First Amendment experts say, because they pass a difficult-to-meet standard in these types of cases.

“You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it,'” RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor specializing in media law, told The Washington Post.

Texts: Murdoch and Fox hosts knew election claims were “crazy” but worried facts hurt “stock price”

The 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan states that plaintiffs like Dominion must show that the party accused of libel published false statements with “actual malice.” This means that they must prove Fox made their on-air statements “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Considering the number of texts revealed last week that point to that standard, former Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe told The Post that he thinks “Dominion both will and should prevail.”

“If anything, the landmark this case is likely to establish will help show that New York Times v. Sullivan” is not an impossible standard to meet, Tribe said.

“While it’s true that the Supreme Court [in Sullivan] has set a high bar for plaintiffs, a high bar doesn’t mean no bar,” Sonja R. West, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Georgia law school, told The Post.

“What we’re seeing in this case looks an awful lot like the exception that proves the rule,” West said. “The First Amendment often protects speakers who make innocent or even negligent mistakes, but this does not mean they can knowingly tell lies that damage the reputation of others.”

Fox actually cited the ruling in its defense against Dominion, claiming that their reporting and commentary was legitimate news-gathering activity that Sullivan protects.

In a statement, Fox News accused Dominion of using “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

Fox’s lawyers also argued in the network’s own brief for summary judgment that it “is plain as day that any reasonable viewer would understand that Fox News was covering and commenting on allegations about Dominion, not reporting that the allegations were true.”

The standard of “actual malice” makes it difficult for plaintiffs to win defamation suits because it is hard to prove what a reporter’s state of mind was before publication — this means they not only have to prove that the reporter was wrong, but that they knew it and proceeded to publish anyway.

Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox has already passed more stages than most defamation suits, Charles Harder, an attorney who has represented Trump and his wife Melania in libel cases, told The Post.

Harder explained that judges often dismiss libel suits before discovery starts but Dominion was able to pass this stage and obtain emails and text messages after months of combing through internal communications and conducting depositions with Fox hosts and executives.

“The key here is that Dominion was allowed to take discovery and obtain the internal communications at Fox,” Harder said. “Too many plaintiffs, likely with meritorious cases, have their cases dismissed early and are denied the opportunity to obtain evidence to prove their claims.”

It is unlikely that Fox will be able to persuade Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis to dismiss the case. This means they will either have to settle with Dominion or face a jury, which won’t be easy on them, Harder says.

“In my experience, juries have no sympathy for media companies that knowingly cause harm to others,” he explained. An example of this trend includes a jury in Connecticut that ordered Alex Jones in October to pay $965 million to the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, a shooting that he repeatedly lied about on his show.

“We just don’t have examples of major media cases with this kind of evidentiary record,” Andersen Jones said.

West added that the messages are “incredibly damning.”

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Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman predicted on MSNBC that Fox won’t be able to evade the lawsuit and that they are “in a world of hurt.”

“Typically, in a defamation suit, you maybe have a rogue reporter or a negligent fact-checking system,” Litman said, adding that Fox was “just continuing to send stuff out that they knew was false and only for ratings.”

Litman said that the consequences for Fox could be severe.

“The Supreme Court has made clear, there is some value in reporters getting it wrong in a fast-moving news cycle, etc.,” he explained. “There is zero value, social value, for any of us in knowing lies. And that is what they are accused of doing with unusually strong proof. They’re looking at a gargantuan verdict or settlement and a huge reputational hit.”

In a conversation with The Guardian published on Monday, Tribe also added that the text message evidence is enough to find Fox News liable for defamation.

The brief, he said, “establishes that Fox was not only reckless,” but that they were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated.”

“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe said. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer and media law expert, also told The Guardian that the Dominion brief was “the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation.”

“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of,” he explained. “These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”

about the Fox News texts

The “Party Down” cater waiters are back, but has the now-famous cast outgrown the pink bow ties?

In many ways Starz’s “Party Down” was both ahead of its time and is attuned to ours. Between its original run in 2009 and 2010, this spartan and nimble comedy about a catering team was one of those superb shows nobody was watching except for the critics singing its praises. Alas, greatness was not enough to keep it alive beyond two seasons.

Thirteen years and a thriving streaming afterlife bring it back to Starz with much of the classic gang, only now they’re in the 40s and beyond, and left a good deal more haggard by the pandemic. Some have fared well. Some are barely holding on. Lizzy Caplan‘s Casey Klein scored fame’s golden ticket, meaning her Los Angeles catering company days are miles behind her. (Caplan’s production schedule for “Fleishman Is in Trouble” prevented her from joining this revival.)

Meanwhile Casey’s former hookup partner Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) is a humble teacher who peaked with a national beer spot that has forever associated him the catchphrase, “Are we having fun yet?” As a client who recognizes him and hears about his messy divorce points out, the answer is a firm no.

Party Down (Starz)

It’s impressive that “Party Down” creators John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, “Veronica Mars” creator Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd were able to assemble as many of the original pink bowtie crew as they have.

Scott came to “Party Down” before he landed “Parks and Recreation”; now he’s the lead in one of the best dramas on TV, “Severance.” If anything, his success makes failure hang off Henry’s shoulders with a glaring shapelessness.

“All Creatures” boss on wartime comforts

The catering service’s boss Ron Donald (Ken Marino) is doing worse despite climbing into a better position. He still lacks managerial acumen, and a place to live that isn’t his van, but compensates for that with willpower and determination to take Party Down to the next level. Together they personify the show’s long-running philosophical argument over whether pie-in-the-sky aspiration makes sense in a town where simply getting by is enough of a struggle, and truly making it can be next to impossible.

Adding Tyrel Jackson Williams as rising social media influencer Sackson and Zoë Chao as Lucy Dang, a chef who prioritizes artistry over her food tasting good, injects a new tension into the familiar chaos accompanying the ensemble on every job.

Party Down (Starz)

Williams is as enjoyable as he was in the early seasons of “Brockmire” where he plays a similar if more battened-down Gen Z promotional savant. Sackson understands the Internet content game in ways his mature colleagues don’t but lacks the wisdom life provides by kicking a person in the teeth a few times. Lucy’s originality is infrequently unappreciated, which she’s fine with, except when the boss demands she cranks out miserably basic pigs-in-a-blanket.

With her part in this show, Chao adds another triumph to her list of series and movies where she’s a main highlight. Her casting and Williams’ also rectifies the overwhelming whiteness of the original cast by adding two dynamic figures providing other missions to chase than past glory.

Otherwise, the squad is where we expect them to be. Ryan Hansen‘s puddle-deep Kyle has landed a role in a middling superhero flick. Jane Lynch‘s Constance is blowing through the fortune she married in the second season finale. Constance has much in common with Megan Mullally’s Lydia, who found success as her daughter Escapade’s momager.

Meanwhile Roman, Martin Starr’s deadpan “hard sci-fi” writer, is still slinging appetizer trays while pondering how to crack his magnum opus.

The dark joke running through the first two seasons of “Party Down” is that that the servers’ terrible work ethic is only half the problem. If these folks are doing the least, it could be because the events they’re working are irredeemably weird or joyless, or their hosts are horrid.

Party Down (Starz)

Whether they’re slinging drinks at a porn awards after-party (where, of all people, Stormy Daniels is a guest star), fulfilling their obligation to fete a murderer, or hanging out with other wealthy people, the Party Down workers are rarely left with the impression that success brings happiness.

Revisiting them in middle age only sharpens that suspicion, whetting it against the contradictory pondering of whether letting go of our dreams truly serves us.

Everyone comes to Hollywood believing they’ll be stars, and as this staff can attest, very few ascend. Fewer counter that sobering truth with a confident, “So what?”

Maybe “Party Down” is this season’s deep-fried mac n’ cheese ball.

As anyone who fell in love with “Party Down” long ago can tell you, its tenor captures all the frustrations and fears of the day job. That part feels the same while jibing with our time of quiet quitting, the gig economy’s takeover and late-stage pandemic trepidation. Ron shifted his Soup ‘R Crackers hustle into making Party Down the town’s go-to caterers, and he was so close . . . at the start of 2020.

His desperate resurrection reflects a feeling looming over all of us, but it also makes a person wonder what a return to the “Party Down” of yore, albeit with a few updates, adds to a TV landscape that’s already heavily capitalizing on backward gazing.

Party Down (Starz)

The show’s balance of sardonic humor and sincerity remains intact, and the ensemble’s chemistry still sparks. Yet it’s tough to shake the suspicion that its laughs are artificially augmented by the star power it now wields. Honestly, isn’t it great to see Scott, Lynch, Mullally and Marino knocking around again? Sure. Why not.

For some it may be enough that these vibrant personalities still mix as smoothly as one of Henry’s umbrella drinks, and to appreciate how well they meld with a guest star roster that includes Jennifer Garner, Quinta Brunson, and Mullally’s husband Nick Offerman.

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An even distribution of writing ensures that no single performance gets short shrift, calling attention to how well-oiled of a comedy machine this cast is. That also gives the script a by-the-numbers certainty that keeps these new episodes firmly in the realm of sweet if not unmissable.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe “Party Down” is this season’s deep-fried mac n’ cheese ball, a crowd-pleaser that doesn’t ask much of us and hides a little calcium in all that delectable fat.

Still, it’s also reasonable to wish these new adventures with old friends endeavored to achieve something more than a safe trust fall into our embrace. Reliable TV reunions are satisfying, but even messy Ron knows that winning repeat business takes offering something extraordinary.

“Party Down” premeires Friday, Feb. 24 at 9 p.m. on Starz.

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Velveeta belongs in your desserts — including this nostalgic play on apple pie

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Velveeta is back! And I mean it’s back back — like making a huge comeback. Velveeta hasn’t been this popular for decades, but regardless of where you currently fall on the love/hate scale for it, you’re going to be intrigued by this recipe.

If you’re like me, you grew up with Velveeta. At my house we made “Rotel” at least once a month, especially in the 80’s. There were few things better than a pot of hot melted Velveeta mixed with a can of spicy Rotel tomatoes and plenty of chips for dipping.

Wine jelly is the nostalgic dessert from a bygone era that couldn’t be more deserving of a comeback

You might also remember the mid-90’s when Velveeta became the poster-product for harmful, processed food and seemingly overnight, it became the most reviled thing ever by nutritionists, foodies and consumers in general.

But . . . aside from the media hate-speak and the FDA forcing some changes to the wording on its label, Velveeta never disappeared. It remained right there on grocery store shelves and it never stopped being the creamiest, meltiest cheese-like product to ever grace a tortilla chip or a bowl of macaroni.

What actually is Velveeta, you ask? As Sarra Sedghi writes in Allrecipes, Veveeta is a “shelf-stable cheese products made from substances including whey, milk, milk protein concentrate, modified starch, canola oil, and cheese cultures,” as well as the fact that it “triumphs in its ability to melt.”

Initially, Velveeta took off like a shooting star for the Kraft company from the time it debuted in grocery stores in 1928. Sales increased every year all the way up to 1996. That’s when American culture began shifting away from fast, processed food and that’s when Velveeta sales went down, down, down.

But then — about 25 years later, the pandemic happened.

During the pandemic, Velveeta ticked all the boxes we needed and wanted: It was nostalgic, comforting, economical and convenient, with a taste reminding us of happier times. The pandemic reminded us that no matter how we live or what we do, life as we know it can come to a screeching halt in the blink of an eye, so we better enjoy the days we have. Maybe the pandemic also shined a light on the fact that many of us weren’t living all that fully or having all that much fun before, spending most of our hours in a frenzy of busy-ness.

Leave it to Velveeta to come back 25 years later, like the wise auntie, to remind us to slow down, smell the roses and eat the cheese?

A new Kraft ad called “Living La Dolce Velveeta” shows that Velveeta is asking you to give in to your hedonistic, pleasure-loving self and try it (or try it again after possibly denying yourself these last 25 or so years). Clearly, Velveeta is done apologizing for whatever it lacks nutritionally and is completely embracing itself as the “FrankenFood” it is. Velveeta is now seeing a resurgence, also evidenced by the fact that there is even a Velveeta-scented nail polish and even cocktails called “Veltini.”

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There are days and weeks and sometimes months when I choose to tighten my belt and eat really clean: no wine, no dairy, no flour, no grain. Other times I feel like celebrating and choose to indulge in whatever I want and however much I want. Most days I fall somewhere in between. What Velveeta’s current marketing is doing, though, is showing that you can eat whatever the heck you want. You can store your box of Velveeta front and center in your pantry and be unafraid for anyone to see it.

No more does loving — or even liking — Velveeta have to be your dirty little secret.

Food is so much more than calories, fat, protein and carbohydrates; food brings people together. Certainly, it is good to understand and be mindful of how integral food is to your health, but joy and laughter and love and lightheartedness are also essential.

Create joy and beauty out of what we have. Enjoy your life. All you need is right there in your kitchen or right outside your door. We can all choose to live the sweet life, la dolce vita! (with or without Velveeta—no judgement either way!)

The recipe

Apples and Cheese bakes to a vibrant golden color with an addictive, somewhat dense crust that works perfectly with the apple filling underneath.

The main ingredient in this recipe is Velveeta, but you can absolutely choose not to use it and still love this recipe. I have you covered for substitutions. But, whether you use Velveeta or not, the combination of ingredients is a little shocking at first glance. You will probably think there is no way this recipe can be right, but it is! So fear not.

This recipe has been around a long time with versions of it included in church fundraising cookbooks, Junior League cookbooks, Azalea Trail cookbooks and lots of other local organizations’ cookbooks for at least forty-plus years (in my area of the country anyway). It is tried and true and I have no doubt you’ll be adding it to your repertoire.

“Serve this on your finest china or a paper plate . . . it’s as easy to serve as it is to bake”

“Apples and cheese”

Yields

08 servings

Prep Time

05 minutes

Cook Time

45 minutes

Ingredients

2 cans Comstock apple pie filling

1 stick butter

8 oz Velveeta cheese

3/4 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup milk

*See Cook’s Notes for ingredient substitution options

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees farenheit.
Pour apples into 9 x 10 baking dish
Melt butter and cheese in saucepan over low heat.
Stir in flour, sugar and milk and combine well.
Pour cheese mixture over apples.
Bake 45 minutes or until golden brown on top and firm in the middle.
Serve on a small plate, similar to how you’d serve a piece of pie.

Cook’s Notes

Here are some options you can use if you’d like a substitute for the Velveeta:

-A mixture of vegan shredded cheddar, real cheddar and brie.

-Use the same amount as called for in the recipe, with the majority being the vegan cheddar shreds. They work well in place of Velveeta when combines with a bit of ‘real’ cheese.

-Earth Grown Vegan Cheddar Style Shreds from Aldi is one of my favorites, as well as the brand Violife.

-Westminster’s Rustic Red Cheddar is my favorite to add into this mix. It’s sweet and nutty, but any favorite of yours will do. Grate it before adding it.

-The brie adds another layer of creaminess. Remove the skin if you choose to use it for this recipe.

As far as the apple pie filling, feel free to use whatever brand you prefer or make your own. For the milk, you can opt for any milk or non-dairy milk.

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“Horrible abuse of power”: Arizona GOP AG withheld his own investigation’s findings debunking fraud

Newly released documents obtained by The Washington Post revealed that former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich publicized an incomplete version of his office’s probe of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

Brnovich, a Republican, launched an investigation into voting in Arizona’s largest county nearly a year after the 2020 election, which took up 10,000 staff hours paid for by taxpayers.

In March 2022, investigators prepared a report that stated almost all claims of voter fraud and error were unsubstantiated, according to internal documents reviewed by The Post.

Brnovich kept the full report private. Instead, in April — while running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat — he released an “Interim Report” that stated his office had found “serious vulnerabilities.” He did not include edits from his own investigators that debunked his claims.

The attorney general’s office then created an “Election Review Summary” in September, after Brnovich’s primary loss, that went through accusations of widespread fraud and refuted each one, making it clear that none of the complaints from lawmakers or “election integrity” groups were true.

Brnovich left office in January without releasing the summary. However, his successor Kris Mayes, a Democrat, shared the documents with The Post, saying she considers the taxpayer-funded investigation closed.

Arizona GOP official forced into hiding over violent threats as right-wingers stoke conspiracies

The records Mayes shared with the outlet show how Brnovich used his office to promote claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They also show how his team privately ignored fact-checks from state investigators while also publicly sharing incomplete accounts of the office’s work.

The documents include two investigative summaries and a draft letter with edits, totaling 41 pages, but as The Post notes, they are far from an exhaustive record of Brnovich’s investigation.

Brnovich quickly confirmed former President Donald Trump loss in Arizona in November 2020, and tried to stop his efforts to overturn the vote, but he continued to discuss potential claims of fraud while trying to gain support from the GOP.

“It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” Brnovich said while discussing his interim report on a far-right radio show.

Mayes told The Post that she released the materials from Brnovich’s office because “the people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election.

“Maricopa County election officials had a right to know that they were cleared of wrongdoing,” she added. “And every American had a right to know that the 2020 election in Arizona, which in part decided the presidency, was conducted accurately and fairly.”

Mayes’ staff is still reviewing the thousands of pages of documents from investigators and attorneys and will redact sensitive information before releasing them to the public in the next few months, spokesperson Richie Taylor told The Post.

The 2020 election in Maricopa County was highly scrutinized because it is the largest voting jurisdiction in Arizona and helped to turn the state blue for President Joe Biden. Brnovich’s investigation began right after Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm hired by the GOP-led state Senate, concluded their review of the election results in September 2021. Their review was criticized by election experts who repeatedly confirmed Trump’s loss in the state.

Brnovich’s office spent more than 10,000 hours with 60 investigators in addition to lawyers and support staff, examining claims of irregularities, malfeasance and fraud, records show. One year later in September 2022, the special investigations section of his office received 638 election-related complaints and pursued 430 of them. Of those, only 22 cases were submitted for prosecutorial review, and just two of those cases involving felons who illegally tried to vote were prosecuted, leading to convictions.

Brnovich never released the full findings and would not close the investigation based on his suspicions voiced in the interim report, despite rebuttals from his own office. The interim report was delivered to then-Republican president of the state Senate, Karen Fann. The letter stated, “We can report that there are problematic system-wide issues that relate to early ballot handling and verification.”

However, Brnovich’s own staff raised complaints about his criticism of the handling and verification of ballots, writing in a draft of the letter, “We did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election.”

Their comments were largely not reflected in Brnovich’s final version.

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Brnovich continued to claim that “Maricopa County had not always timely and fully responded to our requests for records,” even though staff said in the draft document that it was the “collective opinion of … investigators” that the county “was cooperative and responsive to our requests.”

The fuller, 24-page “Investigation Summary” which Brnovich never released despite it being shared with him and his top aide, described the full scope of the allegations investigated by the attorney general’s office, including improper signature verification, misuse of drop boxes and incomplete access to records for the state Senate’s audit. Almost all allegations were found to be unsubstantiated, according to the full summary.

Even in the one procedural violation found, which involved the retrieval of ballots from drop boxes, the state confirmed that there was no evidence that the county mishandled ballots, just that they did not properly record minute details such as time of retrieval, according to the summary.

As for the key issue highlighted by Brnovich’s interim report — signature verification — the full summary said, “No improper Election Procedures were discovered during the Signature Verification review.”

Late last year, his office also received further conclusions that there was no basis for claims of systematic fraud, but they kept those findings private as well.

Maricopa County Board Chair Clint Hickman released a statement on the final AG report, saying “there are a lot of pent up frustrations in play here.”

“I would like our Maricopa County residents to know that I am absolutely disgusted by the revelations that former Attorney General Mark Brnovich failed to do his job as a public servant representing the highest law enforcement elected position in the state,” he wrote.

“Not only did he ignore his own investigators in issuing a different, ‘interim report,’ he falsely suggested wrongdoing by Maricopa County, never correcting the record and blatantly never sharing the team’s final report with the public,” he continued. “This was a gross misuse of his elected office and an appalling waste of taxpayer dollars, as well as a waste of the time and effort of professional investigators.”

“For three years, my colleagues have been called traitors, cheaters, and liars…and those are just the names I can print,” he added. “It has been absolute hell… I implore everyone who cares about our elections to read what the investigators really found, not a political candidate’s cherry-picked story line.”

Maricopa County Board Chair Clint Hickman: “For three years, my colleagues have been called traitors, cheaters, and liars…and those are just the names I can print. It has been absolute hell … all of us stayed within the law.” https://t.co/6HHqUMghsZ pic.twitter.com/XQUWXTm171

— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez (@yvonnewingett) February 22, 2023

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer also released a statement on the matter, writing that “despite what the interim report stated, it’s clear the former Attorney General’s staff and investigators agree that our office was ‘cooperative and responsive to [their] requests.”

Maricopa County Recorder @stephen_richer: “In fact, despite what the interim report stated, it’s clear the former Attorney General’s staff and investigators agree that our office was ‘cooperative and responsive to [their] requests.” https://t.co/6HHqUMghsZ https://t.co/TQoy85G9cv pic.twitter.com/yTsY7DP3FP

— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez (@yvonnewingett) February 22, 2023

Arizona’s Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who was county recorder during the 2020 election said he was “deeply disappointed by the wasteful and pointless actions by a top law enforcement official who diverted thousands of hours of staff time to pursue unfounded allegations of election fraud.”

“Furthermore, I am astounded that the result of this costly investigation, which thoroughly debunked these claims, was kept from the taxpayers who paid the bill,” he added. “Election workers throughout the state and the nation are facing threats coming from these unfounded allegations of fraud and they deserve an apology… Whether or not I was right all along, vindication is not sweet when it comes at such a cost.”

Az Secretary of State @Adrian_Fontes, who was county recorder during 2020 election: “I am deeply disappointed by the wasteful and pointless actions by a top law enforcement official who diverted thousands of hours of staff time to pursue unfounded allegations of election fraud.” https://t.co/TjuYgehgaI pic.twitter.com/QkaAcZHh0O

— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez (@yvonnewingett) February 22, 2023

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance called out Brnovich over the report, tweeting that he “concealed the truth Arizonans paid for from them.”

2/In April, Brnovich, running in the GOP primary for US Senate, released an “Interim Report” claiming his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.

He concealed the truth Arizonans paid for from them.

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) February 22, 2023

Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern said he “cringed” at the report.

“This was a horrible abuse of power,” he tweeted.

This column is brutal. It makes clear that Arizona's top prosecutor, Mark Brnovich @brnoforaz, hid evidence that debunked false election claims.

I was a prosecutor for 28 years and I cringed as I read this. This was a horrible abuse of power.https://t.co/VpfjjKt2b5

— Michael J. Stern (@MichaelJStern1) February 23, 2023

about debunked GOP fraud claims

Pulses are packed with goodness: 5 cool things you should know about them

Each year on February 10, the United Nations commemorates what probably sounds to many like a strange occasion: World Pulses Day.

But, as a researcher focused on forgotten and underutilized legumes, I think the initiative is an important step towards food security. Getting people to eat more pulses can ultimately help achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger.

First, for clarification, “legumes” and “pulses” have different meanings. “Legumes” are all plants belong to the family Leguminosae or Fabaceae, while “pulses” are the dried seeds of legume plants. Pulses include beans, lentils and chickpeas.

One reason that legume plants offer such promise in ending hunger is that they don’t need good soil or nitrogen fertilizers. Plants need nitrogen to build important molecules such as protein and DNA. Most legumes can thrive in poor soil by fixing nitrogen gas from the air for their own use. This happens through symbiotic interaction with friendly bacteria known as rhizobia. The rhizobia are housed inside structures called nodules on the plant’s roots.

Thanks to their nitrogen-fixing ability, pulses are nutritional powerhouses: high in protein and fiber and low in fat.

But that’s not the only interesting thing about legumes and pulses. In honor of World Pulses Day 2023, I would like to highlight five pulses that have unique properties and stories.

1. The African yam bean: high protein beans and underground tubers

The African yam bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa) offers two servings of food: beans and underground tubers. The tubers have higher protein content than any non-legume tuber crops like potato and cassava and the beans are also high in protein. Their nutritional value was proved during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) when the beans were cooked with amaranthus, telfaria or cassava leaves to feed the malnourished in war-affected areas.

This crop is native to Africa and was once grown across the African continent. Researchers have proposed that it may have been domesticated multiple times in west and central Africa. Today, it is mostly grown as security or subsistence crop, rather than commercially. But its high protein content and drought tolerance are attracting increasing interest.

2. Common bean: diversity and environmental versatility

The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) comes in many varieties around the world. Examples are black beans, red kidney beans and pinto beans – they look different but they are the same species. What’s special about them is that they can pair with a larger number of rhizobial species than other legumes can. This may have helped the common bean to thrive outside its native land and diversify in various habitats around the world. It’s able to fix nitrogen in different environments, making it a resilient legume species.

3. Pea: a role in early understanding of genetics

The pea (Pisum sativum) is among the oldest domesticated crops in the world. It contributed to the understanding of genetics, thanks to Gregor Mendel’s famous experiment with pea plants. Mendel observed the way that different physical properties of the pea plants were inherited: pod shape, seed shape, seed color, unripe pod color, flower color, stem length and flower placement. He crossed two pea plants that had different properties and observed the seven traits in the subsequent generations for two years. From this experiment, he established Mendel’s Rules of Inheritance – still applicable in modern day genetic study.

The rich genetic diversity of the pea is also a valuable resource for important crop traits that can withstand various weather conditions due to climate change.

4. Chickpea: built for drought

Many pulses are drought tolerant and use less water for production than animal-sourced proteins, especially beef. Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is known to be highly drought tolerant. Most of this crop is grown under rain-fed conditions in arid and semi-arid areas. This special ability to grow where water is scarce is more prominent in wild species of chickpea. Wild chickpeas can also tolerate temperatures up to 40°C – another valuable genetic resource for better drought tolerance in modern chickpeas.

Still, chickpea yield is highly compromised when there is lack of water. Therefore, scientists are looking for beneficial traits that can reduce the yield loss in chickpeas during drought. This may contribute to a more secure food source in the midst of climate change.

5. Lupins: special cluster roots to seek nutrients

White lupins (Lupinus albus), yellow lupins (Lupinus luteus) and pearl lupins (Lupinus mutabilis) can form special roots to get more nutrients without the need for additional fertilizers. Plants need not only nitrogen but phosphorus. Usually it’s given to plants in fertilizer to increase crop yield. Phosphate fertilizer is made from phosphate rock — a non-renewable resource which is rapidly depleting through agricultural use. The white, yellow and pearl lupins have unique root modifications called cluster roots that can liberate phosphorus from soil particles when the nutrient is low. These roots look like bottlebrush and are formed only when the level of phosphorus in the soil is low. These cluster roots exude negatively charged compound called carboxylate that can liberate phosphorus from the soil and make it available for the plant to use. So lupins do not have to rely on phosphate fertilizers and can even help neighboring plants by increasing the phosphorus level in the soil.

Food security

Pulses deserve our attention not just on February 10 but every day. The five pulses I’ve presented here can serve as sustainable protein sources and make food systems more diverse. They can greatly contribute to better food security in the future.

Nadia Radzman, Research Associate in Plant Biology, University of Cambridge

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